Neuroscientists have discovered that the brain sees some faces as male when they appear in one area of a person's field of view, but female when they appear in a different location, a finding which challenges the longstanding tenet of neuroscience that how the brain sees an object should not depend on where the object is located relative to the observer.

In the real world, the brain's inconsistency in assigning gender to faces isn't noticeable because there are so many other clues, like hair and clothing, but when people view computer-generated faces, stripped of all other gender-identifying features, a pattern of biases based on location of the face emerges.

Researchers have hit on a new way to create a personalized vaccine - an immune response against their own tumors using the tumor itself. This dendritic cell (DC) vaccine was used after surgical resection of metastatic tumors to try to prevent the growth of additional metastases. 

Dendritic cells are critical to the human body's immune system, helping identify targets, or antigens, and then stimulating the immune system to react against those antigens. The new research grew dendritic cells from a sample of a patient's blood, mixed them with proteins from the patient's tumor, and then injected the mixture into the patient as a vaccine. The vaccine then stimulated an anti-tumor response from T-cells, a kind of white blood cell that protects the body from disease.

We don't know about yours but this holiday season, the homes of most scientists will be awash with even more coffee than usual. And that means coffee ring stains.

With the volume of science done in coffee houses (like Newton, who ate his meals in one every day) you'd think that anything about coffee, including coffee rings left behind from spillage, would be studied to death.

Not really.   In 1997, Robert Deegan and colleagues showed that the coffee ring pattern was due to capillary flow induced by the differential evaporation rates across the drop (1) but since then little has been done.    Sometimes science is practical instead of informational and 'just use a coaster' is enough.