The tensions have been fuelled by high prices for commodities such as soya beans and beef, which have driven up demand for arable land
Pepsico is always looking for data to evaluate its supplies of corn, potatoes, oranges and oats,
says Alasdair Coles, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, UK, and the UK chief investigator of the Comparison of Alemtuzumab and Rebif Efficacy in Multiple sclerosis (CARE-MS) I trial.
Coles told the meeting that magnetic resonance imaging showed that subjects taking alemtuzumab had lost also less brain volume than those taking Rebif, a proxy measure for overall tissue damage.
but Coles puts this down to Rebif performing better than expected. The patients recruited in this trial showed very little worsening of disability,
But, says Coles, these findings mirror those from earlier trials, and it is possible to identify those patients most at risk by screening for certain biomarkers.
says Coles. The drug is approved already in many countries as a treatment for some forms of leukaemia and lymphoma, under the name Campath.
The study, in press at the Journal of Archaeological Science1, finds evidence of vegetables, herbs and nuts in nine jars taken from Mediterranean shipwrecks.
Other'hits'included DNA from legumes, ginger, walnut and juniper and from herbs such as mint, thyme and oregano.
Brazil cooks up transgenic bean: Nature Newspaired with rice or steeped in feijoada stew, beans are an essential feature of Brazilian cuisine.
So great is Brazil's love of legumes that demand often outstrips domestic supply, forcing the country to import beans from Argentina, Bolivia and China.
But this relationship could face the ultimate test as Brazilian scientists roll out a transgenic pinto bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) engineered to fend off one of the crop's most devastating enemies:
the golden mosaic virus. Approved on 15 september by the Brazilian National Technical Commission on Biosafety (CTNBIO),
the transgenic bean uses RNA interference to shut down replication of the virus (K. Bonfim et al.
Mol. Plant Microbe Interact. 20,717-726; 2007). ) A product of more than a decade of homegrown research, the bean could begin appearing on tables across the country as early as 2014.
It is an extremely important crop for our small farmers, says Francisco Arag £o, a plant geneticist who led the work for the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA),
soya and cotton with little public resistance, but EMBRAPA is now tinkering with a product that people eat in large quantities every day,
and increased research to rule out health risks stemming from the bean. Nodari, a former member of CTNBIO who has questioned long transgenic crops,
The details will help the agency to develop bean varieties that are resistant to the golden mosaic
but abstained from the decision on the beans. Arag £o notes that safety analyses showed no reason for concern regarding the beans.
He says that whereas some other GM CROPS produce unfamiliar proteins that could in theory cause an allergic reaction when eaten,
the GM pinto bean produces only small snippets of RNA, tailored to react with and neutralize RNA from any invading virus. Herve Vanderschuren,
With approval secured, EMBRAPA must now conduct a further round of field trials to ensure that the transgenic bean produces yields comparable to those of existing varieties.
000 hectares of land on which the golden mosaic virus is so prevalent that farmers cannot grow beans at all at present.
Brazil produces some 3. 5 million tonnes of beans per year already, and Arag £o says that the transgenic bean could increase production by 10-20,
%enough to offset imports and soften the price spikes that accompany domestic shortages. The best part of this story is that the bean was developed in Brazil for the Brazilian farmers,
says Vanderschuren, who is part of a consortium working with researchers in Kenya, Tanzania and South africa to apply the same technology to local crops,
EMBRAPA is already looking to develop other virus-resistant beans, including common black beans and the popular carioca bean.
It's very easy to transfer this gene to any other variety, says Arag £o.
Mining molecular gastronomydieter Heinemann/Westend61/Corbisshrimp and tomato are paired often together in North american cuisine, because they share certain flavour compounds.
and tomato broil has a recipe where the two main ingredients (shrimp and tomato) share 1-penten-3-ol,
and the mozzarella, parmesan and tomato used in the recipe all share 4-methylpentanoic acid.
But in East Asian and Southern European recipes, the trend was the opposite the ingredients were less likely to share flavour compounds.
when the team removed the most common ingredients that shared the least flavour compounds (beef, ginger, pork, cayenne, chicken and onion) from the analysis,
this year his team will demonstrate the feasibility of their ethanol-production process at a pilot plant being built in Chile
soya bean and rapeseed causes a similar level of pollution to oil obtained from oil sands
grew 30.3 million hectares of GM soya, maize (corn) and cotton last year, a 19%increase on 2010.
agricultural biotech giant Monsanto and retailer Walmart together with producers and environmentalists to negotiate environmental certification standards for products such as soya beans, palm oil,
soya and palm oil could have the greatest impact on carbon (see'Food versus forests').'With more than US$4 million in seed money from Norway, the consortium plans to announce an initial round of projects in the run-up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de janeiro (Rio+20) in Brazil in June.
but consumers and environmentalists have contributed also by pressuring major food suppliers to sign moratoria on the purchase of soya and beef from recently cleared land.
Organic agriculture performs particularly poorly for vegetables and some cereal crops such as wheat, which make up the lion s share of the food consumed around the world.
Cereals and vegetables need lots of nitrogen to grow, suggesting that the yield differences are in large part attributable to nitrogen deficiencies in organic systems,
which have yields only 3%lower than in conventional farming and oilseed crops such as soybean,
Other medicines contained DNA from plants in the same family as ginseng the root of which is illegal to trade internationally as well as soya and nut-bearing plants,
Tomato genome sequence bears fruitthe genome sequence of one of the world s highest-value salad plants the tomato has been decoded by an international team of scientists,
The tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is an increasingly popular fruit, with 145.8 million tonnes produced globally in 2010.
According to the leaders of the UK arm of the Tomato Genome Consortium, Graham Seymour at the University of Nottingham and Gerard Bishop, formerly of Imperial College London,
the sequence will make precision breeding possible not just in tomatoes, but also in other crop species from the Solanaceae family,
such as aubergines (Solanum melongena) and peppers (Capsicum spp..They also hope it will help in the development of tomatoes that can survive pests, pathogens and even climate change,
as well as high-yield crops that still have a good flavour.""It s really all about making a better tomato,
says Allen Van Deynze, a molecular geneticist at the Seed Biotechnology Center at the University of California,
and a lead researcher on the project, explains that the group started out using traditional tools to sequence the genomes of the domesticated tomato cultivar Heinz 1706 (the one used to make the famous ketchup) and its closest wild relative, Solanum pimpinellifolium.
Giuliano says that one of the most exciting discoveries was that the entire tomato genome was copied in triplicate on two separate occasions.
The tomato is established already an model for fleshy fruit development, so the information will also be useful for breeding fruits such as strawberries, melons and bananas."
the plant known as pigweed or palmer amaranth (Amaranthus palmeri) isn t much to look at. But to farmers in the southeastern United states, it is a formidable foe.
and soya bean that are modified genetically to be glyphosate tolerant. And it is not unique, says agronomist Harold Coble at the Office of Pest Management Policy in Raleigh,
and reduces the number of pigweed seeds that germinate by 75%.%In Georgia and elsewhere, Culpepper says,
but cellulosic ethanol can be made from municipal waste, wood chips, grass, and the stalks, leaves and stems of food crops.
GM soya levy The biotechnology giant Monsanto is one step closer to losing billions of dollars in revenues from its genetically modified (GM) Roundup Ready soya beans in Brazil.
Missouri, levies a charge on Brazilian farmers who grow soya beans that turn out to be GM.
Farmers say it is impossible to avoid growing GM soya because of contamination, and in April they won a challenge in the state of Rio grande do Sul,
Monsanto may lose GM soya royalties throughout Brazilthe biotechnology giant Monsanto is one step closer to losing billions of dollars in revenues from its genetically-modified (GM) Roundup Ready soya beans,
after the United states. Last year, it farmed 30.3 million hectares of the crops, mostly soya beans,
after it became clear that about three-quarters of the soya crops produced in the southern state of Rio grande do Sul were already being grown from Roundup Ready seeds that had been smuggled in from Argentina.
Monsanto has charged Brazilian farmers 2%of their sales of Roundup Ready soya beans, which now account for an estimated 85%Â of the nation s soya-bean crop.
The company also tests Brazilian soya beans that are sold as non-GM if they turn out to be Roundup Ready,
the company charges the farmers responsible for the crops some 3%of their sales. In 2009, a consortium of farming syndicates from Rio grande do mounted Sul a legal challenge to the levy,
and that it has proved impossible to keep Roundup Ready soya beans separate from conventional varieties."
and conventional soya is difficult, since the GM soya is highly contaminating, says Jo £o Batista da Silveira, president of the Rural Syndicate of Passo Fundo, one of the leaders of the legal action.
Monsanto argues that most Brazilian farmers still use smuggled seeds, and that the company is consequently being deprived of revenue
But the Brazilian Association of Seeds and Seedlings, a trade body, says that 70%of soya-bean farmers now buy their Roundup Ready seeds legally.
noting that the patents relating to Roundup Ready soya beans have expired already in Brazil. He ordered Monsanto to stop collecting royalties,
varo, president of the Mato grosso association of soya-bean and corn producers, agrees that intellectual property is important,
and soya bean estimates for the year on 11 july. The projected US maize yield is down 1. 3 tonnes per hectare to 3. 7 tonnes per hectare,
Estimates of total US soya bean production are also down by 4. 2 million tonnes to 83 million tonnes compared with June
The United states exports 53%of the world's maize and almost 43%of soya beans globally,
Prices of soya beans are also up by almost 30%since the beginning of June, and by almost 60%since the end of last year, he says.
The prices of soya beans and maize have passed the 2008 peak. But wheat, rice and oil prices have not matched their 2008 highs
The direct impact of the increase in maize and soya bean prices will be felt in net importing countries such as Mexico and China.
and are not major consumers of soya beans, says Torero. Researchers are investigating how certain crop varieties including sorghum and pearl millet
and soya beans leap to record highs. The National Climatic Data center in Asheville, North carolina, said on 16  July that moderate to extreme drought was affecting 55%of the continental United states  the highest proportion since December 1956.
The public perception is of small-town universities just doing meat-and-potatoes production agriculture. But we have some of the top agricultural-science universities in the world.
Indonesia, the world s largest grower of oil palms (see Palm sprouts), is expected to double production by 2030.
around 94%of the soya beans and 88%of the maize (corn) grown in the United states is engineered genetically to resist herbicides, insect pests or both, according to the US Department of agriculture.
Seed companies can counter this by engineering new crops that are resistant to additional herbicides such as a new soya bean developed by Dow Agrosciences of Indianapolis,
GM brinjal (aubergine) was approved in 2009, but in 2010 the government banned its cultivation indefinitely, after public opposition.
Dupont violated the patent by making soya beans that mingled the Monsanto trait with its own herbicide-resistant technology, the jury concluded.
In May, the US Food and Drug Administration approved Elelyso (taliglucerase alfa) a drug for the lysosomal storage disorder Gaucher disease which is produced in cultured carrot cells.
including wheat, soya beans and potatoes. By 2050, climate change could cause irrigated wheat yields in developing countries to drop by 13,
Thornton says that potato-growing areas, including China and India, are likely to see yields drop significantly as temperatures rise,
roasted aroma of coffee or the golden-brown colour of crispy French fries are enough to set most mouths watering.
and amino acids such as asparagine found in potatoes and cereals were making acrylamide (C3h5no) as a by-product of the Maillard reaction,
such as changing potato varieties or storage conditions, and reducing cooking temperatures. According to Beate Kettlitz, the group s director of food policy, 90%of large and medium-sized companies in Europe now select potato varieties with low levels of the sugars that can form acrylamide,
and all control French-fry cooking times to limit browning. In 2007, the European commission instructed the EFSA to collate yearly data on acrylamide levels.
In August, he showed that acrylamide levels in French fries can be predicted from the cooking methods and the presence of key precursor chemicals in the partially cooked,
frozen fries used by fast-food restaurants10. This model revealed that a change to the potato blanching process could make a big difference to the final acrylamide level."
"The industry is not giving up on this, he says. Plant breeding and genetic modification could also help,
says atmospheric physicist David Crisp of NASA s Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, who is the science team leader of OCO-2."A timely launch of this satellite should be among the highest priorities of ESA.
says Crisp.""Wouldn t it be good to know where these processes are occurring? However, there was better news for other ESA programmes.
each group of two dozen or so children aged six to eight ate meals containing Golden Rice, spinach or à Â-carotene capsules for lunch every week day during the three-week trial1.
says Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, a palaeoclimatologist at the University of Copenhagen who led the NEEM project."
NEEM project leader Dorthe Dahl-Jensen tells Noah Baker what ice can reveal about Earth s last interglacial.
says Dahl-Jensen. The results confirm the warmth of the Eemian climate: ratios of oxygen and nitrogen isotopes in the core show that some 6, 000 Â years after the onset of the Eemian,
says Dahl-Jensen.""The bad news is that if Greenland s ice sheet did not disappear during the Eemian,
But, says Dahl-Jensen, if Antarctica s massive ice sheets do disintegrate as the NEEM core suggests they did before we could face an extremely rapid sea-level rise around the world.
and Amflora, a starchy potato used in the paper industry. They are the only GM CROPS approved by European union (EU) science advisory committees as safe for agriculture.
This week, the US Supreme court hears arguments that pit Monsanto against 75-year-old Indiana soya-bean farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman
I learned that patents are not available to protect my soybeans, I would think of some kind of technological fix,
Bowman was a regular customer for Monsanto s herbicide-resistant soya beans for his main crop,
They are applied to crop seeds such as maize (corn) and soya beans, and permeate the plants, protecting them from insect pests.
GM crop deal Two agricultural biotechnology giants agreed on 26 Â March to settle a lengthy legal battle over patent rights to next-generation genetically modified (GM) soya beans.
based in St louis, Missouri, at least US$1. 75 Â billion over the next decade for the right to offer two herbicide-tolerant lines of soya bean.
Pathogen genome tracks Irish potato famine back to its rootsthe great potato famine of the 1840s was a defining event in Ireland s recent history.
Working from 150-year-old dried leaves, two competing teams have sequenced now the genome of the single-celled organism that wreaked havoc on The irish potato crop.
Phytophthora infestans, which causes potato late blight, is an oomycete a type of single-celled organism related to brown algae.
Carried by infected potatoes, the disease probably arrived at the port of Antwerp in Belgium in the summer of 1845,
Ireland s dependence on potatoes was the reason the epidemic exacted a far greater toll there than it did on the rest of the continent.
Irish peasants working plots owned by absentee British landlords relied on potatoes for most of their calories,
"The potato is really an amazing staple crop. If you have a diet of potato and milk,
you don t need anything else. The disappearance of that staple had devastating consequences, including 1 million deaths and still more emigrations.
where it infected wild relatives of the potato. Until recently, only a single strain of P. infestans, dubbed US-1, plagued potatoes outside Mexico and South america.
So it came as a surprise when, in 2001, scientists suggested that a different strain was responsible for the famine,
"It seems rather that the potatoes were unusually susceptible, he says. Meanwhile, a team led by Tom Gilbert and Mike Martin,
"What happened was that this pathogen had seen never cultivated potatoes before, says Bill Fry, a plant pathologist at Cornell University in Ithaca,
New york. It spread through potato fields like wildfire in Ireland and other countries where potatoes were grown intensively."
Transgene patents The US Supreme court ruled on 13 Â May that a farmer had violated intellectual-property laws by planting genetically modified soya beans without buying the goods from the crop s patent-holder,
including Monsanto s herbicide-resistant soya beans. The court disagreed, saying that US patent law"provides no haven for propagating crops from such seeds.
evoking the flavours of peanut and cucumber. Bussmann's work to develop crops from Plukenetia species seems to go beyond the traditional role of a scientist.
By contrast, the FDA approved the first GM crop for human consumption   the Flavr Savr tomato   after just three years of regulatory consideration.
The insecticide is applied most often as a seed dressing to crops such as maize and soya beans.
"I know of one lab that has gotten mushrooms to grow on it, Bowyer says. And without solid data on the lifetimes of different types of plastic timber, it is difficult to assess their environmental impacts,
that it is withdrawing all pending EU applications for new transgenic maize (corn), soya beans and sugar beet.
Four crops in limbo three varieties of maize (corn) and one of soya bean are Monsanto products.
four maize varieties and one sugar-beet variety. Monsanto says that it will abandon applications for all of them except for one GM maize, MON810.
is one of only two GM CROPS approved for cultivation in the EU. The other is a high-starch GM potato called Amflora that is intended for industrial applications such as paper production.
and sale of Amflora and move its base to the United states. The company also later said that it will not pursue EU approvals for other GM potatoes.
Davis. The analysis identified crop species including potato, apple, aubergine, carrot and sunflower that have high numbers of relatives yet to be collected.
And it identified some crops, such as sorghum and bananas, that have few, if any, relatives secured in collections.
Khoury notes, for instance, that wild relatives of the faba bean, found only in war-torn Syria,
In 2009, for instance, she found transgenic sugar-beet seedlings in a bag of soil sold to gardeners."
EU debates U-turn on biofuels policythe European union (EU) has spent the past 10 years nurturing a  15-billion (US$20-billion) industry that makes transport fuel from food crops such as soya beans
The root of the different immune responses lies with the mushroom-shaped haemagglutinin protein found on the outside of influenza-virus particles
Tilling less and periodically planting crop fields with nitrogen-fixing legumes can also help to keep nitrogen in the soil."
and the oomycete Phytophthora infestans remains a persistent problem even 168 years after causing the great Irish potato famine4.
and has wreaked havoc on vegetable and cotton production in all of China s provinces except Tibet.
Many angiosperms are known to be polyploid potatoes, for instance, have between two and six copies of each chromosome.
Although symbiotic plant-microbe relationships such as those of the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that live in the roots of legumes have been known for many decades,
including soya beans, wheat, barley and sugar cane. But the question of whether Bioensure will work in commercial conditions is hard to answer:
The researchers calculated the human trophic level for 176 countries for each year from 1961 to 2009 using a data on 102 types of food from animal fat to yams compiled by the Food and agriculture organization (FAO) of the United nations. Ref. 1globally,
and soya bean seeds that are engineered genetically to tolerate 2, 4-D, a weedkiller that is commonly used on other crops.
and soya bean seeds that are engineered genetically to resist herbicides such as 2, 4-D
#'A normal healthy wolf would not have done what happened here.''I'm predicting quite a blowback in the comments for this article...
and soybean producer so this state's problems are really every state's problems. Combined Iowa and Illinois grow about a third of the corn in the U s. The scientists are calling for individual farms
Now NASA and other researchers are developing a different kind of space food space-grown vegetables
There's a NASA effort to send romaine lettuce planters to the International Space station programs investigating crop production in Mars-like environments
and longer-term projects looking to grow soybeans and grains. Such space-farmed produce could save on the weight of the supplies astronauts need to bring with them;
The excerpts from American astronaut Don Pettit's writings about a zucchini plant he brought to space not for food but just for fun.
I bought too many radishes(??12:15: haha omg HTML is SUCH A BITCH to use on an iphone.
37 I forget where the carrot symbol is every single time I need to type it the iphone is not liveblog-friendly 4/5 stars 12:39 I messe up the closing HTML tags again12:
You're like one of those idiots who complains about Duffelblog or Onion articles. I realize this is a popular science magazine
But there are two breeds one in Chile and one in China that are known to lay blue eggs.
The Araucana chicken from Chile and the Dongxiang and Lushi chickens from China (none of which are particularly common in North america) are known to lay pale-blue eggs.
which onions make people cry is complicated even more than scientists previously realized. Reference: Plant Biochemistry: An Onion Enzyme that Makes the Eyes Water S. Imai N. Tsuge M. Tomotake Y. Nagatome H. Sawada T. Nagata and H. Kumagai Nature vol
. 419 no. 6908 October 2002 p. 685. Ed note: Also in that study: Can we create a super onion that doesn't make our eyes water?
For: parboiling a dead shrew and then swallowing the shrew without chewing and then carefully examining everything excreted during subsequent days all so they could see which bones would dissolve inside the human digestive system and
On their own these look yellow or orange carotenoids give color to corn and carrots for example but they re invisible beneath the chlorophyllic green of a leaf for most of the year.
-and-sugar water) then smoked it for 8 hours stuffed with apples and onions and herbs.
Brown is the CEO of Beyond Meat a four-year-old company that manufactures a meat substitute made mainly from soy and pea proteins and amaranth.
Grocery stores are based full of plant substitutes the Boca and Gardenburgers of the world not to mention Asian staples like tofu and seitan.
And that makes recreating it whether from vegetables or cells in a lab exceedingly difficult.
âÂ#  To the ridicule of old friends who joked that he was moving to the country to start a tofu factory he started poring over journal articles and casting around for meat analogues to market
Brown licensed the veggie chicken and began fine-tuning it with the scientists for mass consumption.
lack of fruits and vegetables and thus a lack of Vitamin c in particular was thought the main factor.
#Do Kids Eat More Veggies When Schools Serve Healthier Lunches? You can build it but will they eat it?
and veggies in school lunches is correlated actually with kids eating more fruits and veggies at lunchtime.
and vegetables starting in the 2012-2013 school year. The USDA doesn't yet have any data from that change
In those schools kids ate on average significantly more vegetables than kids at schools that didn't meet the new standards.
Nevertheless many individual kids wouldn't eat any vegetables. Taking a closer look at the data the USDA found some funny and unexpected patterns.
Watermelon and tomatoes taste very bitter. Citrus fruits are so sour that I can't stand them.
I am pushing 50 never eat fruit hardly eat veggies and that's just the way it is.
1-veggie consumption increases at schools that offer no choices except veggies2-the kids who are most likely to have options other than a state-controlled menu
whose only option is mandated a veggie-heavy school lunch are not the same kids who can leave campus for something they'd prefer to have4-kids who have learned at home to be selective in their food choices earning them the label picky tend to reject the official veggie menu5
if one finds alot more beans rice and oatmeal in the diet. You mean if they aren't taught to eat properly at home they don't at school?
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