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The North American Spine Society and the Society of Interventional Radiology have pointed to flaws in both studies. And earlier studies, published over 15 years, found major benefits to kyphoplasty and a related procedure called vertebroplasty. "We're missing opportunities for patients to receive a safe and effective treatment that can significantly reduce their pain and disability," said Malamis, an interventional radiologist. The procedures are used to treat vertebral compression fractures in patients with osteoporosis and other conditions that result in brittle bones. In a vertebroplasty, an acrylic cement is injected into a fractured vertebra. In a kyphoplasty, a balloon-tipped catheter first is inserted into the fracture. The balloon is inflated to restore the height and shape of the vertebra before the cement is injected. Neva Nelson, 74, of Naperville, Ill., said a kyphoplasty that Malamis performed in October, 2009, has greatly reduced her pain in a vertebra in her lower back that she fractured after falling on ice. Before her kyphoplasty, Nelson had to sit on cushions. Walking, and especially standing, were painful. "I had to do something," she said. "I could not go on like that." Nelson said that since undergoing her kyphoplasty, "I don't have to worry about my back any more." In the controversial studies, patients were randomly assigned to receive a vertebroplasty or a placebo-like "sham" procedure. In the sham procedure, patients received an injection of anesthetic, but no cement. However, patients in severe pain are reluctant to enroll in a trial where there's a 50 percent chance of receiving a sham treatment. In one of the studies, researchers had to screen 1,813 patients to enroll just 131 subjects. In the other study, only 78 of 219 eligible patients were enrolled. This low enrollment rate raises the possibility that the patients who did enroll were not representative. Patients experience the greatest pain during the first three months after a compression fracture. Thereafter, pain gradually subsides. Thus, a vertebroplasty or kyphoplasty provides the greatest benefit when performed within a week or two of the fracture. But the studies enrolled patients up to 12 months after fractures. In addition to reducing pain and disability, a kyphoplasty can reduce the risk of subsequent fractures by improving the angle and height of the spine. The studies evaluated vertebroplasty alone, and did not include the more innovative and very different kyphoplasty procedure. Malamis suggests the medical community wait for the results of additional studies now underway before passing final judgment on vertebroplasty or kyphoplasty. In the mean time, he notes that Medicare still covers the procedures.

The researchers, led by professor of applied and engineering physics Harold Craighead, made a device just 200 nanometers thick and a few microns long with an oscillating cantilever hanging off one end. (A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter; a micron is one-millionth of a meter.) They identified exactly how to tune its sensitivity -- a breakthrough that could lead to advanced sensing technologies. The experiments detailed online Feb. 8 in Journal of Applied Physics show how these oscillators, which are nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), could one day be made into everyday devices by lining up millions of them and treating each cantilever with a certain molecule. "The big purpose is to be able to drive arrays of these things all in direct synchrony," said first author Rob Ilic, a research associate at the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility. "They can be functionalized with different chemistries and biomolecules to detect various pathogens -- not just one thing."

"As far as we can tell, this is the first time this type of behavior has been reported in cells that are part of a larger organism," says Peter T. Cummings, John R. Hall Professor of Chemical Engineering, who directed the study that is described in the March 10 issue of the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE. The discovery was the unanticipated result of a study the Cummings group conducted to test the hypothesis that the freedom with which different cancer cells move - a concept called motility - could be correlated with their aggressiveness: That is, the faster a given type of cancer cell can move through the body the more aggressive it is. "Our results refute that hypothesis—the correlation between motility and aggressiveness that we found among three different types of cancer cells was very weak," Cummings says. "In the process, however, we began noticing that the cell movements were unexpectedly complicated." Then the researchers' interest was piqued by a paper that appeared in the February 2008 issue of the journal Nature titled, "Scaling laws of marine predator search behaviour." The paper contained an analysis of the movements of a variety of radio-tagged marine predators, including sharks, sea turtles and penguins. The authors found that the predators used a foraging strategy very close to a specialized random walk pattern, called a Lévy walk, an optimal method for searching complex landscapes. At the end of the paper's abstract they wrote, "...Lévy-like behaviour seems to be widespread among diverse organisms, from microbes to humans, as a 'rule' that evolved in response to patchy resource distributions." This gave Cummings and his colleagues a new perspective on the cell movements that they were observing in the microscope. They adopted the basic assumption that when mammalian cells migrate they face problems, such as efficiently finding randomly distributed targets like nutrients and growth factors, that are analogous to those faced by single-celled organisms foraging for food. With this perspective in mind, Alka Potdar, now a post-doctoral fellow at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic, cultured cells from three human mammary epithelial cell lines on two-dimensional plastic plates and tracked the cell motions for two-hour periods in a "random migration" environment free of any directional chemical signals. Epithelial cells are found throughout the body lining organs and covering external surfaces. They move relatively slowly, at about a micron per minute which corresponds to two thousandths of an inch per hour. When Potdar carefully analyzed these cell movements, she found that they all followed the same pattern. However, it was not the Lévy walk that they expected, but a closely related search pattern called a bimodal correlated random walk (BCRW). This is a two-phase movement: a run phase in which the cell travels primarily in one direction and a re-orientation phase in which it stays in place and reorganizes itself internally to move in a new direction. In subsequent studies, currently in press, the researchers have found that several other cell types (social amoeba, neutrophils, fibrosarcoma) also follow the same pattern in random migration conditions. They have also found that the cells continue to follow this same basic pattern when a directional chemical signal is added, but the length of their runs are varied and the range of directions they follow are narrowed giving them a net movement in the direction indicated by the signal.