For decades, physicians have assumed that cerebral aneurysms rarely undergo structural change and some earlier theories speculated that they grow at a constant rate. Now an international consortium of scientists has used radiocarbon dating to date samples of ruptured and unruptured cerebral aneurysm tissue.

"What we did was actually measure how old the collagen, or basically the structure of a aneurysm is, by measuring the carbon-14 content of the protein that makes up the aneurysm."

That’s physicist Bruce Buchholz of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who was part of the consortium. He says they found that cerebral aneurysms are significantly younger than once thought and that this type of research increases the knowledge of how the body works.

"We're looking at the intrinsic behavior of cells or proteins without adding any other trace of what's already there in nature. So we're not perturbing the system to look at it. We're seeing how the system behaves naturally, which I think is really important."