For years women have trekked to doctors' offices for annual mammograms starting at age 40. But a new study says this may not be necessary: Women can wait until age 50 for their first mammogram with little downside, and they only need to get the exams every two years.

As a boy growing up in the late 1940s, K. Barry Sharpless fell under the spell of the coelacanth. The lungfish-like creature was believed to have been extinct for 6 million years until researchers pulled one out of the waters off South Africa in 1938. Sharpless fished obsessively in the rivers of his native New Jersey and never found any archeologic creature. But in the end he did find virtual coelacanths--biochemical treasures that took nature eons to produce.