Analysis of changes in functional groups of species and potential drivers of environmental change for protected areas across the world’s major tropical regions reveals large variation between reserves that have been effective and those experiencing an erosion of biodiversity, and shows that environmental changes immediately outside reserves are nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate.

Imaging of activity in long-range axons is reported in mice performing tactile object-localization with their whiskers; the feedback projection from the motor cortex to the somatosensory cortex provides information to integrate whisker movement information and touch, which are key components of object identification.

B-cell receptor (BCR) signalling in chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) is found not to be dependent on exogenous antigens; instead, signalling may involve the binding of the BCR heavy-chain complementarity-determining region to self epitopes on the same receptor, a finding that may have important implications for understanding the pathogenesis of CLL and potential therapeutic approaches.