The secrets of a simian schnozz

The big-nosed monkey

For Borneo’s proboscis monkeys, size matters. Males of the endangered species, besides weighing twice as much as the females, sport distinctive, abnormally large noses – a trait that has long puzzled evolutionary biologists. Now an international team of researchers has found that the size of a male’s conk is closely correlated to his overall prowess. Not only are big-nosed males bulkier than their smaller-nosed rivals, they also tend to have bigger testes – and larger female harems. (By contrast, males with smaller noses often live in bachelor groups.) Additionally, the size of a male’s nose affects the quality of his call – perhaps so that females can assess his attractiveness even from a distance. In the journal Science Advances, the researchers conclude that the monkey’s abnormally large nose serves to alert male rivals to his strength and to signal his suitability as a mate to females.

Lab-grown tumours

Scientists have grown replica mini-tumours in a lab – a breakthrough that could lead to more personalised cancer care. The team, at the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden in London, took biopsy samples from 71 patients with bowel, stomach and bile-duct cancer, who had already tried a range of drug treatments, and used cells from these samples to grow replica tumours. When they tested drugs on the lab-grown tumours, these responded almost exactly as the patients’ actual tumours had. This suggests that replica tumours, grown from the patients’ own, could be used as a quick and effective trial ground for treatments. “Once a cancer has spread round the body and stopped responding to standard treatments, we face a race against time to find patients a drug that might slow the cancer’s progression,” said Dr Nicola Valeri, the study leader. The new technique has the potential to simplify this process, pending the findings being confirmed by larger trials.

Tear test for Parkinson’s

People’s tears could be tested to determine whether they have Parkinson’s – long before symptoms start to appear. When researchers from the University of Southern California compared the tears of adults with and without the condition, they found that the tears of people with the disease contained far higher levels of oligomeric alpha-synuclein – a protein that forms toxic clumps and helps cause the nerve damage associated with Parkinson’s. This raises the possibility of developing a cheap, reliable and non-invasive screening test for the disease. “Because the Parkinson’s process can begin years or decades before symptoms appear, a biological marker like this could be useful in diagnosing, or even treating, the disease earlier,” said study author Dr Mark Lew.

Ancient tattoos found on mummies

There’s nothing new about the trend for tattoos. The discovery of body art on two mummies at the British Museum confirms that the practice dates back at least 5,000 years. Archaeologists used infrared scanning to analyse faint black smudges on the bodies of a man and a woman who lived in predynastic Egypt. Those on Gebelein Man A were revealed to depict a bull and a sheep. The “S”-shaped motifs on Gebelein Woman are thought to denote high status. The tattoos are the earliest known examples in Africa. Tattooing was already known to have been practised in Europe at that time: the 5,300-year-old Alpine man known as Ötzi, found preserved in ice near the Italian-austrian border in 1991, had about 60 tattoos, probably made by rubbing charcoal into skin perforations.