Bone

Manny Hamelburg, 68, a retired businessman, had fought prostate cancer for years. First, he tried radiation, then a drug with side effects that nearly killed him, and finally Lupron, a drug that blocks production of testosterone, the hormone that can fuel prostate cancer. The cancer disappeared. But life was miserable. Without normal levels of testosterone, Hamelburg says, he had no energy, and "zero libido for seven years. I was like a eunuch. I was chemically castrated. Sex was just hugs."

Brad Pitt has brought his new movie "Killing Them Softly" to the Cannes Film Festival, and as The Times reported Tuesday morning, he and the film's director had an anti-capitalist message (or, at least, a message aimed against capitalism as recently practiced in the U.S.) to go along with it.  And that message is coming from the mouth of the man who is the new face of Chanel No. 5 -- a job for which Pitt reportedly will receive seven figures.

Brian Price, once a wrecking ball on UCLA's defensive line, has beaten long odds to return to the NFL after two off-season surgeries aimed at keeping his hamstrings attached to his pelvis, rather than breaking loose and coiling down the backs of his thighs. For Price, who will start at defensive tackle Sunday for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, his excruciating recovery was a 10-step process. Meaning just two months ago, he could run only 10 steps. "You have these doubts in your head at times," said Price, a second-round pick of the Buccaneers in 2010 who, because of his congenitally malformed pelvis, spent the last half of his rookie season on injured reserve.

Episcopal Bishop J. Jon Bruno, head of the six-county Los Angeles diocese, has been diagnosed with leukemia and is undergoing aggressive treatment to fight the disease. The 65-year-old bishop said in an open letter that he had been suffering from what he thought was a bout of pneumonia since March. He underwent further tests after treatment failed to cure the "nagging problem. " Doctors at Good Samaritan Hospital discovered that Bruno had acute monocytic leukemia, a form of blood cancer.

"Oh, you mean the guy with the 70-year-old head and the 20-year-old body-builder body? That picture has got to be Photoshopped." Dr. Jeffry Life smiles when I tell him about the general reaction I get about the famous picture of him with his shirt off, the shot that turned a mild-mannered doctor in his mid-60s into a poster boy for super-fit aging and controversial hormone replacement Appearing in medical-clinic ads in airline magazines and...

Osteoporosis drugs can definitely strengthen bones. However, studies and patient reports over the last four years have uncovered a surprising danger: In some cases, these drugs seem to be breaking bones instead of protecting them. Now a new study from Sweden has helped put that risk of drug-induced breaks into perspective. The study concluded that the drugs, such as Fosamax, Boniva, Actonel, Atelvia and Reclast, caused one broken femur for every 2,000 people who used them for a year.

In the remote northeastern corner of Guatemala, archaeologists have found what appears to be the 9th century workplace of a city scribe, an unusual dwelling adorned with magnificent pictures of the king and other royals and the oldest known Maya calendar. This year has been particularly controversial among some cultists because of the belief that the Maya calendar predicts a major cataclysm - perhaps the end of the world - on Dec. 21, 2012. Archaeologists know that is not true, but the new find, written on the plaster equivalent of a modern scientist's whiteboard, strongly reinforces the idea that the Maya calendar projects thousands of years into the future.

In a small, dark room in this city of narrow alleys and workshops the size of shoeboxes, five men in their 70s fashion combs out of water buffalo horn with hand saws for $2 a day. "It's very hard work," said Abdul Bashir, 70. "But I've got to eat. " Members of this predominantly Muslim community of 50,000 have hacked, chipped, cut, molded and polished animal bones and horns into baubles or beads for generations. But the ornaments worn on the supple wrists and suntanned necks of far-off fashionistas carry a high price for these craftsmen, who must live with airborne clouds of bone dust that sticks to their eyes, hair and lungs.

Tyrannosaurs may have stalked far more of the globe than previously thought. Scientists for the first time have found evidence of an ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex in the Southern Hemisphere, a discovery that could shed light on tyrannosaurs' evolutionary lineage, which many scientists had thought was restricted to the Northern Hemisphere after the continents began to separate. Tyrannosaurs had been documented only in Asia, Europe and North America, but a hip bone discovered in Australia could have come only from a tyrannosaur, researchers have concluded.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) , shot in the head in a Tucson parking lot in January, will undergo surgery Wednesday to replace the segment of her skull that was removed by surgeons at University Medical Center in Tucson. Surgeons there cut out a large segment of the skull to allow room for swelling of the brain, a common aftermath of trauma to the head. The bone was frozen to keep it viable until it could be reattached to her skull. In the interim, Giffords has been wearing a protective helmet to prevent injuries to her brain from falls during her rehabilitation at Memorial Hermann Texas Medical Center in Houston.

Jesmyn Ward was struggling. Despite two master's degrees and five years of work experience, her job situation was difficult: She commuted an hour each way to a low-paying college teaching job. In her writing career, things were even worse. She sent out stories and got back rejection letters. Her agent tried and failed, and tried and failed again, to sell her book. "I almost gave up," Ward says. In the spring of 2008, she thought, "Maybe I should stop this. Maybe I should just quit and do something that would give me a steady, higher paycheck, like nursing.

Flame-bearing Prometheus may have visited humans earlier than we thought. An analysis of charred bones and plant ash in sediment from a South African cave suggests that Homo erectus was wielding fire a million years ago — and perhaps even cooking with it, according to a study released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings present the earliest clear evidence of such use of fire, experts said. The ability to control fire marks an evolutionary turning point: It would have kept our ancient relatives warm in unforgiving climes and allowed them to cook their food, releasing trapped nutrients and getting more caloric bang per bite.

The curator of the Catalina Island Museum opened the door to a musty backroom a few weeks ago hoping to find material for an upcoming exhibit on the World War II era. Closing the door behind him, he trudged down a narrow aisle lined with storage boxes and bins filled with gray photocopies of old letters, civic records, celebrity kitsch -- and dust. "No luck," curator John Boraggina muttered. But as he made his way to a back corner, he noticed another row of boxes. He carried the largest to a table, blew off the dust and lifted the lid. Inside were leather-bound journals and yellowing photographs showing freshly unearthed skeletons lying on their backs or sides, or curled as if in sleep.

While the recent trend among most airlines is to introduce higher-fare seats with extra legroom and no baggage fees, Delta Air Lines is moving in the other direction. The nation's largest carrier announced the addition of “basic economy” seating, the airline's lowest-fare offer. The ultra-low-cost seats started in mid-March and are only offered at select routes, primarily Detroit to the Florida cities of Fort Myers, Orlando, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale. The basic economy seats are about $12 to $20 cheaper than regular economy seats but the tickets are nonrefundable and no cancellations or changes will be allowed once the tickets are purchased.

A federal appeals court Tuesday unanimously rejected a request from the Obama administration to reconsider a ruling that bone marrow donors can be compensated for providing the life-saving stem cells from their blood. None of the 25 active judges on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals took up the petition by Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., asking for the full court to review a December ruling that the government fears could lead to money influencing donation decisions. The Dec. 1 ruling by a three-judge panel redefined bone marrow cells harvested from a donor's bloodstream as blood parts, not organ parts.

Vitamin D may be helpful in protecting highly active pre-teen and teen girls, such as those who play sports, from stress fractures, researchers reported Monday. The study was surprising because calcium has long been considered the nutrient most vital to bone health in children. But, in developing children, vitamin D intake may matter more. Researchers analyzed data from 6,721 girls ages 9 to 15 at the start of the study. The girls' intake of calcium, vitamin D and dairy products was recorded along with stress fractures, which are common sports-related injuries.

I'm sorry that Christopher Knight is tired of lead, bone, glass and the like as art materials ("This Critic Has a Bone to Pick," Nov. 6). It seems like just a few years ago that it was at least acceptable to put pencil to paper or paint to canvas, as long as it was done with honesty and passion. Now we are being told we have to throw away our clothing, pedestals and rust and look for new materials to please the jaded critic. While I too deplore cliche, do we really need to be given a list of forbidden materials?

Daughter of Smoke and Bone A Novel Laini Taylor Little, Brown Books for Young Readers: 418 pp., $18.99, ages 15 and up It isn't only an indisputable truth that opposites attract. In young-adult fiction, it's almost de rigueur. So it is with the kickoff to a new series from National Book Award finalist Laini Taylor, in which the most contrarian characters imaginable - an angel and a devil - fall in love. It's to Taylor's great credit that evil incarnate and its love match in "Daughter of Smoke and Bone" are such imaginative interpretations and that the worlds in which this romance unfolds are likewise so unique: Telling a tale this apocryphal requires serious outside-the-box plot work to pull off. Taylor manages her self-imposed challenge with aplomb.

A compound that looked to be a possible wonder drug for obesity and metabolic disease, such as diabetes, may not make it to store shelves. Research published this week shows the hormone, called fibroblast growth factor 21, causes bone loss while it burns fat. The finding is yet another setback in the difficult field of drug development aimed at the country's obesity epidemic. Two studies, one published last week in the journal Cell, and another published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used mice to examine the effects of FGF21.

James Blasczyk is not the last man standing for injury-riddled USC, but he's the only one taller than 6 feet 7. So with Dewayne Dedmon sidelined the rest of the season because of a knee injury, the 7-foot-1 Blasczyk will start at center again Thursday night when the Trojans play at Washington State. Blasczyk scored four points and had four rebounds in USC's 62-45 victory over Utah on Saturday, a win that ended a losing streak at nine games and improved the Trojans to 6-16 overall and 1-8 in Pac-12 Conference play.