#Four Weeks Pregnant: What to Expect This is part of a Live Science series of articles on the weekly changes that a pregnant woman's body goes through as it adapts to the growing needs of the fetus inside her.
In the fourth week of your pregnancy (measured from the first day of your last period) you will begin to register positive results on pregnancy tests
and be able to confirm that you are pregnant. For the sake of accuracy wait until the end of the week to take any home pregnancy tests.
If the test comes back positive congratulations! You should make an appointment with your health care provider for a prenatal checkup.
If the test is still negative take another test at five weeks. Most practitioners don't see patients until they are eight weeks along so you may need to wait a few weeks before actually seeing a specialist.
However if you have had a high-risk pregnancy or a history of problems in giving birth you should see the health care provider sooner than that.
This early in the pregnancy there won't be any major outward changes in your body though the basal body temperature your body temperature
This could be lean beef chicken legumes or tofu. Lean red meat will also help with your iron intake
Leafy greens like spinach deliver both of these nutrients which help to promote bone development
This could be lean beef chicken legumes or tofu. Lean red meat will also help with your iron intake
Leafy greens like spinach deliver both of these nutrients which help with bone development and avoiding birth defects.
EU grain prices would double along with the price of potatoes and brassicas like spinach and cabbage.
including thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), rice (Oryza sativa), maize (Zea mays) and a green alga (Chlamydomonas reinhardtii),
we do not want to use soybeans for diesel oil or corn for ethanol. That is not a good use of land.</
They're also growing vegetables rather than crops like wheat on floating gardens. They use a bamboo frame and load it with water hyacinth,
which rots and makes a bed for vegetables to grow. Then when the flood water rises
Many scientists, including OCO's principal investigator David Crisp, of the Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, think that probing the atmosphere with lasers will eventually offer a way to get round-the-clock data
So as expected the bottom line of the report by Crisp's committee, submitted to NASA on 2 april
says Crisp. The repeated mission would cost more or less what OCO cost, and could be ready for launch in the autumn of 2011.
and might hold Crisp's team together after its current budget runs out in June but if Carbon copy is to fly it needs either new or diverted money.
says Crisp. Try it in the Congo. What all concerned agree on is need the to do something soon.
including potatoes and wheat making the information freely available to researchers, plant breeders and farmers.
For example, one project that applied for funding comes from a farming community in the Peruvian Andes, an area that holds the highest degree of potato diversity in the world.
although this is also badly needed to biological nitrogen fixation by legumes and organic matter. We need to reconsider how to use Africa's intercropping system with these new high-yielding varieties,
when prices spiked for commodities such as soya and beef. Deforestation rates seem to have dropped again in the most recent season;
including rotating strawberries with crops such as broccoli that contain natural pest deterrents, or using steam to fumigate soils.
Nature Newsthe blight that caused the infamous Irish potato famine of the 1840s has yielded its genetic secrets.
Phytophthora infestans, the water mould that causes late blight in potatoes, consumes and rots the leaves and tubers of the plant.
The mould still afflicts potatoes, tomatoes and related plants, and costs farmers around the world an estimated $6. 7 billion a year1.
code for the blight's'weapons'against potatoes. That is an insane number. For microbes 25%is a lot,
In the arms race between plant and pathogen, potatoes have had long an ally: human plant breeders, who have struggled to develop blight-resistant spuds.
The breeders have been working in the genetic dark, however, not knowing exactly what genes they are promoting or
says potato breeder John Bradshaw of the Scottish Crop Research Institute in Dundee, UK. What has happened is after taking 15 years to incorporate this resistance in a cultivar
Transgenic aubergines put on ice: Nature Newsstiff opposition from activists has persuaded the Indian government to put off commercial release of the country's first genetically modified (GM) food crop,
The 14 october ruling by the Genetic engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) granted permission for Indian farmers to grow a transgenic version of aubergine,
) But now a group led by Jacob Bean at the Georg-August University in Gottingen, Germany, has used a different approach,
says Bean. Bean and his colleagues used a well-honed technique called radial velocity, which has found most of the extrasolar planets detected so far.
The method looks for shifts in the lines of a star's absorption spectrum to track its motion towards and away from Earth,
At the Very Large Telescope in Chile, Bean placed a gas cell filled with ammonia in the path of the starlight,
says Bean, who has submitted the work to the Astrophysical Journal (J. Â L. Â Bean et al.
Astrophys. J. preprint at http://fr. arxiv. org/abs/0912.0003; 2009). ) Pravdo says that Bean
and his colleagues may be correct, but there is hyperbole in their rejection of our candidate planet.
Bean's paper, for instance, only rules out the presence of any planet that is at least three times more massive than Jupiter, says Pravdo,
counters Bean, explaining that Earth's atmosphere can introduce distortions that affect the measurements. Astrometrists rely on watching a field of stars about the same distance away as the target star to calibrate their measurements
Bean admits that astronomers might one day find a planet around VB10 if they scrutinize the star long and hard enough The main lesson from VB10,
One supernova in particular was very unusual, recalls Avishay Gal-Yam, an astronomer at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel
very slow, says Gal-Yam. I came back after a week, after two weeks, after a month and five months and it was still about the same brightness.
and the Paranal Observatory in Chile revealed a supernova unlike any other. This week in Nature
Gal-Yam and his colleagues report that the explosion was probably that of a supermassive star, at least two hundred times the mass of the Sun1.
Gal-Yam says that it is the radioactive decay of the nickel that kept the explosion glowing for months.
Gal-Yam says. There are no such stars seen in our galaxy or other nearby galaxies.
Gal-Yam agrees: We should have detected it rather easily, he says. I think it was removed, very efficiently, by some unknown mechanism.
India's transgenic aubergine in a stew: Nature Newsindia's government has refused to allow commercial cultivation of what would have been the country's first genetically modified (GM) food crop.
On 9 february, environment minister Jairam Ramesh announced an indefinite moratorium on the cultivation of a transgenic version of aubergine,
But stiff opposition from activists then forced the government to put off commercial release until further discussions were held (see'Transgenic aubergines put on ice'.
We have no less than ten GM products to get into the regulatory system for trials including brinjal, chickpea, sorghum, sugar cane, castor oil plant,
rice and potato that took 15 years to develop and a lot of money, adds Ananda Kumar,
Its herbicide-tolerant soya bean'Cultivance, 'which was developed with Embrapa, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Cooperation, can now be sold in Brazil.
its'Amflora'genetically modified starchy potato is awaiting European union approval. Depression exit: London-based pharma giant Glaxosmithkline revealed plans on 4 february to shut down early-stage research into pain and depression medications,
Proposals to focus research on maize (corn), rice and wheat would be broadened to include other crops such as beans and cassava.
Truffle's savoury secret revealed: Nature Newsbon appã tit! A team of European researchers has decoded the genome of the delectable PÃ rigord black truffle.
Within its nucleotides reside secrets to the flavour and elusive lifestyle of this fungus, offering clues that could help a truffle industry that is fraught with unpredictable yields and a counterfeit market.
There's a mystique around truffles. They're prized, rare and worth several thousand dollars per kilo, explains David Read, a mycologist at the University of Sheffield, UK,
who was involved not in the genome study, which is published online in Nature1. People go out into the woods at night with dogs
And while most other mushrooms can be cultivated the truffle has remained a serious challenge, he explains.
This report is a fundamental piece of work, yet it still leaves sufficient mystery in the area
so that truffles can retain their influence on the human psyche. The black truffle's scent has been described variously as earthy, dirty, musky or sexy.
These'black diamonds'sell for  1, 000- 3, 500 per kilogram ($1, 345-$4, 700) on today's market.
and demand for black truffles by replacing them with their cheaper yet similar-looking cousin,
the Chinese truffle. European truffle producers who sell black truffles specific to their region have been frustrated by sellers who make bogus claims about a truffle's origin.
To sort out the scandals, mycologist Francis Martin, at The french National Institute for Agricultural Research in Nancy,
and his colleagues are compiling a database of genetic markers to verify the geographic origins of black truffle populations.
The genome of the black truffle (Tuber melanosporum) includes genes encoding flavour-related sulphur metabolites
and not by microbes native to the region in which the truffle grows, as many researchers had thought.
many thought that truffles could be like cheese or wine, in that the microflora and yeast living on the truffles played a vital role in releasing volatile compounds,
Martin says. But we in fact demonstrated that the volatiles giving rise to the truffle's perfume are encoded in the truffle's genome.
The truffle's smell lures female pigs which, mistaking the aroma for an irresistibly scented boar,
unearth the truffle and often consume it. When they excrete it the truffle's spores are scattered around the forest floor.
Other scents beckon the truffle fly, which visits the fungus in search of a mate
but carries off fungal spores instead, spreading them between truffles. Truffle cultivation is notoriously difficult, in part because of its clandestine life cycle as an underground symbiont, in
which the fungus trades nutrients with oak-tree roots. The T. melanosporum genome also reveals that the fungus reproduces sexually more often than researchers thought.
Many growers rely on asexual truffle propagation, in which two haploid cells from a single fungus each with one copy of the genome fuse to form the diploid fruiting body (the truffle),
which has two copies. Yet Martin and his team found two different sets of mating genes in the black truffle,
suggesting that two strains of T. melanosporum with opposite mating types combined through sexual reproduction. Martin advises growers to use both mating types
when inoculating oak trees, and to genetically fingerprint the truffles to be sure that they are not from the same family.
In 2008, Martin and his colleagues reported the genome of Laccaria bicolor, another symbiotic fungus that is dependent on woody plants for nutrients2.
The 125-megabase black truffle genome is bigger than that of L. bicolor and four times larger than that of many fungi but it contains far fewer protein-coding genes.
Besides sharing a handful of genes with L bicolor that encode enzymes to degrade plant cell walls,
the truffle lacks most of the genes that are involved in L. bicolor's symbiotic relationship with plants.
Because the truffle lineage separated from the lineage carrying L. bicolor before woody plants were around,
white wine truffle sauce or truffled risotto are likely to wrinkle their noses at the thought of button mushrooms that have been engineered to smell like the real thing.
When you taste the black truffle on hot pasta, that is something you cannot forget, says Martin. Â
Plant biologists fear for cress project: Nature Newsthe brilliant career of a diminutive weed may have hit a snag.
Nature Newsthe European commission last week approved Amflora a genetically modified (GM) potato developed by German chemical company BASF.
The potato engineered to produce a form of starch that is better for some industrial purposes in for example, paper manufacturing,
The Amflora potato approval has stirred up a lot of opposition. Why is this? The potato is controversial not because of its modified starch
but because it contains marker genes that confer resistance to the antibiotics kanamycin and neomycin.
Where and when will the Amflora potato be planted? BASF has said that it only intends to grow the potatoes in countries that want it the company will begin planting Amflora this year on a few dozen hectares in Germany, Sweden and the Czech republic.
If the European commission succeeds in its plans to break the GMO deadlock, many more hectares, and many more varieties of GM CROPS, may soon be growing in Europe.
since 1996 so crops such as corn and potato can produce the crystal proteins, protecting themselves from insects without any pesticides.
transgenic crops now make up more than 80%of soya bean, maize (corn) and cotton grown in the United states or about half the nation's cropland.
Some farmers aren't seeing big yield increases with the company's new herbicide-tolerant soya bean line, Roundup Ready 2 Yield.
Monsanto is being squeezed in the North american soya and maize market by the world's number-two seed company Dupont,
The insects are also emerging as a threat to crops such as green beans, cereals, vegetables and various fruits.
which are used largely for growing strawberries and tomatoes. The state has been deliberating over methyl iodide for a year
There are non-chemical alternatives to soil fumigants including planting strawberries alongside mustard or broccoli, which release chemicals that deter insects
Organic farms win at potato pest control: Nature Newsa study suggesting that organic agriculture gives better pest control
They conducted a meta-analysis of data collected on these denizens of Washington potato fields
resulting in fewer potato-munching beetles and larger potato plants. Although the work of Crowder and his group does not address the issue of yields from organic versus conventional farms
Bigger plants generally mean greater potato yields. At least as important as what the research says about organic farming is
whether this finding also applies in systems other than potato fields.
Intensive farming may ease climate change: Nature Newsto many people, modern agriculture, with its industrial-scale farms and reliance on petroleum-based fertilizers, may seem a necessary evil one that has fed a growing human population while causing
So far, only a potato with modified starch content Amflora, developed for industrial rather than food use by German chemical company BASF,
Since 1996, Monsanto has held a European patent on genes that give soya beans resistance to the company's Roundup herbicide specifically the active ingredient glyphosate.
where soya-bean crops (known as Roundup Ready) expressing the glyphosate-resistance genes can be cultivated without a licensing agreement.
Argentinian growers are exporting soya meal harvested and processed from these crops to Europe, especially The netherlands.
claiming that the imported soya meal contained the DNA sequence that it had patent protection for in Europe.
The European Court of Justice Europe's top court, based in Luxembourg ruled on 6 july that Monsanto couldn't bar imports of the soya meal.
It argued that citing the fact that the DNA in the soya meal was not performing the function for
As for the wider impacts on Monsanto, the company stated that overall patent protection of the company's Roundup Ready soya bean was not at issue,
Nature Newspolicy Research Events Business Business watch The week ahead Number crunch Sound bites Policy Sugar-beet ban:
Farmers in the United states have been blocked from planting genetically modified sugar beets after a US federal judge revoked the government's 2005 approval of the crop.
The decision on 13 august means that the beets 墉 which at present provide around half of the US sugar supply 墉 cannot be grown until the US Department of agriculture (USDA) completes an environmental-impact statement,
respectively, sued the USDA in 2008 for approving the sugar beet without adequately assessing the effects that it could have on weeds and nearby conventional crops.
a variety of aubergine modified to produce a protein from the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) bacterium that is toxic to insect pests.
after an outcry from farmers and activists, environment minister Jairam Ramesh put a moratorium on planting the vegetable, pending the interacademy assessment of its safety to human health and the environment.
000 plants species including bryophytes (mosses and liverworts) and legumes (peas and beans) from the five major plant groups.
that process led to higher animals such as ourselves, says Tais Dahl, an earth scientist at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense,
Dahl's team looked at the concentration of molybdenum and the ratios of its isotopes atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons and different masses in oceanic rocks for clues to the concentration of oxygen in the seas
Dahl's study uncovered two periods when heavy molybdenum isotopes show up in the shale records
%But Dahl's study suggests that the radiation in the Ediacaran probably occurred in a low-oxygen environment,
Dahl says that further sampling is required to confirm the paper's findings but that it looks very promising at this stage.
The bananas have a gene from green pepper to protect against banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW which costs farmers in Africa's Great lakes region an estimated half a billion dollars every year.
The sweet pepper gene produces a protein called HRAP that strengthens the plant's ability to seal off infected cells.
where it has been shown to improve the disease resistance of vegetables including as broccoli, tomatoes and potatoes.
The Ugandan research team, based at the National Agricultural Research Laboratories in Kawanda, received a royalty-free licence to use the technology in 2006.
Six of the eight GM banana strains developed with the green pepper gene showed 100%resistance to BXW in the lab1.
Many will focus on local staples such as cowpea (or black-eyed pea), cassava and sweet potato. Uganda's biosafety law has been stuck in the country's legislative system for years.
and used for commercial pollination in tomato greenhouses. Honeybees tend to perform poorly in tomato pollination.
But in the last three years, researchers have identified five North american species that have undergone a relatively swift population reduction since the 1990s
whose beans yield chocolate, and the woodland strawberry. Earlier this year, a team backed by food giant Mars unveiled a preliminary sequence of the cacao tree Theobroma cacao.
compared with 71 in the well-studied but less flavoursome plant thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana),
Nature Newsresearchers have traced the key genetic changes that enabled the plant pathogen responsible for the 1845 Irish potato famine (Phytophthora infestans) to jump from wild plant hosts to cultivated potatoes.
and disease-resistant varieties of potato that the pathogen will find much more difficult to adapt to and overcome.
which infects lima beans (Phaseolus lunatus). They computationally analysed and compared these genomes with the genome of the previously sequenced P. infestans.
GM beet ban A federal judge, who in August barred US farmers from planting genetically modified (GM) sugar beets, is blocking any attempt to get round the ban.
The ruling meant that GM beets which provide about half of the US sugar supply could not be grown until the US Department of agriculture (USDA) completes environmental-impact statements.
The USDA let biotech'stecklings'be planted, which are designed to produce GM seeds, not sugar beet directly.
Yet last week, the judge ordered them to be destroyed too. Monsanto, based in St louis, Missouri,
which markets the GM beets, says it will appeal the ruling. Seals threatened Two Alaskan seal species may become the first animals
Winning projects included a scheme to develop strategies for growing potatoes in the Peruvian Andes in the increased temperatures resulting from climate change.
including potatoes and wheat. The information, which can be held in gene banks or on farms, is freely available to researchers,
planting the'Amflora'high-starch potato. Coming up 3 6 march The American Association for Cancer Research hosts a conference in Vancouver,
Several research groups are working on fortified varieties of bean, rice, maize, sweet potato, cowpea, peanut, wheat, pumpkin and banana.
which released orange sweet potato containing 50%of the daily Vitamin a requirement in Uganda and Mozambique in 2007,
in 2008), where soya-bean farming is common. At a crisis meeting, Teixeira said it was too early to tell whether the surge related to anticipated changes in legislation governing forest preservation,
The study notes that the United states which produces about 40%of the world's soya
%and soya beans by 1. 3%.It has also, they calculate, bumped up food commodity prices worldwide by about 6. 4%over 30 years.
Nature Newswomen, beansprouts, cucumbers, bacteria, cows: the cast of the current European Escherichia coli outbreak is already a crowd.
Case-control studies of patients in the German outbreak pointed to salad vegetables and both cucumbers and beansprouts have been suspects.
It is possible that the vegetables were contaminated with bacteria originally carried in soil or water;
but the more likely source of the bacteria is animals. Pathogenic E coli are passed typically to humans from ruminant animals (cows or sheep) via faecal contamination in the food chain or through consumption of raw milk or meat products.
revealed that the ill women were more likely than the controls to have eaten tomatoes, cucumbers and salad vegetables prior to contracting the disease,
but exactly which vegetables are responsible, if any, is unclear. Early reports that the outbreak originated in cucumbers imported from Spain were shown later to be incorrect the cucumbers contained the bacterial toxins,
but not the bacteria responsible for the ourbreak themselves. Fresh vegetables are still the prime suspect
but Flemming Scheutz, head of THE WHO Collaborative Centre for Reference and Research on Escherichia and Klebsiella in Copenhagen, suggests that the bacteria might not have originated in the food chain at all.
This strain has never been found in any animal, so it is possible that it could have come from straight from the environment into humans.
handle and consume salad vegetables. This is still our only explanation for this demographic, says Wieler.
they also have active adherence mechanisms to stick to some vegetables, says Frankel. It is possible that the strain has evolved a combination of adhesion proteins that makes it particularly hard to remove from food,
Developers then used genetic control elements derived from pathogenic plant viruses such as the cauliflower mosaic virus to switch on the genes.
The scientists studied crops at a Tokyo research field, including cabbages and potatoes that were planted a few weeks after rains showered the field with radioisotopes from Fukushima.
The crops were harvested on 16 Â May and contained low levels of radiation around 9 Â becquerels per kilogram (Bq kg-1;
Other crops undergoing confined field trials include virus-resistant sweet potatoes and drought-resistant maize, he says.
All eyes on the potato genome: Nature Newsa global effort has cracked finally the complex genome of the potato,
which is published today in Nature1. The not-so-humble potato (Solanum tuberosum) is the world's fourth most important food crop
and is vital for global food security. It has proved surprisingly economically stable compared with major grain crops such as rice, wheat and maize (corn:
potato markets stayed the same. Despite its importance, sequencing has been delayed by the genetic complexity of the common commercial potato.
Its genome comprises more than 39,000 protein-coding genes, and it is a highly heterozygous autotetraploid this means that it has four copies of every chromosome,
UK one of the 26 research institutes that came together from around the globe to form the Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium several factors made the sequencing possible.
But the key was finding a type of potato with a genome that could be simplified adequately.
Using this potato, geneticists selected one copy of each chromosome and duplicated these to produce a double-monoploid clone in
now we've got data on two types of potato, it gives us quite a good handle on the biodiversity of the potato as well,
says Bryan. The most important finding of the consortium's initial analysis is the identification of more than 800 disease-resistance genes, each
of which has potential for use in fighting devastating diseases such as the potato cyst nematode and the potato blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans, famous for causing The irish potato famine of the 1840s.
Singling out these genes will make it easier to develop new varieties of potato because thanks to its complex genetics, the tuber has been notoriously difficult to improve through breeding.
The possibilities for improvement through marker-assisted breeding and genetic modification could make the potato a more viable alternative to grain crops,
Potatoes are more nutritious in terms of complex carbohydrates, they've got more protein and more fibre than rice,
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