ONCOLOGY: Killing the Cancer Seed
All cancer cells are not equally dangerous, according to a current concept that is transforming cancer research. Instead, a relatively few cancer stem cells fuel cancer growth. The implications are profound: find and kill this minority of crucial cells and the rest of the tumor may languish or even self-destruct. A new study of human breast cancer tissue challenges the cancer stem cell hypothesis in solid tumors and suggests additional cells need to be targeted in treatment. The findings, by Kornelia Polyak and colleagues, appear in the March Cancer Cell.

PSYCHIATRY: When Seeing Is Not Believing
Over the past seven years, Gina Kuperberg (right), Tatiana Sitnikova, and their colleagues have been comparing how our brains react to merely unexpected scenarios versus downright strange ones. Though both types of anomaly are processed rapidly, in under a second, the more outlandish ones take a bit longer; the accompanying brain activity looks more like what occurs when we try to comprehend grammatical mistakes than errors of meaning. Now the researchers have taken this difference in timing and activity to develop a new model for how we make sense of events, both verbal and visual. Kuperberg presents this model in an upcoming special issue of Brain Research.

NEUROVIROLOGY: HIV Takes a Sweeter Path, Too
The path that HIV takes to enter and infect cells is well known. But research in the March 20 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, led by J. Roberto Trujillo and Joseph Brain (pictured), shows that HIV also can take an alternate route. Sugars on its outer surface can bind to and help the virus enter macrophages, immune system scavengers. Surprisingly, this alternate path is not infectious; instead, the virus is swallowed into the cell through phagocytosis. The discovery that HIV can get into cells without infecting them could be a promising guide for developing new vaccines.