Chronic pancreatitis, which affects around three million people worldwide, is especially difficult to treat because the molecular drivers of the disease vary from patient to patient. Salk researchers have created a new platform for studying chronic pancreatitis that retains patient-specific disease biology, which can be used to develop personalized chronic pancreatitis treatments and has already pinpointed a protein that could be a promising target for many patients.

A new tool that allows researchers to create realistic full-body animations of monkeys has provided the first evidence that non-human primates experience the “uncanny valley” phenomenon for body avatars, according to a study by Lucas Maximilian Martini at the University Clinic Tubingen in Germany and colleagues at KU Leuven in Belgium, publishing July 14^th in the open access journal PLOS Biology.

Are giant sinkholes in China’s karst mountains havens or traps for the rare plants that inhabit them? A new study finds they are both—offering refuge from heat and drought while gradually eroding the evolutionary potential of an endangered tree.

With the aid of physical forces – in this case, sound – it is possible to actively steer the formation of engineered tissue. For example, sound waves can be used to create functional vascular networks with blood vessel-like structures in vitro. Scientists at the Center for Molecular Biology of Heidelberg University have demonstrated this through their methodology for acoustic manipulation. The team headed by Junior Professor Dr Daniela Duarte Campos also defines quality requirements for generating complex multi-cell-type vascularized 3D tissue that is, for example, relevant for biomedical studies.