At yesterday’s International Solid State Circuit Conference, Holst Centre - founded by the Belgian nanoelectronics research center IMEC and the Dutch research center TNO - presented a plastic 64-bit inductively-coupled passive RFID tag operating at 13.56MHz.

With a record 780bit/s data readout of 64 bits over 10cm, the device approaches item-level tagging requirements. The tag generates a 5-fold higher bit rate compared to state-of-the-art plastic RFID systems. The achievement paves the way for low-cost high-volume RFID tags to replace barcodes.

The RFID system consists of a low-cost inductive antenna, capacitor, plastic rectifier and plastic circuit, all on foil. The LC antenna resonates at 13.56MHz and powers up the organic rectifier with an AC voltage at this frequency.

Computers are increasingly being used by those seeking sexual thrills and this use is helping inspire new and innovative technologies, according to a cybersex expert from University of Portsmouth.

Dr. Trudy Barber is delivering a lecture on the subject at a Royal Society of Medicine ‘Sexual Pleasures’ conference this week in which she will explain how fetishism and deviation in sexuality are helping change the way people use new technology and can even influence the invention of new technology. She doesn't say what those are but it's worth consideration.

Barber is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Creative Arts and Media (SCAFM) at the University of Portsmouth.

Antioxidants are believed to help ward off illness and boost the body’s immune system by acting as free radical scavengers, helping to mop up cell damage caused by free radicals. But you don't have to pay a lot; the humble white button mushroom (Agaricus bisporus) has as much, and in some cases, more antioxidant properties than more expensive varieties.

Although the button mushroom is the foremost cultivated edible mushroom in the world with thousands of tons being eaten every year, it is often thought of as a poor relation to its more exotic and expensive cousins and to have lesser value nutritionally.

But according to new research in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, the white button mushroom has as much antioxidant properties as its more expensive rivals, the maitake and the matsutake mushrooms - both of which are highly prized in Japanese cuisine for their reputed health properties including lowering blood pressure and their alleged ability to fight cancer.

Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University’s Molecular Biosensor and Imaging Center have developed new “fluorogen activating proteins” (FAPs) that will become a key component of novel molecular biosensor technology being created at Carnegie Mellon. The FAPs, which can be used to monitor biological activities of individual proteins and other biomolecules within living cells in real time, are described in the February issue of Nature Biotechnology.

Carnegie Mellon scientists designed the FAPs to emit fluorescent light only when bound to a fluorogen, an otherwise non-fluorescent dye added by the scientists. This feature will allow biologists to track proteins on the cell surface and within living cells in very simple and direct ways, eliminating cumbersome experimental steps.

A predisposition for obesity might be wired into the brain from the start, suggests a new study of rats in Cell Metabolism.

Rats selectively bred to be prone to obesity show abnormalities in a part of the brain critical for appetite control, the researchers found. Specifically, the researchers show that the obese rats harbor defects in neurons of the arcuate nucleus (ARH) of the hypothalamus, which leaves their brains less responsive to the hunger-suppressing hormone leptin.

Paleontologists, who use estimates based on the fossil record, and scientists who use "molecular clock" methods to study evolutionary history, have never agreed on when modern birds came into existence, because they have had conflicting results.

A new analysis by researchers at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, the Centre for Biodiversity Conservation Mexico and Central America, and Boston University offers the strongest molecular evidence yet for an ancient origin of modern birds, suggesting that they arose more than 100 million years ago, not 60 million years ago, as fossils suggest.