Nature News In a milestone for a politically charged field, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the world's first clinical trial of a therapy generated by human embryonic stem cells.
phase I safety study of a stem cellerived therapy for spinal cord injury. The publicly traded company has an extensive patent portfolio relating to embryonic stem cell research,
In the trial, eight to ten paralyzed individuals within 7 to 14 days of their injury will be injected at the point of injury with stem cellerived precursors to oligodendrocytes,
The cells have demonstrated both capabilities in animals. 1 The company said it expects to begin enrolment early this summer at up to seven US medical centres.
Politics and approval In a conference call with analysts and reporters, Geron's president and CEO Thomas Okarma said that the trial"marks the dawn of a new era in medical therapeutics.
President bush had placed tight restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research; President Obama has promised to reverse those.
The Geron cells come from one of a score of lines approved for federal funding under the Bush policy.
but there is no corresponding increase in"recruitment, "or the number of new seedling trees. The mortality rates,
This subtle trend correlates with climate change in the region, which has warmed by between 0. 3 and 0. 4 degrees Celsius every decade since the 1970s.
The work was based on 76 long-term forest studies, and is published in the journal Science1. Study co-leader Phillip van Mantgem of the Western Ecological Research center in Arcata
California explains the mortality increase in financial terms:""Think of it like a compounded interest rate; the difference between a 1%return and 2%return compounded annually over 50 years will be huge."
"The team ruled out a number of competing explanations for the trend. For example, a forest that is relatively young starts out with many small saplings,
and as the forest grows it also naturally thins out, until the same space is covered with many fewer,
but much larger trees. For this reason, they only looked at plots where the forest was more than 200 years old parts of the forest spared from the axe
since large-scale logging began in the region in the nineteenth century. These trees are continuously dying
but the forest-wide thinning process has finished. Modern fire suppression was ruled also out by looking at the set of forests that have no history of frequent fires.
They too have seen an increase in mortality. So far, the correlation with increased temperature is just that:
could vary between different forests. Those in hot, arid regions may be losing trees because of drought stress.
Even if rainfall is stable, higher temperatures can suck those same scanty centimeters of precipitation through the tree faster,
and his team captured may be symptoms of climatic stress that make the forests more liable to such catastrophes."
"These changes in mortality rates are really an indication of overall system stress, and when trees are stressed,
"says Werner Kurz of the Canadian Forest Service in Victoria, British columbia. What the work means for the carbon balance of the Earth is also not as obvious as it may seem.
Recently, it was shown that old forests continue to suck away carbon into their third centuries and beyond2."
"With fewer live trees, you would expect that they would take up less carbon, "suggests Kurz."
what action is called for in the face of the data presented by the study.""If you attempted to go out
and mess around with the forests, you'd probably end up accelerating mortality rates, "says co-author Jerry Franklin of the University of Washington in Seattle.
But if the mortality rate ramps up to higher percentages, some action could be taken with the dead trees,
"Really, the options that are available are salvage logging of the wood for biomass or long-lived wood products to keep the carbon from the atmosphere,
He mentions control of any invasive species that might take over from stressed forest species, the transport of tree species to colder climes further north and more controlled burns to prepare the forests for more frequent wild fires.
But he adds, "No one really knows what to do. All the sudden we are uncharted off into territory. r
Nature News The global drive to eliminate the last pockets of polio infection is to receive a boost of more than half-a billion dollars from international donors.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary international and the governments of the UK and Germany this week pledged $630 million over five years for a massive final push to eradicate the crippling disease.
along with the World health organization, UNICEF and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is part of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
The Gates Foundation will give Rotary $255 million, with Rotary pledging to raise $100 million,
which Rotary matched dollar for dollar. The new money will go to vaccination programmes, better disease surveillance and research on new vaccines.
Eradication hope"We are on the brink of eradicating one of the most feared diseases in the world"
says Jonathan Majiyagbe, chairman of the Rotary Foundation, the charitable arm of Rotary international. He adds that the big injection of new money should galvanize governments
and non-governmental organizations to step up funding and efforts"to end polio once and for all"."If polio is eradicated, it would follow smallpox,
which in 1980 became the first disease to be officially wiped out from the planet. The global polio initiative, a mammoth programme involving the vaccination of billions of children,
has reduced the number of polio cases by 99 %since it's launch in 1988, from an estimated 350,000 cases in 125 countries to just 1, 600 last year.
Pockets of the disease exist in four countries: Nigeria, where polio vaccines were denounced by religious leaders,
and false rumours circulated that they carried HIV and caused female infertility; the Uttar Pradesh and Bihar provinces in India, where vaccine effectiveness has been hampered by poor sanitation and high population density;
and in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where conflict has hampered vaccination campaigns. Unless the virus is eliminated in these regions,
a single case of the infectious disease could spawn new outbreaks of the disease, and export it to the many countries that are now officially polio-free,
and so risk undoing the progress already made. The existence of residual pockets of infection is the main reason why the drive to completely erase the disease has failed so far,
with target dates repeatedly being pushed back. Budget gap But in recent years, the global polio programme has faced funding shortfalls,
as government donations have tailed off. The large new commitments by non-governmental organizations therefore offers a much-needed cash injection to finish the job.
Even with the new money, however, the global initiative will still be some $340 million short of the budget it needs for 2009-10."
"We urge other countries to join us in closing the funding gap, "says Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, German Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development."
"Rotarians, government leaders and health professionals have made a phenomenal commitment to get us to a point at
which polio afflicts only a small number of the world's children, "says Bill gates.""However, complete elimination of the polio virus is difficult,
and will continue to be difficult for a number of years.""""The huge costs of the programme mean that the faster we move,
the easier it will be, "Gates adds, "but I'm optimistic we will be successful. u
#FDA ready to regulate transgenic animals: Nature News The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has adopted a policy that will govern approval of the use of genetically engineered animals.
The guidelines, released on 15 january, have been more than a decade in the making. In the interim, researchers have pushed forward with plans to develop a wide range of transgenic animals,
including salmon engineered to grow faster, and the Enviropig, engineered to produce waste that is less polluting than that of normal pigs.
Last week, an FDA advisory committee deemed an anti-clotting drug called ATRYN, produced in the milk of genetically engineered goats,
to be safe an important step towards the eventual approval of the drug for sale in US markets.
But the lack of a clear path to government approval has been a significant barrier to companies wishing to develop genetically engineered animals,
"You can't persuade shareholders that they should invest money indefinitely in the absence of any light at the end of the tunnel,
'As such, the agency will investigate the safety of the'drug'as well as possible environmental impacts if, for example,
whether the FDA has the necessary expertise to evaluate the environmental risks posed by transgenic animals,
That approach could end up backfiring for the FDA and for companies developing transgenic animals, Gurian-Sherman argues,
Researchers have found that fish excrete prodigious amounts of a mineral, calcium carbonate, that had been thought to come almost exclusively from marine plankton such as shelled algae.
Biologists knew that bony fish a group that includes most fish apart from cartilaginous ones such as sharks
"says Rod Wilson, a fish physiologist at the University of Exeter, UK. Wilson and his colleagues from the United kingdom, the United states and Canada set about estimating the contribution of fish to global marine carbonate production.
they used two independent computer models to calculate the total mass of fish in the world's oceans.
The models suggested that there are between 0. 8 billion tonnes and 2 billion tonnes of fish biomass in the oceans.
an impurity that causes the mineral to dissolve more readily and reduce the acidity of the water."
overfishing may lower the number of fish producing calcium carbonate, but it could also reduce the average size of fish in the oceans.
where the mineral is likely to be preserved, says Feely d
#Graphene electrode promises stretchy circuits: Nature News A transparent, flexible electrode made from graphene could see a one-atom thick honeycomb of carbon first made just five years ago replace other high-tech materials used in displays.
It could even be used instead of silicon in electronics. Byung Hee Hong from Sungkyunkwan University in Suwon, Korea,
and his colleagues transferred a wafer-thin layer of graphene, etched into the shape needed to make an electrode, onto pieces of polymer.
The polymers they used are transparent, and one polyethylene terephthalate (PET) can be bent, whereas the other polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is stretchable.
The resulting films conduct electricity better than any other sample of graphene produced in the past. Until recently
high-quality graphene has been hard to make on a large scale. To produce their graphene, Hong and his colleagues used a technique that is well known in the semiconductor industry chemical vapour deposition.
This involves exposing a substrate to a number of chemicals, often at high temperatures. These chemicals then react on the surface to give a thin layer of the desired product.
The results in Hong's case were relatively large, high-quality films of graphene just a few atoms thick and several centimetres wide.
Thinner is better The team made the electrodes by using nickel as a catalyst on
which to react methane and hydrogen. Nickel usually catalyses the formation of thick layers of graphite.
But by using a layer of nickel less than 300 nanometres thick and by cooling the sample quickly after the reaction the researchers could produce up to ten single-atom layers of carbon in graphene's signature honeycomb pattern.
Their work is published in Nature1. The samples aren't perfect each layer covers only around two-thirds of the sample
but Hong says he is working to improve this. The graphene samples can be chemically etched into specific shapes.
And when stamped onto the polymer, they can be bent or stretched by as much as 11%without losing their conductivity.
Because the layers of graphene are so thin the resulting electrodes are transparent, and Hong says that makes the material ideal for use in applications such as portable displays.
It could, for instance, be used to replace indium titanium oxide, which is expensive and inflexible.""We are planning to get an investment to build up mass-production facility of the large-scale graphene films,
"says Hong. His team is also looking at using the graphene electrodes in photovoltaic cells. Easing the pain
But the electrodes are less likely to be used in bendy electronics at least in the short term
and more likely to be incorporated in niche applications such as individual ultra-high-frequency transistors, suggests Andre Geim, from the University of Manchester, UK,
who was one of the first to make graphene2. Geim had predicted that chemical vapour deposition would be the best technique for making high-quality graphene films3.
The procedure"is of absolutely crucial importance""he says.""It is very hard to work with small pieces of material.
It's really painstaking, "Geim adds. The new process, which produces bigger pieces of film,
"will tremendously influence the speed of development in this area"."Hong thinks that graphene's most promising application will be to replace the silicon-based materials used in semiconductor technologies.
But this would need technological breakthroughs such as the ability to grow larger-scale uniform monolayer graphene films
and to modify the conductivity of graphene nanostructures. Such applications could be some time off, says Geim."
"It's probably too far beyond the horizon to predict. t
#Digital soil map for Africa launched: Nature News Soil scientists are developing the first ever digital soil map of Africa, covering 42 countries south of the Sahara.
and properties of the soil, helping farmers and policymakers to improve degraded soils and increase crop production.
The map will be made from satellite measurements of soil nutrients, moisture and organic matter. These data will be combined with samples taken over the next four years at 60 randomly chosen sites across Sub-saharan africa,
where researchers on the ground will measure the soil's chemical and physical properties and its organic content.
Using this information scientists can predict soil properties at places they have not sampled, checking their models by comparing predicted soil properties against actual measurements.
A farmer in Malawi, for instance, could use the map which will be freely available online to find out how much fertilizer,
and of what type, his or her land needs. The project is also looking into sending information to mobile phones,
which are very common in Africa. The map will divide the continent into squares that measure 90 metres x 90 metres giving 100-times greater resolution than the best current maps of African soils
"This project will benefit farming families in Africa by showing how they can reverse declining soil fertility,
a major reason for slow growth in the region's agricultural productivity during recent decades,"says Namanga Ngongi,
president of the Alliance for a Green revolution in Africa based in Nairobi, Kenya, a partnership to promote sustainable agriculture in Africa.
is launched today at the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Institute in Nairobi, which is leading the initiative.
The institute is part of the International Centre for Tropical agriculture, a nonprofit research body funded by international organizations and private foundations.
Arms-control experts strongly criticize the Indo-US nuclear deal that set off the rush, saying it undermines the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
India wants to increase the proportion of its electricity generated from nuclear sources from 2. 8%to 25%by 2050.
or more new reactors to join the 17 existing ones and the 6 that are under construction.
The Nuclear power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) in Mumbai expects this month to finalize a total of US$15 billion in contracts with France's Areva group
The US companies Westinghouse and General electric have not signed contracts but are due this month to visit India and scout out possible locations for reactors.
The NPCIL has readied four sites one for each vendor each capable of accepting eight to ten imported reactors.
On 5 december, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev signed a deal in New delhi that paves the way for four more 1-gigawatt reactors over the next decade,
in addition to the two that Russia is already building at Kudankulam in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
says Ravi Bhushan Grover, director of strategic planning in India's Department of Atomic energy (DAE) and a key negotiator of the Indo-US nuclear deal.
That is far from sufficient, say arms-control experts who argue that India should sign and ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty,
as well as cap the amount of fissile weapons material it produces.""India retains, deal or no deal,
the capability to produce weapons-grade material at a far higher rate than it is believed to have done ever
"says Paul Nelson at the Nuclear Security Science and Policy Institute of Texas A&m University in College Station.
says Rebecca Johnson, director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy in London. Within India, DAE employees are concerned that an influx of proposed new reactors could lead to quality standards being compromised.
The country's Atomic energy Regulatory Board will have to inspect and clear several new reactors of different designs as they are approved."
"Our primary concern is over safety, "says A. Sathasivam, president of the National Federation of Atomic energy Employees.
Om Pal Singh, the board's secretary, says the problem is simply a lack of manpower.
To deal with the new applications, the board intends to double its number of regulators within the next five years,
he says. And the NPCIL is losing staff, because many of its employees have been enticed into more lucrative jobs as consultants in the new nuclear rush."
"Almost all our directors who have retired or who are going to retire in a few years have been grabbed by private companies at ten times my salary,
"says Jain. For instance, his predecessor, V. K. Chaturvedi, now heads the nuclear group at Reliance Infrastructure in Mumbai,
and Padmanabha Krishnagopala Iyengar, former DAE secretary, claim that Indian nuclear scientists are giving up prematurely on their thorium research programme in exchange for a few uranium reactors from abroad.
its thorium research programme focuses on turning the material into fissile uranium-233 for use as reactor fuel.
Fast breeder reactors, of the type under construction in Kalpakkam, would breed uranium-233 in thorium blankets surrounding a plutonium core.
Last month, Thorium power in Mclean, Virginia, with a market capitalization of about $40 million established a joint venture with Punj Lloyd, an engineering company in Gurgaon.
The two companies plan to set up an investment fund and to act as consultants to other companies looking to get in on the rush
#African grant comes with no strings attached: Nature News A funding programme for health research will for the first time hand complete control to its African recipients along with the cash,
development experts say. Launched this week, the Health Research Capacity Strengthening (HRCS) initiative will give £10 million (US$14. 3 million) each to Malawi
and Kenya to spend as they see fit over a period of five years. Funding will come from British and Canadian charities and government.
The money will, among other things, train researchers, refurbish labs and set up mechanisms to make sure research results are used in policymaking.
In Kenya the funding will be channelled through a new non-governmental organisation, the Consortium for National Health Research (CNHR.
In Malawi, the National Research Council will be in charge of funding decisions. The body received just US$286, 000 from the Malawian government in 2008,
so the new money is a considerable addition to its coffers. At first, both bodies will receive assistance to ensure sound financial management,
but this support is expected not to last longer than three years. Loans but not grants have been provided on this basis before, for example, through the World bank's Millennium Science Initiative."
"We will have representation on the two bodies but we are not going to be making the decisions,
a UK medical research charity that is funding the new grant along with the UK's Department for International Development and Canada's International Development Research Council.
but having a panel of in-country experts to deal with grant applications is a new approach.
The donors hope the funding will help the countries develop and implement high-quality research programmes that meet their own needs.
African scientists see the funding as a vote of confidence.""The agenda will not be set in London or Washington.
the grant-making capacity that will be built could inspire more health research funders to channel grants through the new funding agencies.
which will distribute the Kenyan funding. The unpredictability of donor funding also means that many Kenyan scientists are underfunded,
he adds. Leveraging more In the long term Ochieng and his colleagues hope to encourage the Kenyan government to put more money into health research it funds very little at the moment.
They also want to raise an endowment from international donors that could provide a more stable source of funding for medical research in Kenya.
The HRCS initiative is unlikely to stay unique for long. In a separate programme the Wellcome Trust has joined forces with the Indian government's Department of Biotechnology to fund postdoctoral researchers in the country through a new,
independent trust based in New delhi. The European union is also planning to fund a"mini-framework programme"for African researchers, similar to the much larger programmes it runs in Europe.
The funding rumoured to be in the region of#30 million (US$38 million) would be distributed by a body hosted in Africa,
a UK epidemiologist who has been based in Africa for most of the past 15 years. He warns against excessively high expectations for this first attempt."
More than 140 nations decided to begin negotiations for the mercury-limiting treaty at a 20 february meeting in Nairobi of the governing council of the United nations environment programme (UNEP.
and positive, surprise,"adds John Munthe, an expert on mercury emissions and international environmental policy at the Swedish Environmental Research Institute in Stockholm.
Mercury is a global pollutant, he notes, and"to solve problems in any country we need a global strategy".
says Alistair Steel, executive director of the Brussels-based industry group Euro Chlor. Traditionally, chlorine production has used a mercury electrode in the electrolysis of sodium chloride,
but alternatives are increasingly being used. Munthe predicts that the initial focus of the UNEP treaty will not be on the chlorine industry,
laboratory chemicals or low energy light bulbs that contain mercury.""I don't think these areas where mercury still has important uses will be the first to go,
It is more likely that the treaty will first tackle illegal gold mining, in which mercury is used to form an amalgam with gold particles in river sediments;
or China's use of mercury catalysts in the manufacture of plastics. In addition, coal fired power plants, which emit mercury because of its natural presence in coal,
could be fitted with mercury-capture kits, technology that already exists but is used not universally.""Once you have the prospect of a legally binding treaty it concentrates the minds of governments
and companies,"says Nuttall a
#MRI modified for better images: Nature News A simple change to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines will provide more uniform coverage at higher powers as well as more room for portly patients.
In a market set to be worth more than $5 billion by 2010, the new technology may offer an easier way to get to the high-field machines manufacturers
MRI machines use a magnetic field to get hydrogen atoms in the body spinning in a particular way,
then knock them off-balance with a radio wave. The small radio-frequency signals given off by the recovering nuclei provide the imaging data.
In their new version of the technology Klaas Pruessmann at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, his student David Brunner and their colleagues removed the radio-frequency coil used to tumble the nuclei from an MRI machine built by Philips Healthcare
and replaced it with a system that could do the same job from up to 5 metres away.
The university has filed for patents on the technology, which is described on page 994 of this issue."
"says Andrew Blamire, an MRI expert at the nuclear magnetic resonance centre in Newcastle, UK.""Claustrophobia is a widespread problem in clinical MRI,
"says Pruessmann. Removing the coil from the machine provides a less constraining cavity. But the potential advantages go further than the patient experience.
Standard clinical MRI SCANNERS use magnets with field strengths of about 1. 5 Tesla and radio-frequency signals of about 64 megahertz,
with the cylindrical conducting tube lining the machine functioning as a waveguide for a signal transmitted by an outside antenna.
The technique was unveiled last May at the International Society for Magnetic resonance in Medicine meeting in Toronto
This provoked Graham Wiggins of the Center for Biomedical Imaging at New york University's Medical center to build his own version.
who is working with one of the big industrial MRI players the health-care arm of Siemens,
pointing to possibilities such as screening large numbers of biological samples or laboratory animals all at once.""Giving people a new degree of freedom will hopefully lead to things that we haven't thought of at all. f
a fearful memory can be erased by a drug that is usually used to control blood pressure. When memories are laid first down,
Now a team led by Merel Kindt at the University of Amsterdam have used the ß-blocker propranolol to affect reconsolidation.
Forget about it Current treatments for patients who have strong fearful memories, for example people with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD
"There are a lot of treatments for anxiety disorders but you see a lot of relapse, "says Kindt. In addition, the drug treatment didn't affect how well the participants remembered the link between the spiders and the shock.
They are also conducting brain imaging studies, and may soon try out the therapy on stronger fearful memories.
To discover whether drug treatment would change this, the team conditioned people to be afraid of pictures of spiders by showing them photos of the arachnids
"says Roger Pitman at Harvard Medical school, who led the original study on the effects of the drug on fear memories in patients with PTSD2.
They are also conducting brain imaging studies, and may soon try out the therapy on stronger fearful memories r
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