'Plasma needle' could replace the dentist's drill

The plasma needle, is cold and painless to the touch. The needle's creator, physicist Eva Stoffels-Adamowicz, who is based at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, says it could also be used to painlessly remove cancerous tissue.

Stoffels-Adamowicz came up with the idea for the needle while working with low-pressure plasmas, which are created in a vacuum. In order for the plasma to be used on people, she and her colleagues developed a plasma needle that works in air.

Read more about this at the New Scientists website.
Other links:
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/7/11/15/1#needle

Recovery and regeneration damaged brain

A study of the "miraculous" recovery of a man who spent 19 years in a minimally conscious state.

Research suggest that Wallis's brain had, very gradually, developed new pathways and completely novel anatomical structures to re-establish functional connections, compensating for the brain pathways lost in the accident.
They found that new axons - the branches that connect neurons together - seemed to have grown, establishing novel working brain circuits.
Surprisingly, the circuits look nothing like normal brain anatomy. A lot of the damage had been to axons that passed from one side of the brain to the other, torn by the force of the accident. But Schiff says that new connections seem to have grown across around the back of the brain, forming structures that do not exist in normal brains.

You can read tarticlecal at the New Scientist website