The treatment of cartilage injuries is one of the most difficult challenges facing orthopaedic surgeons. Clinicians and researchers at UCSF are combining forces to establish a multidisciplinary center to meet this challenge. "The UCSF Cartilage Repair and Regeneration Center is unlike any other in the region," says UCSF orthopaedic surgeon Hubert Kim, MD, PhD.

Cartilage injury, repair and regrowth have long been mysterious processes. In part, this is because injured cartilage doesn't act like many other injured tissues; cartilage continues to decline in function well after trauma, and is very slow to heal.

Christoph Schreiner, MD, PhD, professor and vice chair of otolaryngology, head and neck surgery and a member of the W.M. Keck Foundation Center for Integrative Neuroscience at UCSF, is senior author of a study reported in PLoS Biology on the way in which auditory neurons detect and discriminate vocalizations. Robert Liu, PhD, the first author of the study, began the work while a postdoctoral fellow in the Schreiner lab. He is now assistant professor of biology at Emory University.

Longtime faculty member David Gardner, Mount Zion Health Plan Distinguished Professor of Medicine, is the new chair of the Academic Senate at UCSF.

Modern weapons, like IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, have left many soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with debilitating injuries, while advances in trauma care have ensured their survival and return home to cope with those unique injuries, relying on a VA system that is antiquated and can't support their physical and emotional needs, according to a report released Thursday by the Institute of Medicine.

NPR's All Things Considered reports that "[a] new species of bacteria has been discovered, thanks to an American tourist who caught it while traveling in Peru. Dr. Jane Koehler, an infectious-disease specialist who led the team that found the species, named it Bartonella rochalimae, after a long-dead Brazilian scientist." NPR's Rebecca Roberts speaks with Koelher about the discovery of the bacterium, and why that particular name was selected for it.

A simple test that can be given by any physician predicts a person's risk for developing dementia within six years with 87 percent accuracy, according to a study led by researchers at San Francisco VA Medical Center (SFVAMC).

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Before life emerged on earth, either a primitive kind of metabolism or an RNA-like duplicating machinery must have set the stage – so experts believe. But what preceded these pre-life steps?

UCSF urogynecologist Sharon Knight, MD, recently returned from Niger, where she treated women with an extreme form of incontinence.