Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) and Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) cause malformations in babies, including facial defects, short stature, and mental and behavioral abnormalities. The African frog, Xenopus, is a valuable tool for understanding early vertebrate development since these embryos are large, easy to work with and very responsive to environmental cues. New research uses this system to address the mechanism underlying the characteristics associated with maternal consumption of alcohol in early pregnancy.

Bananas are a staple crop of Rwanda. The fruit is eaten raw, fried and baked — it even produces banana beer and wine. Around 2 million tons are grown each year but the fruit is only a small percentage of what the plant produces. The rest — skins, leaves and stems — is left to rot as waste.

The London Centre for Nanotechnology will develop a new device to enable people living with HIV to monitor their own health and the effectiveness of their treatments, thanks to a £2 million EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) grant announced today.

Biomedical engineers have developed a new type of probe that allows them to visualize single ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules within live cells more easily than existing methods. The tool will help scientists learn more about how RNA operates within living cells.

Wanted: stems cells. Just like those absconders chased by police all over the world, everybody can tell about their good deeds but none really knows how to recognize them. Yet, as of today, thanks to a study just published in the Proceedings of the National Accademy of Sciences (PNAS) and authored by Nobel Laureate for Medicine in 2007 Mario Capecchi and by the researcher from the Catholic University of Rome Eugenio Sangiorgi, we now know how to reveal the stem cells camouflaged in the pancreas.