A drug widely used to treat asthma and allergies may also help fight aggressive cancers, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study that uncovered how tumors hijack common white blood cells to evade immunotherapy. The findings in mice and human tissues point to a practical, new way to improve treatment for tough tumors, such as triple-negative breast cancer, where immunotherapy often fails.

A large-scale study with data from Brazilian Cerrado streams found that about half of the field sampling effort preserved the ability of most habitat and biological indices to distinguish stream disturbance levels, while greatly reducing time and costs. Macroinvertebrate indices remained robust under reduced sampling, and only fish richness was more sensitive to lower effort. The findings suggest that faster, more cost-effective stream assessments could support biomonitoring programs in tropical regions with limited funding.

A new, consolidated checklist of diatoms—a major group of photosynthetic microalgae—has been compiled for the Salish Sea, northeast Pacific, by a team of Canadian scientists. Integrating historical records with new reports, this first comprehensive baseline establishes a foundation for assessing diatom diversity in the region. As primary producers at the base of marine food webs, diatoms are key indicators of environmental change, providing critical insight into the health and resilience of the Salish Sea bioregion. The checklist is now published in the open-access Biodiversity Data Journal.

Sequencing environmental DNA in seawater shows the local presence or absence of species, but until now could give little information about those measures of biodiversity that are the most useful in conservation. As a proof-of-principle, scientists in the US have now shown that mitochondrial DNA in water sampled near schools of dolphins contains enough information to measure their local effective population size and monitor the health of these populations.