Researchers at Hokkaido University have developed a new kind of hydrogel that bonds spontaneously and strongly to defected bones, suggesting potential use in the treatments of joint injuries.

When soft supporting human tissues--including cartilage and ligaments, which are joined firmly to bones--are damaged, they cannot spontaneously repair inside the body. The use of artificial supporting tissues has the potential to significantly ameliorate damage to soft tissues. Progress has hitherto been hampered by the lack of materials that are strong, yet soft and pliant, for adhering to bone.

If we are in a relationship we are more likely to be attracted to faces resembling our own, but for single people, opposites attract.

Relationship status affects who and what we find attractive, found a study published in Frontiers in Psychology.

Dr Jitka Lindová of Charles University in the Czech Republic and her team showed a series of photographs of faces to university students and asked them to rate their attractiveness. The photographs were digitally manipulated so that the resemblance to the student was modified.

Images were of an individual of the opposite sex, whose face had been manipulated to look either more or less similar to the student. They were also presented with images of a same-sex individual manipulated in the same way.

As if it were one of the known Russian dolls, a group of astronomers, led by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, (IAC) has found the first known case of three supernova remnants one inside the other. Using the programme BUBBLY, a method developed within the group for detecting huge expanding bubbles of gas in interstellar space, they were observing the galaxy M33 in our Local Group of galaxies and found example of a triple-bubble. The results, which were published yesterday in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, help to understand the feedback phenomenon, a fundamental process of star formation and in the dissemination of metals produced in massive stars.

Academic social psychologists, who are over 99 percent liberal, can be reliably counted on to create surveys to affirm that liberals are more intelligent, less fearful of change, likely to have prettier children - especially in an election year.

In a report appearing in the July 12 issue of JAMA, an HIV/AIDS theme issue, Huldrych F. Gunthard, M.D., of University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland, and colleagues with the International Antiviral Society-USA panel, updated recommendations for the use of antiretroviral therapy in adults with established HIV infection, including when to start treatment, initial regimens, and changing regimens, along with recommendations for using antiretroviral drugs for preventing HIV among those at risk, including preexposure and postexposure prevention.

For the first time, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and University of Leeds have proved that gene variants associated with red hair, pale skin and freckles are linked to a higher number of genetic mutations in skin cancers. The burden of mutations associated with these variants is comparable to an extra 21 years of sun exposure in people without this variant.

The research, published today in Nature Communications, showed that even a single copy of a red hair-associated MC1R gene variant increased the number of mutations in melanoma skin cancer; the most serious form of skin cancer. Many non-red haired people carry these common variants and the study shows that everyone needs to be careful about sun exposure.