Current recommendations developed by the Institute of Medicine in 1990 suggest women should gain at least 15 pounds during pregnancy and places no upper limit on pregnancy weight gain.

Not a good idea, says Raul Artal, M.D., chairman of the department of obstetrics, gynecology and women’s health at Saint Louis University School of Medicine.

“Guidelines for nutrition during pregnancy at that time were based solely on expert opinion and not on scientific data. Obesity was not the problem it is now,” Dr. Artal says.

A new study led by Artal,published in the October issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology, found that women of different weights should gain or even lose different amounts of weight.

Comets are made of the most primitive stuff in the solar system. As hunks of rock and ice that never coalesced into more planets, they give researchers clues to the evolution of solar systems.

In February, during its mission to study the sun's polar regions, the spacecraft Ulysses flew through McNaught's ion tail 160 million miles from the comet's core.

Instrument readings showed there was "complex chemistry" at play, said University of Michigan space science professor George Gloeckler. Gloeckler is the principal investigator on the Solar Wind Ion Composition Spectrometer (SWICS) aboard Ulysses, which measured the composition and speed of the comet tail and solar wind.

According to an analysis by Dr. Kathryn Wilson, associate professor of economics at Kent State University and colleagues, the United States has the highest level of income inequality among all rich nations. For example, low-income households, or those at the 10th percentile of the income distribution, spend approximately $8,900 per year per child, while high-income families, or those at the 90th percentile, spend $50,000 per child.

“People like to think of America as the land of opportunities,” says Wilson. “The irony is that our country actually has less social mobility and more inequality than most developed countries.”

The present can tell you a lot about the past, but you need to know where to look. A new study appearing this month in Genome Research reveals that protein architectures – the three-dimensional structures of specific regions within proteins – provide an extraordinary window on the history of life.

In the study, researchers at the University of Illinois describe contemporary protein architectures as “molecular fossils” or “historical imprints” that mark important milestones in evolutionary history. The research team compiled a global census of protein architectures, and used these relics to plot the emergence, diversification and refinement of each of the three superkingdoms of life: Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya.

"What makes the modern university different from any other corporation?" That's the question asked in the NY Times this week. In light of increasingly unaffordable tuition rates and the profitable but corrupt business of lending huge sums of money to students, do universities deserve their nonprofit status? Is the tight competition for federal grants corrupting the mission of universities? The Times isn't so sure: "Driven by big science and global competition, our top universities compete for “market share” and “brand-name positioning,” employ teams of consultants and lobbyists and furnish their campuses with luxuries in order to attract paying “customers” — a word increasingly used as a synonym for students."

One of the most ambitious earth science expeditions yet mounted to gain a better understanding of the earthquake process, has begun off the coast of Japan, involving geologists from the universities of Southampton and Leicester.

Dr Lisa McNeill, of the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science, based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, and Joanne Tudge, of the Department of Geology, University of Leicester, are taking part in the multi-disciplinary study of a 'subduction' zone off the Japanese coast, aboard the deep-sea drilling vessel Chikyu (which means 'Planet Earth' in Japanese). This is the maiden scientific voyage of this vessel, which has unique capabilities enabling it to access new regions of the Earth's crust.

The amount of dark matter left over from the early universe may be less than previously believed. Research published in the open access journal PMC Physics A shows that the "relic abundance" of stable dark matter particles such as the neutralino may be reduced as compared to standard cosmology theories due to the effects of the "dilaton"', a particle with zero spin in the gravitational sector of strings.

Nikolaos Mavromatos of King's College London and colleagues in Athens and Texas obtained their result by studying a special "off-shell" time-dependent term (due to the dilaton) in the Boltzmann equation that describes the evolution of hot matter density as the Universe cooled down.

Folding is very important in human brain development because some of the worst neurological problems such as schizophrenia, autism and lissenchephaly (smoothness of the cortex, found with severe retardation) are associated with abnormal brain folding.

On the other hand, Albert Einstein's abnormally folded brain made him a genius

Larry A.Taber, Ph.D., the Dennis and Barbara Kessler Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Phillip Bayly, Ph.D., Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering, are examining mechanical and developmental processes that occur in the folding of the brain's surface, or cortex, which gives the higher mammalian brain more surface area (and hence more intellectual capacity) than a brain of comparable volume with a smooth surface.

File sharing is taking its worst toll on smaller albums, “devastating” lower ranked titles on the Billboard Top 100, according to the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science.

The authors completed rigorous empirical analysis, using data on the performance of music albums on the Billboard Top 100 charts together with data on peer-to-peer file sharing. The analysis indicates that average survival time on the chart has decreased by 42%. The lower debut ranked albums bore the brunt of decreased survival times, with file sharing as a major contributing factor.

Tufts University researchers are developing techniques that could allow computers to respond to users’ thoughts of frustration — too much work — or boredom—too little work. Applying non-invasive and easily portable imaging technology in new ways, they hope to gain real-time insight into the brain’s more subtle emotional cues and help provide a more efficient way to get work done.

“New evaluation techniques that monitor user experiences while working with computers are increasingly necessary,” said Robert Jacob, computer science professor and researcher. “One moment a user may be bored, and the next moment, the same user may be overwhelmed.