CHICAGO. Researchers find gene linked with male infertility

A single gene may be crucial for the final stages of sperm cell formation and could help explain why some men are infertile, US researchers said yesterday. Laboratory mice who lacked the gene had a significantly lower sperm count and were infertile, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill discovered.

l SYDNEY. Oh, he?s walking the plank in his underwear again?

An Australian man, clad only in underwear, fell nine stories while trying to build a makeshift plank bridge into a neighbor?s flat, but lived to tell the tale. The bridge collapsed just after midnight Tuesday sending the 35-year-old man plummeting into a building structure below, police in Western Australia state said. ?He was skylarking around, building planks across to his neighbor?s place when it happened.

He was very lucky. It was an iron and timber structure, possibly a pergola, that cushioned his fall,? police spokeswoman Ros Weatherall said. The man was recovering in hospital with cuts and a suspected broken leg.

LONDON. Experimental malaria vaccine works in babies

African babies ? the group most at risk of dying from malaria ? may be protected against the mosquito-borne disease by an experimental vaccine, researchers said on Wednesday. The finding clears the way for final-stage testing of GlaxoSmithKine Plc?s shot and increases the chance that the world will have a usable vaccine within five years.

NEW YORK. Naked chocolate Jesus rises again

A life-size chocolate sculpture of a naked Jesus will finally be displayed in New York starting in late October, seven months after an outcry by Roman Catholics forced a different gallery to cancel its exhibition. The chocolate Jesus will be joined by sculptures of several fully clothed saints, but the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights said it will not protest because, unlike before, there are no plans to put the ?anatomically correct? Jesus in public view during Holy Week. The Proposition gallery in Manhattan?s Chelsea neighborhood will present ?Chocolate Saints ... Sweet Jesus,? an exhibition timed to coincide with All Saints? Day on November 1. The show will run from October 27 to November 24. Back in March, the chocolate Jesus by artist Cosimo Cavallaro was to be exhibited in a street-level window of the Roger Smith Lab Gallery in Midtown Manhattan, giving casual passers-by a view of Jesus?s private parts. Protests, including a call to boycott the affiliated Roger Smith Hotel, forced the gallery to scrap the showing.