While diabetes can mostly be managed through a carefully-controlled diet and regular insulin shots, a longer term solution and perhaps even a cure could be found by replenishing a patient's own supply of beta cells, which naturally produce the hormone. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are a step closer to that kind of treatment, after tweaking the recipe for turning stem cells into beta cells.

• Diabetes
• Hormone
• Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPS)
• Insulin
• Stem Cells
• Washington University in St Louis
• Washington University in St. Louis

Vaccine hesitancy, where people are reluctant or refuse to have themselves or their children vaccinated, is a growing movement among those fearing negative health outcomes from immunizations, such as the (non-existent) risk of autism. This collective uncertainty has now gathered such momentum that the World health Organization (WHO) sees fit to list vaccine hesitancy as one of its 10 threats to global health in 2019, alongside other more established dangers such as air pollution and drug-resistant bacteria.

• Vaccines
• World Health Organization

Things are about to get very fun in the American electric performance motorcycle market, as Zero and Lightning prepare to release a pair of next-generation machines that sound like very serious contenders. Here's what we know so far.

• Electric Motorcycles
• Lightning Motorcycles
• Zero Motorcycles

Researchers have found that blocking the uptake of a specific hormone in mice prompts the burning of the animal's stores of beige fat, or adipose tissue. The researchers say the discovery of this regulatory mechanism provides a new target for the development of drugs that combat obesity by boosting the burning of stored fat in the human body.

• Beige fat
• Brown fat
• Fat cells
• Obesity
• Tsinghua University

As important a technology as water filters are, they get less effective as bacteria builds up on their surface. Now, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a new type of membrane that reduces such biofouling by actively killing bacteria with graphene – and in an interesting twist, it's built by bacteria.

• Bacteria
• Filter
• Filters
• Graphene
• Materials
• Membrane
• Washington University in St Louis
• Washington University in St. Louis
• Water

As we learn more and more about how the bacteria in our gut can affect our entire body, some researchers are looking to specifically genetically engineer probiotics to act as novel, living medicines. New data published in the journal Science Translational Medicine has described the results of a human trial testing the safety of a non-pathogenic strain of E. coli engineered to mop up excess ammonia in a person's large intestine.

• Bacteria
• Gut Bacteria
• Microbiome
• Probiotic

One of the software packages that will guide the ESA ExoMars 2020 rover after it lands on the Red Planet has passed a major test at the space agency's Planetary Utilisation Testbed, or "Mars Yard." The exercise by the half-scale ExoMars Testing Rover (ExoTeR) in the 9 x 9-m (30 x 30-ft) rock-strewn sandbox will help the actual rover autonomously navigate Martian hazards as it seeks spots to drill two meters (6.6 ft) down in search of signs of past life.

• ESA
• Exomars
• Mars

Ultrasound technology has been in wide use for decades, helping submarines navigate and letting doctors non-invasively peer inside patients, but it might be about to get a whole lot more powerful. Researchers have developed an "ultra" ultrasound sensor that is so sensitive it can hear air molecules moving around or the vibrations of individual cells.

• Cells
• Medical Imaging
• Navigation
• Sonar
• Ultrasound
• University of Queensland

The 2019 Dakar Rally is now over, and as well as a new crop of extraordinary stories about extraordinary human beings, we can now sit back and enjoy some thoroughly spectacular imagery from one of the most grueling and beautiful motorsport events on Earth.

• Dakar Rally
• Dakar Rally 2019
• Photography

It's no secret that the course we're on with food production and consumption is in need of serious correcting, but a major new report from a global team of scientists has laid out the kind of maneuvering needed to set us on a sustainable path. Billed as a planetary health diet for both the Earth and its people, the set of guidelines put forward by the EAT-Lancet Commission gun for nothing short of a "Great Food Transformation," something they say would feed 10 billion people, save lives and avoid large-scale environmental destruction.

• Food
• Food security
• Health