Image: CARY WOLINSKY (photograph); JEN CHRISTIANSEN (photoillustration) CHILDREN WITH AUTISM may struggle with social interaction because their mirror neuron systems are not functioning properly. At first glance you might not notice anything odd on meeting a young boy with autism. But if you try to talk to him, it will quickly become obvious that something is seriously wrong. He may not make eye contact with you; instead he may avoid your gaze and fidget, rock his body to and fro, or bang his head against the wall. More disconcerting, he may not be able to conduct anything remotely resembling a normal conversation. Even though he can experience emotions such as fear, rage and pleasure, he may lack genuine empathy for other people and be oblivious to subtle social cues that most children would pick up effortlessly.

On Sunday's "Good Morning America Weekend Edition," Consumer Reports health editor Ronni Sandroff said that contrary to popular belief, price does not dictate a cream's power. "There was no correlation between effectiveness and price," Sandroff said. Even the more effective creams provided only a minimal reduction of wrinkles -- less than 10-percent. Sandroff said consumers can't expect a cream to perform a miracle.

A drop in breast cancer cases may be due to women eschewing Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), experts say.

Is a person hysterical if he or she complains of numbness in a limb but conventional tests reveal no underlying cause? A new study argues yes. While the term hysteria has fallen out of favor--replaced by the more reasonable sounding "conversion disorder," after Freud's explanation of such symptoms as the conversion of intolerable emotional impulses into physical manifestations--the condition has not disappeared. Recent fMRI scans of three women insisting they had no feeling in either a hand or a foot revealed that their brains really were malfunctioning when the numb appendage was stimulated.

International health experts called on Tuesday for rapid worldwide access to new cervical cancer vaccines that have the potential to save a quarter of a million lives a year.

In a study released in May, scientists at the Broad Institute scanned 20 million “letters” of genetic sequence from each of the human, chimpanzee, gorilla and macaque monkey genomes. Based on DNA differences, the researchers speculated that millions of years after an initial evolutionary split between human ancestors and chimp ancestors, the two lineages might have interbred again before diverging for good.

Doctors leading a global war on heart disease say they are "devastated" by the loss of a new drug they had expected to be an important weapon in the fight against high cholesterol.Pfizer had hoped to get federal approval next year to sell its torcetrapib, which raises levels of what is known as good cholesterol, or HDL. But the international clinical trial key to that approval was halted over the weekend after safety monitors saw that patients taking the drug died of cardiovascular problems at higher rates than test subjects not on the drug.