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When you say ‘Everglades’ to me I immediately think of hovercrafts, James Bond and alligators. Of course there’s more than that, not least because it’s an interesting system from an ecological point of view. It has been a mystery, for example, how stable patterns of ridges and sloughs parallel to the flow of water form.

A paper this month in The American Naturalist describes a model that adequately explains these patterns¹, with consequences for understanding carbon sequestration and habitat provision.

Cell biologists may be forgiven for getting excited about the focal adhesion kinase, FAK. Its role in formation of focal adhesions, essential for anchorage-dependent growth and motility, has long been appreciated. Now, however, it seems that it has an essential role in tissue homeostasis² in the intestine. It appears to be necessary for epithelial wound repair, but also is implicated in tumorigenesis and will no doubt attract attention as a therapeutic target for intestinal cancer.

Occasionally I see a title of a paper that means I just have to look, even if it is completely outwith my own interests (what am I saying? Everything interests me). Here’s one:

Towards a consistent classification scheme for geochemical environments, or, why we wish the term ‘suboxic’ would go away.

‘Suboxic’ refers to places