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A team develops a novel biomaterial that, when mixed with islets, allows islets to survive after transplant without the need for long-term immunosuppression.

Redness, swelling, pain -- these are signs of inflammation. It serves to protect the body from pathogens or foreign substances. Researchers were able to show that inflammatory reactions of an important sensor protein proceed in a specific spatial direction. This finding has the potential to conceivably stop inflammation at the 'growing end', and thus bring chronic inflammatory diseases to a halt.

Hopeful diabetes treatment, islet cell transplantation, is now one step closer to the clinic following new study.

The effect of variability on learning is recognized in many fields: learning is harder when input is variable, but variability leads to better generalization of the knowledge we learned. In this review, researchers bring together over 150 studies on variability across domains, including language acquisition, motor learning, visual perception, face recognition and education, shedding light on the underlying mechanisms behind variability.

About one in 20,000 infants is born with what's called a congenital giant nevus -- a huge, pigmented mole that may cover much of the face and body. Due to the mole's appearance and its risk of later developing into skin cancer, many patients decide to have their children undergo extensive surgery to remove the entire lesion, which can cause large and permanent scars. Researchers led by recently created multiple preclinical models of this condition and used them to show that several drugs can be applied to the skin to cause the lesions to regress, and one topical drug also protected against skin cancer.