Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have taken a first step toward growing blood vessels from stem cells that could eventually be transplanted into living organisms.

New research has revealed that the structure of a bacteriophage, a virus infecting bacteria, resembles that of certain dangerous viruses that infect people. Studying this bacteriophage reveals various characteristics about viruses and their life cycle without having to study actual human viruses.

The commonly held view that IVF is the only culprit in the steady increase in the numbers of twins born over the past thirty years was challenged by a scientist speaking at the 22nd annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Prague, Czech Republic, Wednesday 21 June 2006. Professor Robert Jansen, Medical Director of Sydney IVF, Sydney, Australia, said that his research had shown that improved nutrition, both maternal and in the lab in the case of IVF, had produced better and stronger embryos.

In the ongoing search for better ways to target anticancer drugs to kill tumors without making people sick, researchers find that nanoparticles called buckyballs might be used to significantly boost the payload of drugs carried by tumor-targeting antibodies.

It would be the ultimate in tissue therapy. Simply supply a bag of your blood and come back two weeks laterto find it turned into cells from other tissues, ranging from brain and liver cells to the insulin-producing beta islet cells of the pancreas.

A recent wildlife census conducted in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) revealed that several species of large mammal are now recovering from a decade of civil war and rampant poaching, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN). Specifically, elephants and other species in the park have increased in number since the park's last census, due in large part to the anti-poaching efforts of park guards who patrol this World Heritage Site at great personal risk.

Men who have had a vasectomy reversed have a very much greater rate of chromosomal abnormalities in their sperm than do normal fertile men, a scientist told the 22nd annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Prague, Czech Republic on Wednesday 21 June 2006. Professor Nares Sukchareon, of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, said that doctors needed to be aware of this problem and monitor carefully children born as a result, particularly if ART was involved.

A team of researchers led by Prof. Irun Cohen of the Weizmann Institute of ScienceImmunology Department has revealed the molecular mechanism of a vaccine for Type 1 diabetes. The new findings should help amplify the effectiveness of the vaccine, which is currently in advanced stages of clinical trials. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disorder in which the immune system mistakenly attacks the body's own insulin-producing pancreatic cells, reducing and ultimately eliminating the production of insulin – a hormone needed to convert sugar, starches, and other foods into energy.

The conditions in which embryos are cultured in the laboratory during in vitro fertilisation could be causing genetic errors that are associated with certain developmental syndromes and other abnormalities in growth and development, such as low birth weight.

For the first time, researchers have enticed transplants of embryonic stem cell-derived motor neurons in the spinal cord to connect with muscles and partially restore function in paralyzed animals. The study suggests that similar techniques may be useful for treating such disorders as spinal cord injury, transverse myelitis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and spinal muscular atrophy. The study was funded in part by the NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).

Why do some taxanomic families contain many species and others contain far fewer? There has been much debate in the scientific community over the reason for such variation, but a recent study in The American Naturalist by Albert B. Phillimore (Imperial College London, Silwood Park Campus), Robert P. Freckleton (Oxford University), C. David L. Orme (Imperial College London, Silwood Park Campus), and Ian P. F. Owens (Imperial College London, Silwood Park Campus) identifies the two biological traits in birds that account for most of the variation: dispersal and feeding generalization.

A pioneering collaboration among U.S., European and Australian researchers announced June 20, 2006, will seek to identify genetic differences in the way people respond to HIV.

Eleven journals published by BioMed Central, the open access publisher, received their first Impact Factor this month. With nine journals in the top 10 of their 2005 Journal Citation Report* category, and ten journals with a 2005 Impact Factor exceeding 3.00, open access journals are confirmed as publishing high-quality, highly cited research.