says that 80,000 livestock have perished already and that 2 million hectares of crops are still underwater.
Many researchers also called for better livestock management. Livestock rearing is increasingly hugely in China, and phosphate concentrations in animal feed in the country are much higher than Western standards,
says Zhang. With a limited labour force but ample subsidized chemical fertilizer available in most of rural China, dumping this phosphate-rich animal manure into waterways has become an easier and cheaper option than using it to fertilize cropland.
A pollution census conducted by China's government earlier this year earlier this year see'China takes stock of environment')found that livestock is the largest contributor to run off pollution from the land into waterways,
Habitat loss, resulting from the conversion of natural habitats for agriculture and livestock grazing is the biggest threat to plants'survival,
All it takes is one bull in really poor condition to wander into a risky habitat
This change could threaten the livelihood of the thousands of nomads who survive by raising cattle on the plateau.
The Tibetan alpine meadow grassland is used by local people to graze their yaks and sheep.
In both people and pigs, newborns with cystic fibrosis tend to have abnormally low levels of a hormone called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1),
Unlike in healthy controls, in mutant pigs IGF1 levels do not increase over time. The blood concentration of IGF1 could one day be used as a marker to predict
Stoltz and his collaborators took advantage of a pig model of cystic fibrosis that they debuted in 20084.
the team found that newborn mutant pigs had significantly less IGF1 in their blood at birth.
Like the pigs, the babies carried significantly less hormone than controls. The data seem very robust,
The researchers found abnormally low levels of growth hormone in pituitary slices from the mutant pigs
it would be smart to try it in piglets.
Sterile moths wipe out cotton pest: Nature Newsbetween May and October for four consecutive years, aeroplanes crisscrossed the morning skies above Arizona's cotton fields, dropping millions of tiny moths onto the croplands below.
is engaging in classic black sheep syndrome: members of a group may be annoyed by public criticism from outsiders,
Turkey's president did not intervene and ask parliament to reconsider, as some scientists had hoped,
scientists are afraid that the seeming turn for good in their fortunes will be vulnerable to the first legal challenge from Turkey's vociferous opponents of GM.
can trigger abortions in goats and sheep and cause flu-like symptoms and sometimes pneumonia in humans.
and agriculture ministries coordinated their efforts poorly before they ordered a cull of more than 50,000 dairy goats in 2009,
In some of the resulting chicks, the cassette integrates into germ cells. These animals can be crossbred to produce chickens that carry the cassette in every cell.
but for using similar cassettes to create resistance to other common poultry diseases. Tiley's study was funded partially by Cobb-Vantress, a major international chicken-breeding company.
Animal diseases Livestock plagues are on the rise globally owing to increasingly intensive farming practices and the world's growing taste for meat and other animal products.
The warning came from scientists at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), based in Nairobi, Kenya, at a conference in New delhi on 10 12 february.
Livestock plagues are spreading: Nature Newslivestock plagues are on the rise globally, owing to increasingly intensive farming practices and the world's growing taste for meat and other animal products.
The warning comes from scientists at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), based in Nairobi, Kenya,
Whereas rich nations are controlling livestock diseases effectively, developing countries, including many in Africa and Asia, lag dangerously behind,
where up to 40%of household income can depend on livestock, Mcdermott and his ILRI colleague Delia Grace warn today at a conference in New delhi (Leveraging agriculture for improving nutrition and health).
Mcdermott points out that methods need to be tailored to the circumstances in developing countries to control the spread of livestock diseases.
Another study in The Holocene5 by Dorian Fuller, an archaeologist at University college London, explores methane emissions from livestock and the spread of rice agriculture in Southeast asia.
and suggests that the expansion of livestock could help to plug the gap in previous millennia.
could allowing cattle to graze in the country's Alpine National park the picturesque setting for the film The Man from Snowy River reduce the risk of bushfires?
The letter's organizers claim that the trial is a naked attempt to use the imprimatur of science to allow cattle to graze in an ecologically sensitive area,
The decision in question is the return of cattle to portions of the 646,000-hectare park, a landscape of deep ravines, high plateaux and snow gum trees.
In the 1950s, as many as 100,000 head of Aberdeen angus and Hereford grazed in the park, according to Mark Coleman, president of the Mountain Cattlemen's Association of Victoria.
Gradual restrictions since then culminated in a park-wide grazing ban in 2005 after a Victoria government review found that cattle didn't reduce the intense wildfires that can visit the region,
Coleman says that the cattle do stop fires, by eating the vegetation that forms potential fuel,
when 400 head of cattle were allowed back into the park, the government of Victoria announced that they were part of a research trial.
but merely testing methods suitable for measuring the impact of cattle on fuels and on ecosystem functions.
Australia's environment minister, demanded that the state ask the federal government for approval to release the cattle.
The demand means that the cattle must be removed from the park until the federal government has reviewed the matter.
and the cattle would have been taken down from the mountains by Mid-april anyway. Furthermore it is not clear
Ninety per cent of the general public couldn't give a shit about the cattle or the environment,
however, a furious debate has emerged among behavioural ecologists over whether the train of the male peafowl,
Pavo cristatus, still woos peahens. Research in which peacocks'tails were plucked experimentally, published online this month in Animal Behaviour1,
Dakin and a colleague, Robert Montgomerie, tracked three populations of feral peacocks and peahens during the spring breeding season,
I think there's clear evidence that peahens use a peacock's tail in their mate choice,
However, in 2008, a team of Japanese ecologists studying the same group of feral peafowl over seven years reported that, overall,
She noticed a drop in their success with peahens. However, she also found that, before plucking, males typically had between 165 and 170 eyespots on their trains,
and probably mean more to scientists than to peahens. At the end of the day, we will never know what peahens are looking at
and how they select their mates. You can't ask them.
Grants aim to fight malnutrition: Nature Newsnearly US$20 million in new grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be spent on getting nutritionally enhanced rice and cassava to market and decreasing malnourishment in Asia and Africa.
and the development of large-scale livestock farms to make it easier to collect and reuse manure.
the ministry is drafting new laws on soil protection and the reduction and treatment of livestock pollution.
such as better livestock management and cleaner farming. With a limited labour force but ample subsidized chemical fertilizers available in most rural areas, dumping nutrient-rich animal manure has become an easier and cheaper option than using it to fertilize crops.
Consequently, livestock has become the largest contributor to run off pollution being responsible for 98%%38%and 56%of COD, nitrogen and phosphorus, respectively, according to the national pollution census.
The key to reducing livestock pollution is to promote greater integration between farming and livestock rearing,
Such a mixed crop and livestock system could better utilize water, nutrients and animal wastes and reduce pollution,
In addition to laws on soil protection and livestock management, regulations on the use of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides the use of which is much higher per hectare in China than in developed countries are needed urgently,
Researchers from the United kingdom studied the direct transmission of foot-and-mouth disease from one cow to another in a unique experimental setup that might also find applications in the study of other pathogens.
In 2001, a foot-and-mouth outbreak in UK cattle triggered a mass cull and restricted access to many parts of the countryside.
It shows that the window in which infected cattle can transmit the disease to other animals is actually shorter than previously believed and
and his team exposed eight cows to one form of the virus. They then attempted to transmit the virus from these'source'cows to other bovines in a biosecure compound on the Pirbright site,
The team found that the cattle in their study were not infectious until around 0. 5 days after clinical signs appeared,
Charleston and his co-authors suggest that the fact that cattle are less likely to be infectious before showing clinical signs means that
In the 2001 outbreak, some 700,000 cattle were culled to fight the disease, says co-author Mark Woolhouse, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
goat and sheep pox viruses. The report was a response to an executive order from US President Barack Obama last year.
Nature Newswomen, beansprouts, cucumbers, bacteria, cows: the cast of the current European Escherichia coli outbreak is already a crowd.
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.
traditional bushmeat species such as apes and antelope are no longer easily available owing to over-hunting and, in some cases,
But the team has found evidence of a'henipa-like'virus in domestic pigs from two villages about 70 kilometres north of Accra.
In a paper published on 22 september in Plos ONE, the team reports finding antibodies against members of the Henipavirus genus in 5%of 97 pigs studied.
Nipah virus is known to multiply in pigs, and the species had a key role in a 1999 outbreak in Malaysia that killed more than 100 people.
It looks like there is spill over from bats to pigs in Ghana, says Cunningham. This is the first step along the line to a public-health threat.
for example, cows and other ruminants have complicated digestive systems involving multiple stomachs filled with microbes that process plants many times to extract the maximum nutrition.
Examples from the CDM include siphoning off the methane produced by pig farms and feeding it to a power plant that would
for example, or because the images are too poor to make out cattle, or appear to contain hay bales or sheep instead."
"One half of their data is just noise, says Burda. In addition, Burda's group looked at herds as a whole,
whereas Jelinek s team analysed individual cows.""Of the data that were looked useable, they only at 50%of the cows.
It s very subjective, Burda adds. His team's reanalysis of  the Jelinek data actually does support the theory that cattle can magneto-sense,
says Burda. In a response to the reanalysis, Jelinek and colleagues say that in some cases they suspect each team may have looked inadvertently at different pictures,
The Jelinek team says that it only looked at cows far from power lines, and that the slopes are few
"Sheep, horses, hay bales, rocks, cows with unsatisfactory resolution, cows near a track, settlement or feeder, were taken not in the analysis. SÃ nke Johnsen, who studies magneto-reception at Duke university in Durham,
as the alignment of individual cows in herds is unlikely to be independent. Overall, he says that the original results,
The iceberg that eventually calves from the breaking ice shelf will cover around 880 square kilometres,
woolly rhinos, wild horses, reindeer, steppe bison and musk ox. The researchers created a series of snapshots of the European,
woolly mammoths and the Eurasian populations of musk oxen went extinct as populations became more and more isolated from one another.
Musk-ox remains are rarely found at sites where humans lived, for example, and the species'range has little overlap with that of humans.
Musk oxen cope poorly with high summer temperatures, for example, and are now found only in the North american Arctic and Greenland.
while Eurasian musk ox would do well, Willerslev says. This could mean that it will be difficult to determine which modern species are at greatest risk of extinction,
and Livestock (CNA) a lobbying organization representing more than 5 million Brazilian farmers, calls the updated forest code"undoubtedly the most restrictive and rigorous land-ownership legislation in the world.
and international organizations to ramp up their funding of efforts to control outbreaks of the H5n1 virus in poultry,
Yet surveillance of H5n1 in poultry worldwide is patchy, particularly in poorer countries, where the virus is prevalent.
Genbankmoreover, if H5n1 surveillance in poultry is poor, the situation is far worse in pigs,
where there is almost no systematic surveillance, even in richer countries. H5n1 infections in pigs are uncommon
and cause only mild illness, creating little economic incentive to monitor them4. Genbank contains partial sequences from just 24 pig H5n1 isolates.
Yet pigs are a likely source of a human pandemic H5n1 virus because they are susceptible to both human
and avian viruses, creating opportunities for genetic reassortment in co-infected animals. Fouchier argues that many countries collect more and more-timely,
"Warnings weeks after dangerous viruses have emerged in poultry, or mammals, may be better than no warnings at all.
But even if a candidate pandemic H5n1 virus was detected in poultry, culling flocks to eliminate it would be no mean feat.
For methane, the study identified 14 control measures that would target leakage from coal mining and oil and gas operations, emissions from landfills, wastewater systems, livestock manure and rice paddies.
On 4 january, the agency banned unapproved uses of cephalosporins in cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys a ban that it had ordered already in 2008,
but revoked after protests from farmers, drug firms and veterinary surgeons. The new order is less strict than the 2008 rule.
On 4 Â January, the agency said that it would prohibit certain uses of cephalosporins in farm animals including cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys,
and reviewers considering fears about whether it could keep pathogens safely contained in the middle of prime US cattle country.
and poor consideration of the facility s proximity to metropolitan areas and livestock. Beef producers have been alarmed particularly that the 2010 assessment put the cumulative risk of foot-and-mouth disease escaping from the NBAF over the facility s projected 50-year lifespan at 70%(see Fear factor.
and would have a devastating effect on the US cattle industry if it escaped. US research with live foot
wrote cattle rancher Paul Irvine in a submitted statement. What happens next will depend, in part, on the NAS s judgement of the facility s risks and benefits.
that can accommodate small numbers of livestock, says that the challenges of running such labs can be met with technical measures.
The result from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) suggests that oxygen abundances throughout the Galaxy are more variable than expected.
and principal investigator for IBEX.""This is the stuff that stars, planets and people are made of, he says."
The US$100-million IBEX mission was launched in October 2008 with the goal of mapping the heliosphere,
The IBEX spacecraft is far from this boundary, in orbit around the Earth, but it has detectors that are sensitive to neutral atoms that can enter the heliosphere.
where they are caught by  IBEX.""I call it the 15-billion-mile hole-in-one,
Although a previous NASA mission, Ulysses, measured neutral helium from beyond the heliosphere, IBEX is the first to measure heavier elements, such as oxygen and neon,
IBEX found the ratio of oxygen atoms to neon atoms to be lower in the Local Cloud than the average ratios for both the Solar system and the Galaxy as a whole
Based on the speeds and directions of the neutral atoms, the IBEX team was also able to refine its picture of the shape of the heliosphere.
That has led the IBEX team to picture the leading edge of the heliosphere as flatter, or more snub-nosed than previously imagined."
says Priscilla Frisch, an IBEX investigator at the University of Chicago.""All the data indicate we re going to leave it in the next few thousand years
and pig flu deposited in the US National Center for Biotechnology Information s Influenza Virus Sequence Database between 2003 and 2011.
The number of pig sequences deposited remained relatively flat from 2003 to 2010 before jumping dramatically in 2011.
The jump in the number of pig sequences also disappears (see Delayed sequencing. Roughly 30%of the sequences are from isolates collected before 2003.
and pig sequences but it is aimed at increasing the genomic knowledge base, rather than real-time surveillance.
Just 7 of the 39 countries with more than 100 million poultry in 2010 collected more than 1, 000 avian flu samples between 2003 and 2011.
Even fewer pig sequences were collected, with one-third of the countries that are home to more than 4 million pigs depositing none at all (see The pig in the room).
Surveillance of avian flu viruses is bad, but that of pig viruses is worse. Yet pigs are a serious pandemic risk:
they can be infected co with both human and avian flu strains, which means that they provide ample opportunity for gene swapping and, thereby,
the emergence of pandemic strains such as the 2009 H1n1 pandemic virus. The world is home to some 1 billion domestic pigs, almost half
of which are in China, yet only 7, 679 pig flu sequences were collected between 2003 and 2011.
Just three countries the United states, China and Hong kong  collected more than 1, 000 swine flu sequences each,
Poland, the Philippines, Denmark and The netherlands are each home to more than 10 million pigs. In pigs, flu tends to be mild,
so there is little economic incentive for surveillance. Moreover, the pork industry often doesn t want the negative image of having swine flu detected in its farms.
are compiling one of the world's single largest sources of pig sequences. They get their viral isolates from abattoirs,
Because more than 90%of the pigs slaughtered in Hong kong come from ten provinces in Mainland china
The pandemic risk posed by pigs has risen also since 2009. The 2009 pandemic H1n1 virus,
which is now endemic in pigs, is unusual in that it contains the triple reassortant internal gene (TRIG) cassette,
and endemic swine viruses, says Peiris. Another pig virus that has the TRIG cassette, H3n2, infected 12 people in the United states in 2011."
"I think that this is just the tip of the iceberg and such reassortments are surely going on worldwide,
The size of a country s poultry population is no predictor of how many samples that country will generate (see Many birds, few samples.
or no sequences have poor veterinary systems and flu-prone farming systems, such as backyard farms and mixed poultry and pig farms,
because they will not receive any compensation for culled livestock. Countries sometimes also fail to look for,
The saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis) was described first from skulls found in a Vietnamese forest reserve1, but the elusive antelope has rarely been seen alive.
Little is known about its range or population, which probably numbers in the low hundreds. Conservationists are now planning to trawl tropical leeches for saola DNA.
the Annamite mountains that straddle the country s border with Laos. A more precise estimate of the antelope s range would help to target conservation efforts,
Gilbert, his colleague Mads Bertelsen and their team had fed goat blood to medicinal leeches (Hirudo spp.
After killing the leeches over the course of several months, the team identified goat DNA in every one of them.
Genetic material from the critically endangered Saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica) was present in one powder; and boxes marked as bear-bile powder
and more than three-quarters included DNA from animals not listed on the packaging, such as water buffalo, domestic cows and goats."
when cattle are infected with a common liver parasite. The liver fluke Fasciola hepatica was known already to affect the standard skin test for btb,
because the test is less sensitive in cattle infected with the fluke1. Researchers tested milk from dairy herds across England and Wales for antibodies against F. hepatica, an indication of infection,
"Cattle carcasses are inspected in abattoirs and we would see evidence of TB in the slaughtered animals
The authors of the Nature Communications study hypothesize that cows display fewer symptoms because the fluke alters their immune response.
Control relies on testing cattle for btb before they are moved between farms; animals that test positive are destroyed
and allow better control of infected cattle, but this poses its own difficulties. Farmers can keep cattle away from damp fields that are home to the fluke s snail host,
but treating infected dairy cattle is complicated. In 2010 the European union (EU) banned most flukocide drugs because they leave toxic residues in milk.
The milk from cows that receive the remaining two allowed drugs is undrinkable for three days after treatment.
Badgers have been blamed for spreading btb between farms, and after a fraught debate the UK government last year announced a badger cull in England.
when infected cows are found later, he says.""We have queried frequently the accuracy of testing,
an immunologist  at the Royal Veterinary College in Hatfield says there could be implications beyond cattle.
Health authorities in Somalia, Sudan and Turkey have reported also sporadic resistance to the two other classes of insecticides recommended by THE WHO for safe and effective household spraying:
The Brazilian Confederation for Agriculture and Livestock, one of the main business groups supporting the bill,
Model pigs face messy paththe three litters of Yucatan miniature piglets, born in late May,
As the United states first genetically engineered (GE) pigs with muscular dystrophy, the creatures could be used to test treatments for the disease.
which aims to sell GE pig models for use in academic and pharmaceutical laboratories, has bred so far about 275 Â pigs some with cystic fibrosis, others with heart disease, arrhythmia or cancer,
and now muscular dystrophy. Because pigs mimic these human diseases more closely than mice, they are desirable models for drug testing
and for studying the disease process. However, as the first company to seek approval for a disease model in a GE animal that could, in theory,
In 2009, the company submitted its first application to the FDA for approval of its cystic fibrosis pig model."
Nevertheless, the company remains hopeful that its pigs will skirt the hardships that have befallen other GE animals in the pipeline.
In 2009, it applied the guidelines in approving a GE goat that produces a blood-clotting drug in its milk.
and a hog engineered to excrete less-toxic manure. Members of Congress have voiced their fears about such frankenfish,
which was sponsoring the environmentally friendly hog, backed out of the approval process. Last month, the experimental hogs were put down.
Aquabounty, the GE salmon company, based in Maynard, Massachusetts, fears that it, too, may have to pull its product
With salmon frozen in the pipeline, Exemplar s piglets might skip to the front of the queue."
"GE pigs for medical models could move more quickly because there s a strong need for them in the medical community,
Although animal-rights advocates may object to disease-model pigs, Swart predicts that they will avoid intense public scrutiny
While the pigs plod through the process one step at a time, a handful of investigators at US universities have begun already to study how diseases develop in the transgenic animals.
Because the pigs aren approved t federally, Exemplar must track each pig from birth to beyond the grave.
If a scientist in Iowa sends tissue from one of the animals to a colleague in California,
Moreover, without approval, Exemplar cannot promote the pig models for drug testing based on what the researchers find.
Swart calls the wait worthwhile if Exemplar s pigs can help pharmaceutical companies to predict whether a drug will work."
improving yields and profits of crops, fish and livestock; improving sustainability and environmental integrity, and climate change adaptation and mitigation;
The Takarkori shelter and others nearby are home to vivid and colourful rock art depicting cattle, some with full udders,
and even pictures of people milking cows, but these images are nearly impossible to date precisely.
Archaeologists have also found fragments of domestic cattle bones at these sites but these do not indicate
They may even have grazed their cattle up and down mountains, depending on the season. Mark Thomas, a geneticist at University college London, calls the latest work"a very exciting finding.
Risk assessment of US agro-biosafety lab found wantingan independent panel reviewing the dangers associated with establishing a high-security laboratory for studying animal diseases in the heart of US cattle country has found that the government
has underestimated the risk that livestock will be exposed to microbes escaping from the facility. The largely critical review suggests that the proposed National Bio-and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF),
which affects cattle and other cloven-hoofed animals, would have devastating consequences for the US cattle industry were it to emerge in domestic herds.
Congress ordered the DHS to make changes and tied the NBAF s funding to a revised risk assessment
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