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As per government data released on Thursday, young Americans are choosing suffocation and hanging to commit suicide.

Deaths by these measures have increased every from 1994 to 2012 among males and females aged between 10 and 24 years. The report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention unveiled that measures like poisoning, suffocation and hanging have high chances to lead to death.

Researchers at the CDC said suffocation and hanging measures resulted into 4.5 deaths per 100,000 among young men by 2012. The death rate was up from 3 per 100,000 in 1994. The rate was found to have increased by more than three times in women to 1.7 per 100,000 in 2012.

It has been reported that doctors at a San Francisco hospital on Friday successfully performed kidney transplant surgeries in a rare organ donation chain that gave six patients new kidneys.

Hospital spokesman Dean Fryer said in a statement that a group of 12 donors and recipients, aged 24 to 70 years, is now recovering well after undergoing kidney transplants at California Pacific Medical Center.

Fryer said this was the largest kidney swap in the 44-year history of California Pacific's transplant center. Back in 2011, the hospital became the state's first to perform five-way swap, he added.

In an interview at the Future of Genomic Medicine conference in La Jolla, California this week, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said that in President Barack Obama's $215 million 'precision medicine' program, one of the earliest tasks will be to find a way to assemble data from a mishmash of existing studies.

According to him, the program will gather loads of health information and genetic data on more than 1 million Americans in order to develop targeted medicines.

Volunteers who have expressed interest in participating include Kaiser Permanente, the Mayo Clinic and the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given a green signal for the first non-brand name version of a biological drug. Called Zarxio, the drug enables patients to grow more white blood cells when they have been wiped out by chemotherapy.

Sandoz is the manufacturer of Zarxio, which is a low-cost copy, or biosimilar version, of Amgen's biologic drug Neupogen. The FDA approved Neupogen, generically known as filgrastim, in 1991.

There is no doubt that biological drugs have brought significant advances in medical science, which is evident from the transformation in cancer care and some other diseases, like juvenile arthritis. But high cost of such drugs has remained a big issue. This is the first time a non-brand name competitor has been given the approval by the FDA.

American astrophysicist and famous cosmologist Neil deGrasse Tyson is perhaps the best known expert of astrophysics and space exploration in the United States. Tyson has been director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History since 1996, but he is known as the charismatic star and host of the American science documentary television series 'Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey'.

On Friday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) stated that its car-sized robotic rover, Curiosity, has been experiencing intermittent short circuits in its robotic arm. According to the United States space agency, it could limit the rover's drilling of rocks.

The space agency had launched Curiosity on November 26, 2011, from Cape Canaveral to explore Gale Crater on the Red Planet.

Currently, the rover is at the base of an 18,000-foot-tall mountain on the planet. Objective of the rover is to help scientists in understanding how changes in rocks at different levels of the mountain have changed the Mars' climate over time. Rocks of the mountain are made of different layers of remains dating to a time when the Red Planet was warm and wet.