Put the Shovel Down*

Astrocytes Put down the Broom and Pick up the Baton

In this issue of Cell, Panatier et al. (2006) show that D-serine released by astrocytes, a type of glial cell in the brain, promotes NMDA receptor activity at synapses in the hypothalamus. These results confirm that glial cells participate in synaptic signaling and show that they can dictate the tenor of synaptic plasticity.

Empyema thoracis: not time to put down the knife.

Service failures put down to poor monitoring of patients.

Put to the test

Personalized heart muscle cells made from stem cells in the laboratory could be used to check an individual's response to potential new drugs before clinical trials.

Lens put-put laws: monotonic and mixed

Many authors have argued, for good reasons, that in a range of applications the lens put-put law is too strong. On the other hand, the present authors have shown that very well behaved lenses, which do satisfy the put-put law by definition, are algebras for a certain monad, and that this viewpoint admits fruitful generalisations of the lens concept to a variety of base categories. In the algebr...