A new study documents malformations seen in an infant born to a kidney transplant recipient who had taken mycophenolate mofetil (MMF), a widely used immunosuppressant available commercially as Cellcept®. The findings suggest a specific birth defect pattern particular to this drug, reinforcing its potential to harm to the fetus.

Approximately 14,000 births to organ transplant recipients, primarily kidney transplant patients, have been reported worldwide. Although pregnancy was initially ill-advised for these women, the American Society of Transplantation concluded in 2003 that pregnancy is usually safe following the first year of a transplant, provided that organ rejection or other complications have not occurred. The fetal side-effects of several immunosuppressant drugs have been studied, though not for widely used newer medications, such as (MMF).

A study by UC Irvine ecologists finds that excess nitrogen in tropical forests boosts plant growth by an average of 20 percent, countering the belief that such forests would not respond to nitrogen pollution.

Faster plant growth means the tropics will take in more carbon dioxide than previously thought, though long-term climate effects are unclear. Over the next century, nitrogen pollution is expected to steadily rise, with the most dramatic increases in rapidly developing tropical regions such as India, South America, Africa and Southeast Asia.

Nitrogen fertilizer, applied to farmland to improve crop yield, also affects ecosystems downwind by seeping into runoff water and evaporating into the atmosphere. Industrial burning and forest clearing also pumps nitrogen into the air.

Scientists from the University of Bonn are researching which plants giant dinosaurs could have lived off more than 100 million years ago in order to find out how they were able to become as large as they did. Such gigantic animals should not have existed.

Their recipe; take 200 milligrams of dried and ground equisetum, ten milliliters of digestive juice from sheep's rumen, a few minerals, carbonate and water. Fill a big glass syringe with the mix, clamp this into a revolving drum and put the whole thing into an incubator, where the brew can rotate slowly.

In this way they obtained an artificial 'dinosaur rumen'. With this apparatus (also used as a ‘Menke gas production technique’ in assessing food for cows) Dr. Jürgen Hummel from the Bonn Institute of Animal Sciences (Bonner Institut für Tierwissenschaften) is investigating which plants giant dinosaurs could have lived off more than 100 million years ago, since this is one of the pieces still missing in the puzzle involving the largest land animals that ever walked the earth. The largest of these 'sauropod dinosaurs' with their 70 to 100 tons had a mass of ten full grown elephants or more than 1000 average people.

Quantitative modeling of a biological pathway normally involves intense computer simulations to crunch all available data on the dozens of relevant reactions in the pathway, producing a detailed interaction map.

Now an MIT team has used an engineering approach to show that complex biological systems can be studied with simple models developed by measuring what goes into and out of the system. Such an approach can give researchers an alternative way to look at the inner workings of a complicated biological system-such as a pathway in a cell-and allow them to study systems in their natural state.

The researchers focused on a pathway in yeast that controls cells' response to a specific change in the environment. The resulting model is “the simplest model you can ever reduce these systems to,” said Alexander van Oudenaarden, W.M. Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering and Associate Professor of Physics and senior author of the paper in Science.

When something is moving close to the speed of light, the fastest anything can move, sending ahead information in time to make mid-path flight corrections sounds impossible.

Not quite, say physicists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

They have developed a way to measure subtle fluctuations in RHIC's particle beams as they speed around their 2.4-mile-circumference high-tech racetrack - and send that information ahead to specialized devices that smooth the fluctuations when the beam arrives.

Older women are more prone to depression and are more likely to remain depressed than older men, according to a new study by Yale School of Medicine researchers in the February Archives of General Psychiatry.

The Yale team also found that women were less likely to die while depressed than older men, indicating that women live longer with depression than men. This factor, along with the higher likelihood of women becoming depressed and remaining depressed, collectively contribute to the higher burden of depression among older women.

Citizen Science – Past, Present & Future, to be held at Vaughan College, the University’s Institute of Lifelong Learning, will showcase longstanding research from the University’s Departments of Biology and Lifelong Learning, as well as from the Rutland Water Nature Reserve, the British Trust for Ornithology, Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) and the Earthwatch Institute, all linked with the University.

Its emphasis will be on how ordinary citizens have helped scientific research over the years of the University’s existence. In making this connection, the conference goes back to the very beginnings of Adult Education in Leicester, when Canon Vaughan made academic knowledge – including knowledge of the natural world – available to ordinary working class men and women of Leicester in the 19th Century. The university is proud to continue these traditions throughout the world.

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.