The system for assessing the health of England’s rivers states just 14% are in good ecological health but an independent report for Defra says this masks improvements in freshwater biodiversity – and has proposed an alternative monitoring standard.

A team of scientists, led by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), carried out a review of the ecological status assessments of the Water Framework Directive (WFD), and criticised its ‘one out, all out’ approach.

Published in the journal CHEST, the American College of Chest Physicians recently released a new clinical guideline on the management of patients with early-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Many soil microbes play a vital role in ecosystems, as they help plants access nutrients and water and assist in stress tolerance such as during drought and to defend against pathogens. One such group of soil microbes are arbuscular mycorrhizal, aka AM, fungi, which are associated with the roots of approximately 70% of plant species on land.  new Dartmouth-led study reports on how global climate conditions affect AM fungal spore traits and the species biogeographic patterns. The results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The glycocalyx surrounds each cell in the human body like a coat. This complex sugar layer plays a key role in the progression of numerous diseases, such as cancer and autoimmune diseases. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) have succeeded for the first time in imaging individual sugars within the glycocalyx at molecular resolution and linking their spatial arrangement to their biological function. The findings, recently published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, open up completely new perspectives for understanding this important cell structure – with far-reaching consequences for diagnosis and therapy.