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A species that is 15 million years old, hedgehogs have survived all kinds of environmental changes over the years, including urbanisation. Surprisingly, cities have often been found to have higher hedgehog populations than rural areas. Understanding why this is could help us to protect them in the future.

Gardeners turning to the internet for advice about Japanese knotweed are likely to find a wide range of sometimes contradictory and potentially misleading advice that could put them on the wrong side of the law, scientists at the University of Exeter have found.

A study by researchers at the University of Exeter's Penryn campus which looked at knotweed guidance from a range of sources on the web found that information, even that from local government sources, varies significantly in its comprehensiveness and accuracy and could lead to further spread of the invasive plant.

Helsinki, 4 July 2016: There is a much disputed claim that "injury" to the lining of the uterus - whether inadvertent or deliberate - increases the chance of embryo implantation and thus the chance of pregnancy in certain groups of women having IVF. The "injury" has usually been performed as a biopsy from the womb lining (endometrium), whose action is believed to cause a favourable inflammation ("scratch") within the endometrium thereby making it more receptive to an implanting embryo.

1. Staph risk runs in families, especially among siblingsAbstract: http://www.annals.org/article.aspx?doi=10.7326/M15-2762URL goes live when the embargo lifts

Young women who received the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine through a school-based program had fewer cervical cell anomalies when screened for cervical cancer, found a new study in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

Targeting NEAT1 and 'paraspeckles' increases chemosensitivity of cancer cells

A study that is first in its kind and published in Nature Medicine today has looked at how far genetic factors control the immune cell response to pathogens in healthy individuals. A team investigated the response of immune cells from 200 healthy volunteers when stimulated with a comprehensive list of pathogens ex vivo (outside the human body), and has correlated these responses with 4 million genetic variants (SNPs).

In recent years pasta gained a bad reputation: it will fatten you. This led lots of people to limit its consumption, often as part of some aggressive "do it yourself" diets. Now a study conducted by the Department of Epidemiology, I.R.C.C.S. Neuromed in Pozzilli, Italy, does justice to this fundamental element of the Mediterranean diet, showing how pasta consumption is actually associated with a reduced likelihood of both general and abdominal obesity.

LA JOLLA, CA--A powerful arm of the immune system is production of antibodies that circulate through the blood and neutralize invading pathogens. Although B cells actually manufacture antibody proteins, the process is aided by neighboring T cells, which shower B cells with cytokines to make them churn out high-quality antibody proteins--and remember how to do so. Given the essential function of "helper" T cells, researchers have long sought to define biological signals that encourage their development. Until now, the best candidates had only minor effects on human immune cells.

While immune therapy has proven effective in treating certain types of cancer, especially lung cancer and melanoma, tumors of the pancreas remain among the most difficult to treat and, so far, are impervious to immune-based therapies. Now, a new study in mice has shown that immunotherapy against pancreatic cancer can be effective when given in conjunction with drugs that break up the fibrous tissue in these tumors.

The study, from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, appears July 4 in Nature Medicine.

ANN ARBOR--Is honesty really the best policy? Isn't it more beneficial to cheat, if you can get away with it?

A study from the insect world provides a new perspective on honest communication by showing that paper wasps that send dishonest signals are aggressively punished, and the drubbing can have long-term impacts.

Mice are one of the most commonly used laboratory organisms, widely used to study everything from autism to infectious diseases. Yet genomic studies in mice have lagged behind those in humans.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Cells contain thousands of messenger RNA molecules, which carry copies of DNA's genetic instructions to the rest of the cell. MIT engineers have now developed a way to visualize these molecules in higher resolution than previously possible in intact tissues, allowing researchers to precisely map the location of RNA throughout cells.

Key to the new technique is expanding the tissue before imaging it. By making the sample physically larger, it can be imaged with very high resolution using ordinary microscopes commonly found in research labs.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- MIT engineers have developed a new type of easily customizable vaccine that can be manufactured in one week, allowing it to be rapidly deployed in response to disease outbreaks. So far, they have designed vaccines against Ebola, H1N1 influenza, and Toxoplasma gondii (a relative of the parasite that causes malaria), which were 100 percent effective in tests in mice.

Helsinki, July 4, 2016: Despite its occasional use as an adjunct in IVF, human growth hormone appears of little benefit to women having difficulty conceiving. Indeed, in an Australian/New Zealand collaborative placebo-controlled randomised trial presented here at the Annual Meeting of ESHRE, live birth rates were no better in poor-responding patients (under the age of 41) given growth hormone as a supplement than in those given placebo.