A melanoma vaccine made from the tumour, and reefs that grow without rats

Two out of three also got intismeran autogene, a vaccine made from the mutations in that person's own removed tumour; the rest got a placebo. At a median follow-up of 24.6 months, the vaccine group had a 42 percent lower risk of recurrence or death (hazard ratio 0.58, 95 percent confidence interval 0.45 to 0.75). At two years, 82.2 percent were alive and cancer-free, against 70.0 percent on pembrolizumab alone. The risk of distant spread or death fell 38 percent, with 88.5 percent versus 80.2 percent free of distant metastasis at two years 113. Georgina V. Long of the Melanoma Institute Australia presented the data at the European Society for Medical Oncology meeting in Madrid on 24 October 113108.

Graham of Lancaster University and colleagues studied 28 atoll islands in the Seychelles, the Chagos Archipelago and Teti'aroa. Rats arrived by ship and emptied many seabird colonies. Seabirds feed at sea and drop the nutrients on the island and the reef around it; without them, as the write-up puts it, the engine idles. Around rat-free islands, reef accretion was about 1.8 times higher on lagoon reefs and about 2.5 times higher on ocean-facing reefs, and sediment production was 2.3 to 2.8 times higher. Sites with high native vegetation had an estimated 4.6-fold greater fine-root length, which matters because coconut plantations do not hold sand the way native forest does. The study appeared in Science Advances on 14 October 112.

In others 5 to 30 percent of households were taught, and in others half to all of them. Nicholas Christakis, Marios Papamichalis and Laura Forastiere at Yale, with Edoardo Airoldi of Temple, mapped who asked whom for health advice, who was friends and who lent money, before and after. In low-dose villages, people who took the classes tended to drop untreated neighbours they used to ask. In high-dose villages, treated people added ties, and friendship and money links moved with the health links. A subset of 56 villages still showed the pattern three years after the classes ended. The paper is in Nature, dated 14 October 111.

Within 24 hours there was a surge of new spines, and fragile "stubby" ones matured into stable, receptor-dense "mushroom" spines that persisted for weeks. In healthy brains psilocybin pruned some older connections to keep the circuit balanced. In chronically stressed brains, where synapses had been decaying, it produced an even bigger burst of new spines and blocked excess synapse loss. The work is in Nature Neuroscience 32.

Iron and titanium were spread remarkably evenly through the material. Bennu, the asteroid Ryugu and a rare group of carbon-rich meteorites called CI meteorites share strikingly similar fingerprints, which points to a common reservoir of ancient cosmic dust. The analysis, in Science Advances, also gives evidence that Jupiter helped shape the material Bennu and other ancient objects formed from, and it challenges earlier theories about where the asteroid was born 2.

They looked at nearly 8,000 edited sites across more than 2,000 proteins in two tissues: the optic lobe and the gills. First author Jack Moen listed effects on protein activity, stability, localization and how proteins interact, extending to the health of organelles. Moen's summary: the animals generate proteins with different properties "all without changing their DNA." The optic lobe, which handles sight and response, showed more frequent and more complex editing than the gills 27.

Samples were available at diagnosis and about two, four and 10 years before. The team tested antibody reactions to roughly 357,000 antigens from bacteria, viruses, food and the body itself, and found 123,980 unique antibodies across the samples. People who later developed either disease had less antibody diversity than healthy participants, and distinct changes showed up as far back as 10 years before diagnosis. Crohn's and ulcerative colitis carried different signatures 7.