Today's Globe: face-reading, mentally ill inmates, MGH doctor's return, BU bacterial infection, health cost-cutting, PTSD, AIDS in women, tobacco ban

Harvard neuroscience professor Charles A. Nelson III, who runs the nation’s top laboratory studying how people learn to decode facial expressions, recruits hundreds of babies and preschoolers from the Boston area. Using high-tech equipment to monitor the children’s eye movements and brain activity, researchers seek to discover how people identify one face from another and how they decipher the emotions behind particular expressions.

The Patrick administration has shelved plans to build special treatment units for hundreds of seriously mentally ill inmates, two years after advocates for prisoners alleged in a federal lawsuit that the state’s practice of keeping such inmates in solitary confinement 23 hours a day was inhumane and causing suicides.

Two weeks after a patient repeatedly stabbed her at a Massachusetts General Hospital clinic, Dr. Astrid Desrosiers returned home yesterday, with casts on both forearms and deep scars, but with enough strength to walk through her front door.

Sophisticated genetic fingerprinting confirmed that a laboratory experiment was the source of a bacterial infection that sickened a graduate student on Boston University’s medical campus, city disease investigators said yesterday.

As health care legislation moves toward a crucial airing in the Senate, the White House is facing a growing revolt from some Democrats and analysts who say the bills Congress is considering do not fulfill President Obama’s promise to slow the runaway rise in health care spending.

Powerful scans are letting doctors watch just how the brain changes in veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and concussionlike brain injuries, signature damage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

In its first study of women’s health, the World Health Organization said yesterday that the AIDS virus is the leading cause of death and disease among women between the ages of 15 and 44.

The University of Montana is proposing a campuswide ban on all forms of tobacco, though students and staff would have nearly two years to quit before it’s enforced.