A window into the soul is poetic, but a window into the abdominal cavity may be more useful. A glass porthole implanted into the abdomen of mice has allowed researchers to observe the spread of cancer in intimate detail.

Tumour metastasis occurs when cancer cells spread from a primary tumour to other parts of the body, where they group together and form secondary tumours.

The migration of tumour cells is not well understood, partly because it is not easy to observe the spread of cancer inside the body. Advanced imaging techniques like multiphoton fluorescence microscopy only penetrate to a depth of half a millimetre or so – far too small to look at common sites of metastasis, including organs such as the liver.

So Jacco van Rheenen at the Hubrecht Institute for Developmental Biology and Stem Cell Research in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and colleagues tried a new approach: implanting a 12-millimetre titanium ring containing a panel of glass into the abdominal wall of mice. "It's just like a window in a ship or a plane," says van Rheenen. This porthole gives a clear view of the internal organs, including the kidneys, small intestine and liver.

Tracking cancer

The team was then able to track individual tumour cells, marked with fluorescent dye, over the course of two weeks as they spread around the abdomen. Surprisingly, after the cells had migrated to their final destination – but before they condensed into secondary tumours – they appeared to move randomly about the local area. Nobody had realised that cancer cells move around like this before they form secondary tumours, says van Rheenen. "We found new stuff that we didn't imagine before."

The team used drugs to suppress the mobility of the cancer cells after they had reached their destination, and found that this led to a lower rate of tumour growth and fewer secondary tumours. "By suppressing the movement, you block progress to full metastasis," says van Rheenen.

"This is a great technical feat," says Peter Kuhn, who studies metastasis at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. "Putting windows into animals is an important development." But he cautions against drawing quick conclusions from animal models. "It is really important to distinguish between cancer in a mouse and cancer in a human."

Journal reference: Science Translational Medicine, DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3004394

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BAD news for fair-skinned red-heads: wearing a hat and sunblock and sitting in the shade won't necessarily protect you from skin cancer. Studies in animals suggest the risk remains regardless of exposure to ultraviolet light.

David Fisher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and colleagues introduced a gene linked with melanoma - the most dangerous form of skin cancer - into mice engineered to be albino, or to have either red or black hair.

The team had planned to study the incidence of melanoma after exposure to UV light - known to be particularly damaging to the fair skin that often accompanies red hair. But before they could start, the red-haired mice developed tumours. "It was a big surprise," says Fisher.

To test whether it was the gene, which gives both mice and humans red hair, or the red pigment itself that was involved, the team created albino-red hair hybrids: mice with an gene but whose hair was white. Hybrid mice were protected from melanoma, says Fisher, indicating that the pigment itself plays a role.

"Red pigment has a capacity to cause oxidative stress," he says, which might lead to genetic mutations (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11624). Discovering the mechanisms involved may lead to protective strategies that go beyond shielding the skin from UV, Fisher adds.

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Digital artist Salvatore Iaconesi hacked his medical records to put them online in a global search for the best treatments

See more in our gallery: "Healing arts riff on open-source medical records"

You were told you had brain cancer and your response was to hack open your medical records and publish them online. Why?
When I was diagnosed I was a bit unsatisfied with what took place at the hospital: it was almost as if I had nothing to do with it. The doctor comes up, he tells you that you have a tumour, and it's like you disappear and only your clinical records remain. I didn't want to disappear. I'm not just a patient, I am a human being. I stepped out of the hospital with a copy of my digital medical records, but I found they were in a peculiar format which takes a lot of skill to open. So I hacked this format to make that data really accessible.

Last month you put this data on your website artisopensource.net/cure. What happened?
It's been incredible. I have been able to become an expert in neurosurgery and neurology. Through this kind of complete openness, I could access thousands of people who have provided me with their knowledge, their skills, their testimonies, their life experiences. Roughly 60 neurologists, neurosurgeons and radiologists contacted me suggesting techniques for surgery and for treatment. They are even talking to each other.

Scans of your brain have inspired you and other artists in many ways. Tell me more.
There are lots of things going on: poems, texts, narratives. An electronic music collective in Palermo, Italy, did a performance with images of my cancer as their visuals. There is this wonderful American artist, Patrick Lichty, who built a sculpture of my brain and tumour in Second Life. I have printed out a picture of my tumour, and I look at it and speak to it. It's like a meditation with your cancer, so you are not that afraid anymore. Science talks about the fact that laughing, being unafraid, being positive, being social, is good for your immune system, your psychology.

Does crowd-sourcing a cure mean you've lost faith in medicine?
No, it doesn't. I want to take care of myself using medicine and surgery. Doctors are wonderful people. But I also want to take into consideration all other possible approaches. When I disclosed my records, I made it explicit that I was doing it to try to find a new definition for being sick, or ill or diseased, and also for the word "cure". In different cultures, cure means different things. It could refer to the body or the soul or to society.

Don't doctors advise against trawling the internet for information about diseases?
We live in a time when, thanks to the internet, the mythology has been destroyed that people are stupid and some things can be done only by professionals. If you are open, you can have some interesting surprises. Of course your doctor will say don't go to the internet because magicians and clowns will show up selling you miracle remedies which don't work. I'm not replying to those emails - that's very important.

The Italian parliament might change the law to make medical information more open...
It has been proposed and I am very happy about it.

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Each cigarette a woman smokes pushes her closer to an early grave. Women who smoke heavily into middle age cut their lives short by around 10 years.

But quitting early pays off; kick the habit before 40 and the risk of premature death drops by 90 per cent (The Lancet, doi.org/jng). Do it before you're 30, and the risk is even lower at 97 per cent.

The findings, from a study which followed 1.3 million British women for an average of 12 years each, mirror results from a study of male smokers from 2004.

Men took up smoking en masse in the UK around 10 to 20 years earlier than women, encouraged by free cigarettes supplied to servicemen during the second world war. As a result, the effects on health in men who smoked have taken two decades longer to show up in women. "Whether men or women, smokers who stop before middle age will on average gain about 10 years of life," says Richard Peto of the University of Oxford, head of both studies.

Meanwhile, the health benefits of legislation banning smoking at work, and in restaurants continue to accumulate.

A study in the Archives of Internal Medicine revealed that in one Minnesota county, heart attacks dropped by a third 18 months after the introduction of anti-smoking laws.

Further, a review in Circulation of 45 studies covering 33 smoke-free laws around the world found that the number of people taken into hospital because of lung diseases dropped by almost a quarter and far fewer are being admitted after heart attacks and strokes since anti-smoking laws came into force.

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The field of mental health needs a broad conversation to understand how our language may be holding us back, limiting not only our impact but our imagination.

The purpose of this initiative is to support the career development and training of outstanding early career mental health researchers interested in pursuing global mental health research careers.

This initiative aims to support studies on mental disorders based on new concepts of transcriptome complexity that assign functional roles to non-coding and potentially novel coding transcripts, exploring their potential as trans-regulators of gene transcription, mRNA splicing, mRNA stability, molecular transport, and influence on chromosome architecture.

The initiative aims to support research that will advance our understanding of the biological mechanisms underlying eating disorders by studying periods of transition.