The first known case of someone born without the ability to recognise voices has been reported in a paper by UCL (University College London) researchers, in a study of a rare condition known as phonagnosia. The UCL team are calling for other people to come forward if they think they have also grown up with the condition.

For many women, including the growing number who choose later-in-life pregnancy, predicting their biological clock's relation to the timing of their menopause and infertility is critically important.

The assumption that time, weather, and pollution are what cause buildings to decline is only partly true. Bacteria are also responsible for the ageing of buildings and monuments – a process known as biodeterioration, where organisms change the properties of materials through their vital activities. Leonila Laiz from the Institute for Natural Resources and Agrobiology in Seville, Spain, and colleagues have just isolated five new strains of bacteria that degrade old buildings. Their work¹ is published online this week in Springer's journal Naturwissenschaften.

A University of Alberta researcher has found a possible treatment for the E.coli strain that killed seven people in Walkerton, Ontario, in 2000 and has just been linked to more than 200 illnesses in North Bay, Ontario.

In the first study ever to genetically link the immune system to normal behavior, scientists at Rockefeller and Columbia universities show that mast cells, known as the pharmacologic bombshells of the immune system, directly influence how mice respond to stressful situations. The work, to appear this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and to be highlighted in Science, chips away at the increasingly stale idea that the two most complex systems in the body have entirely separate modes of operation.

Construction of the brain's border fence is supervised by Wnt/b-catenin signaling, report Liebner et al. in The Journal of Cell Biology.

Researchers from the John Innes Centre in Norwich, Great Britain, in collaboration with other European centres participating to the FLORA project, have obtained genetically modified tomatoes rich in anthocyanins, a category of antioxidants belonging to the class of flavonoids. These tomatoes, added to the diet of cancer-prone mice, showed a significant protective effect by extending the mice lifespan. The research has been published in the 26 October issue of Nature Biotechnology.

Viruses -- long regarded solely as disease agents -- now are being used in therapies for cancer. Concerns over the safety of these so-called oncolytic viruses stem from their potential to damage healthy tissues. Now Mayo Clinic researchers have discovered a way of controlling the viruses behind potential cancer therapeutics. They are engineering the virus's genetic sequence, using microRNAs to restrict them to specific tissues. The microRNAs destabilize the virus's genome, making it impossible for the virus to run amok. The discovery is reported in the current issue of Nature Medicine.