Toronto, ON, Canada. Prospects have improved for the large-scale engineering of uniform and layered biomaterials that could be used for tissue generation or surgical repair.

A new machine makes engineered tissue with potential application to preparing vascular patches for the surgical repair of blood vessels and enabling grafts for burn victims. The basic technology may provide a means for creation of three-dimensional cell cultures for developing therapeutic drugs.

Kansas City, MO, USA. Potassium channels contribute to primary activation of the vomeronasal organ (VNO), which detects pheromones and triggers basic-instinct behaviors.

From its niche within the nose in most land-based vertebrates, the VNO is one of evolution's most direct enforcers, triggering behaviors that range from compulsive mating to male-on-male death matches, with implications for sensory transduction experiments in other fields.

Boston, MA, USA. Biologists argue that recent findings demonstrate that adult mouse and human ovaries are capable of dividing and generating new oocytes during adult life.

If confirmation of this finding continues, investigations into cell division and meiosis will face both complications and opportunity. Accounting for the effects of a mother's age, reproductive history, and physical attributes will take greater prominence while opening new research pathways for examining the sources of geneti

Stirling, Scotland. Two foreign plant species formed a hybrid that overcame infertility, a rare example of a new species that has originated in the wild in the last 150 years.

The new species of monkeyflower (Mimulus peregrinus) was discovered on the bank of a stream in Scotland. Thousands of wild species and some crops that are thought to have originated in this way, yet this type of species formation is rare in recent history.

Pasadena, CA, USA. Focused light enables a potential range of deep-tissue imaging applications in biomedical research, medical diagnostics and incision-less surgery.

Researchers now can use a method that focuses light efficiently inside biological tissue. Previously, light could be focused only about one millimeter deep, but the new limit is now two and a half millimeters. In principle, the technique could probe as much as a few inches into tissue.