Chemotherapy is harsh, which is good when it comes to killing cancer. What's not-so-good is that it can also cause hair loss, inflict nausea, and disable the proper functioning of all sorts of organs -- including the ovaries. Chemotherapy, therefore, can affect female fertility.

In some cases, doctors have extracted immature eggs from adult women about to receive chemotherapy, matured them in a laboratory, and then implanted them when the women are ready to have children. Until now, no one had ever tried this with eggs from young girls -- girls who have not yet undergone puberty. But it's just recently happened.

Doctors have removed eggs from young female cancer patients and for the first time, have brought the eggs to maturity before freezing them.

Remember that old saying -- An apple a day keeps the doctor away? Well, it seems that an apple peel a day might keep cancer at bay, according to a new study.

A dozen compounds have been found called triterpenoids. These compounds found in the peel of an apple either inhibit or kill cancer cells in lab cultures.

"We found that several compounds have potent anti-proliferative activities against human liver, colon and breast cancer cells and may be partially responsible for the anti-cancer activities of whole apples," says Rui Hai Liu, Cornell associate professor of food science.

Previous studies have shown that apples not only fight cancer cells in the laboratory but they also have shown to reduce the number and size of mammary tumors in rats.

So, don't peel those apples. Eat the whole thing!

UK researchers have developed a 3D laboratory model of human breast cancer, specifically ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). The model, complete with normal cells and tumor cells, should help experts understand how the disease develops in its early stages, and it could replace the need for experiments in animals.

About one in five breast cancers in the UK start out as DCIS. Researchers wanted to learn more about how the early cancerous changes in cells develop into larger tumors, and they chose to fashion a 3D test tube model because it is more complex than a layer of cells in a Petri dish.

Once this experiment is proved successful, it could reduce and perhaps replace animal studies.

"With breast cancer, there is an urgent need to move away from animal research models because their similarity to human cancer can be so poor," says one expert who explains this model could help revolutionize breast cancer research -- because unreliable research costs time, money, and lives, both animal and human lives.

Those venturing into space face a very serious occupational hazard -- cancer. The disease can be caused by radiation from the cosmic rays and solar flares astronauts encounter when they travel beyond the Earth's protective magnetic layer or magnetosphere.

British scientists are working on rectifying this problem by creating a Star Trek-style deflector shield to protect astronauts from radiation.

Think about this:

Scientists wish to mimic the magnetic field that protects the Earth with shields deployed around spacecraft and on the surfaces of planets to deflect harmful energetic particles.

Details, presented at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Preston, UK, include the following:

• The idea has been linked to the deflector shields that protect the USS Enterprise and other spacecraft on Star Trek. The shields, like on the TV show, could be switched on and off.

• In order to make the shield, scientists must generate a magnetic field and then fill it with ionized gas, or plasma. As energetic particles interact with the plasma, energy is sapped away from them, causing them to slow down.

• Protective shelters would not work on long-duration space journeys due to the drip of energized particles, thought to be as harmful as large solar storms.

"The nice thing is that magnet technology is really quite evolved here on Earth," says Dr. Mike Hapgood, from the Didcot-based research centre. The question is can you take it into space?"

A team from Rutherford-Appleton plans to build an artificial magnetosphere in the laboratory. They would eventually like to fly a test satellite which would test the technology in space.

Scientists have determined that mouth cancer develops in two different ways which dictates the seriousness of the disease. This finding, revealed on Tuesday, could lead to better prevention and treatment. In laboratory experiments with healthy, early, and advanced cancer cells, researchers were able to pinpoint differences in the cells that determined the aggressiveness of the cancer. They found faults in the p53 gene, which stops damaged cells from dividing, and in the p16 gene, which helps regulate and prevent cancer from developing. Both changes are linked to more aggressive tumors. This is first-time evidence that some mouth cancer tumors are more aggressive than others and are unfortunately linked to poor patient survival.

Oral cancer typically stems from pre-cancerous lesions, changes, or patches in the mouth -- all of which are early signs of cancer. Recognizing which pre-cancerous changes are more likely to develop into aggressive tumors would allow doctors an insight that could help them prescribe the best treatment.

Smoking, use of chewing tobacco, and heavy alcohol consumption are the leading causes of mouth cancer. And smoking and drinking are a very dangerous combination. Like lung cancer, mouth cancer usually develops in people age 50 or older.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women, other than skin cancer. It is the second leading cause of cancer death in women, after lung cancer. Right now there are slightly over two million women living in the U.S. who have been treated for breast cancer.  Maritech is researching new and less expensive ways to detect breast cancer.

Matritech scientists, using a research mass spectrometer, discovered the existence of certain proteins in the blood of breast cancer patients that were generally not present in the blood of women without detectable breast malignancy. Matritech is developing test methods for NMP66 proteins in a proprietary laboratory procedure. Results of the company's testing indicate that NMP66 proteins found in the blood of women with breast cancer may enable physicians to more effectively manage women with or at a risk for breast cancer.

What are the odds? Six women working in the same hospital laboratory have been diagnosed with cancer -- and one of the women has already died. Naturally, the other five women are nervous. During the 1970s and 1980s, six women worked together as technicians in the sterile environment of the Mission Memorial Hospital searching for infections or evidence of diseases like leukemia, identifying electrolytes and white blood counts. Within a span of four years, one by one, all six were diagnosed with cancer.

According to one of the six women diagnosed with breast cancer, they were exposed to hazardous toxins and toxic fumes as maintenance workers burned biohazardous medical wastes, plastic IV bags and tubes, petrie dishes, syringes, and infectious materials in the incinerator near the lab. The Occupational Health and Safety Agency for Healthcare in B.C. (OHSAH) recently conducted a preliminary investigation of 63 technicians and acknowledges there is a cancer cluster tied to the lab. Further investigation is needed to determine the extent of the damage caused to the health of all those exposed. Of the 63 lab workers, the cancers include -- breast, ovarian, liver, thyroid, lymphoma, and skin cancer. If you would like to read more on how this could happen, and what exactly the maintenance workers were burning that created the toxic fumes, go here.

By injecting laboratory mice with human embryonic stem cells, Technion Institute of Technology in Israel researchers have created mice that are partly-human. After the injection of human embryonic stem cells, the mice grew mixed lumps of human tissue called tetromas. Testing experimental drugs on tetromas in mice eliminates the need to put human volunteer test subjects at a potentially life-threatening danger of unknown adverse reactions to new drugs being developed and tested for safety.

Until now, the only way to determine if an experimental drug was effective, or safe, was to test it on monkeys or human volunteers. The problem is that monkeys do not always have the same reaction to a drug that humans do. While developing laboratory mice that grow human lumps of tissue sounds freakishly Frankenstein, humanized mice do allow scientists to make much more accurate advances in the development of effective and safe drugs to treat cancer.

According to Professor Yoram Reiter, "Scientists are currently able to cure cancer in mice, but not in humans. It is hoped that the humanized mice will throw light on this discrepancy and help scientists fine tune cancer treatments."