One reason for the difference between the EPA and the California DPR reports is that the EPA effectively assumed that no one would get hit by a'plume'of pesticide created by stagnant air pockets
Such plumes of other fumigants, she says, typically send a couple of dozen people in the United states to the emergency room every few years.
including rotating strawberries with crops such as broccoli that contain natural pest deterrents, or using steam to fumigate soils.
Nature Newscanadian researchers have decoded the DNA of the tree-killing fungus found in the mouths of mountain pine beetles,
the destructive bugs that wipe out entire North american forests. Further genome sequencing of the beetle and pine tree species should help forest managers design better pest-control tactics,
the authors say. It's really getting to a systems-level understanding of the mountain pine beetle epidemic,
says study co-author JÃ rg Bohlmann, a chemical ecologist at the University of British columbia in Vancouver, Canada,
Mountain pine beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae) have eaten their way through vast swathes of western North american pine forests,
As the burrowing beetles tunnel under the bark to feed and lay eggs, they release spores of the blue-stain fungus (Grosmannia clavigera),
and allows the beetles to continue to infest. Bohlmann and his colleagues assembled the fungus's 32.5-million-base-pair genome
For the other two species the beetle and the tree the researchers are concentrating mainly on expressed gene sequences, fragments of the complete DNA sequence, rather than the genomes in their entirety.
They've already amassed one of the largest insect libraries of gene transcripts for the bark beetle from more than a dozen beetle life stages and body parts.
and say which population of trees is interacting with which population of fungus and which population of beetles,
and a few symbiotic ecological relationships such as leaf-cutter ants and their microbial partners, but the approach has never before been applied on this scale for an outbreaking forest nuisance.
who studies the interaction between bark beetles and fungi at the University of Montana in Missoula.
Comparing the blue-stain fungus with free-living or pathogenic fungi will shed light on how the beneficial fungus helps the beetles thrive,
Using genomics to stop the bark beetles is a bit of a long shot for sure, admits Chris Keeling,
a research associate in Bohlmann's lab. But it might offer the best strategy for containing the forest pests,
and co-workers from numerous labs in the United states and Europe have sequenced the pest, using techniques honed on other organisms, plus a few tweaks2.
Polar-bear protection: The US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed on 22 october to designate around 500,000 square kilometres of critical habitat 96%of which is sea ice for the polar bear.
The bear was listed as a threatened species in 2008 owing to projections of sea-ice declines caused by global warming.
The government is obligated already to avoid actions that jeopardize the bear, but the designation would add another layer of protection by also making it illegal to conduct activities that adversely affect the bear's habitat.
Vaccine report: More children than ever are being immunized, but 24 million infants in the world's poorest nations still do not receive routine immunization, according to a report by the World health organization, UNICEF and the World bank.
The 21 october State of the World's Vaccines and Immunization report says that although four in five children now have access to lifesaving vaccines,
or brinjal, that is insect-resistant. But barely 24 hours later, Jairam Ramesh, India's minister of environment and forests, said that permission for its cultivation will be given only after consulting all stakeholders.
and food safety studies on animals carried out since 2002 show that Bt brinjal is absolutely safe to eat.
Nearly 40%of animal and plant species in the country's arid and semiarid ecosystems are in danger from habitat loss,
) Last week the company fired chief executive Harry Stylli and Elizabeth Dragon, senior vice-president of research and development. Chief financial officer Paul Hawran and another unnamed executive resigned,
Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak shared the 2009 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine,
Animals raised in the isolated environment expressed more genes involved in inflammatory immune responses and cholesterol synthesis,
and pig guts and their comparable size in organs, makes pigs a good model animal to study.
covering a total of nearly 13 hectares, in the northern states of Sonora, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Coahuila and Tamaulipas.
In Sonora where Monsanto has begun planting, transgenic maize is kept 500 metres away from conventional maize fields,
He notes that this could explain why farmers often need to crossbreed, or hybridize, different inbred lines to produce the superior corn varieties that we tend to eat.
Events Pelican recovery The brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis pictured) is being removed from a list of threatened and endangered species under the US Endangered Species Act after the government declared it officially recovered.
Pelican populations were devastated by hunting, habitat destruction and the pesticide DDT, but the US Fish and Wildlife Service says there are now more than 650,000 in the United states, the Caribbean and Latin america.
including the bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) and the Northern Rocky mountain grey wolf (Canis lupus). Research Lunar splashdown: A NASA probe sent crashing into the Cabeus crater near the Moon's north pole on 9 october ploughed up a plume containing water, hydrocarbons and, unexpectedly, mercury,
the agency said last week. Parts of the crater remain in permanent shadow, and so contain a record of the Solar system's chemistry and evolution because material that falls in freezes, becoming trapped.
Of eight species of South american frogs studied, four showed some sensitivity to the herbicide mixture at concentrations below the application rate used in Plan Colombia,
The researchers also found that frog larvae in small artificial ponds showed few toxic effects from glyphosate exposure
the pond studies of frogs, he notes, do not give enough information about the soils present to be sure that they were not adsorbing more of the herbicide mixture than would normally occur in the wild.
What's more, in one particular species of frog (Rhinella granulosa), about a third of adults died after being exposed to glyphosate at concentrations equivalent to field applications.
Relyea notes that the research also confirms his own studies of how much glyphosate is sufficient to kill half the frogs in a population3 a concentration known as the LC50.
whether the frogs are exposed to those concentrations. The glyphosate-surfactant mixture could cause problems when it is sprayed in frog habitats,
such as a rut in the road or a ditch beside a field, where some frog species live
and reproduce in temporary shallow pools. If those chemicals are being sprayed in those areas, then it is quite possible that you will get concentrations that cause toxicity,
The dog cloner: Nature Newsfor someone who had emerged just from a 40-month trial, Byeong-Chun Lee seemed remarkably energetic.
I'm dogs, said the Seoul National University cloning specialist with a smile, distinguishing his presentation from his junior researcher's,
Lee created an impressive list of cloned and transgenic canines. Among them were three female afghan hounds (Bona, Hope and Peace, who Lee calls Snuppy's girlfriends,
though the 10 puppies that Bona and Hope produced with Snuppy, which prove that clone couples can have healthy offspring,
three male wolves using postmortem cells (to show that it will be possible to save endangered species, like the wolf;
beagles (because the dog is the best choice for human disease modelling; and the first transgenic dog (a beagle, known as Ruby Puppy,
or Ruppy, that has red fluorescent protein that makes its nose, paw pads and claws red, even to the visible eye).
Lee's team also produced seven golden retrievers clones of Korea's best drug-sniffing dog.
Dogs can communicate and obey, says Lee. That's why I focus on them. The team's cloning efficiency has jumped from 1 live clone from 1,
To be able to produce that many animals, and that many varieties, in such a short time is a tremendous accomplishment,
Lee hopes that dogs which are used already as a model for cardiovascular and other disorders,
But Wakayama wonders whether dogs will ever catch on as model animals because they are still relatively difficult to clone
It's unfortunate that these great results won't contribute to animal cloning overall. Alan Colman, who worked on the team that cloned Dolly the sheep,
For some diseases dogs provide the best animal model for the human disease. But the use of cloned dogs
or transgenic dogs could be somewhat problematic due to the prime place of the dog in human affections,
says Colman, now at the A*STAR Institute of Medical Biology in Singapore. Still, Lee's cloned
and transgenic dogs are piquing interest. He is collaborating with both the US National Institute of Allergy
With the differences between species in disposition and cognition, dogs are tremendously valuable to basic genetic studies of higher brain order.
cloned dogs will significantly raise the value of this data and make a revolutionary contribution to neuroscience.
But as Lee tries to prove the practical value of his animal cloning, he faces fierce competition from his former mentor.
The two laboratories are still the only two to clone dogs. Lee has cloned dogs with RNL Bio,
a Seoul-based company spun out from Seoul National University and based on the technology developed by Lee and Hwang.
Hwang has cloned dogs for Mill Valley, California-based Bioarts. The two companies have been tied up in legal wrangles with each other.
gives it exclusive rights to clone dogs as well as cats and endangered species. At Bioarts'urging, Start Licensing sued RNL for infringement.
Bioarts withdrew its dog-cloning services. RNL also claims exclusive dog-cloning rights, based on a license it purchased in June 2008 from Seoul National University.
In a separate trial in South korea, RNL tried to prevent Hwang from cloning dogs by enforcing its patents from Seoul National University.
Hwang persuaded the court that tweaks he had made to the cloning procedure constituted a different method,
Lions'taste for human flesh dissected: Nature Newsa notorious pair of man-eating lions that teamed up to terrorize Kenyan labour camps more than 100 years ago did not have the same taste for human flesh,
a new study suggests. The findings may reveal unexpected flexibility in lion social relationships. Between March and December 1898, a pair of male lions killed
and devoured 28-135 people in the Tsavo region of Kenya. To understand what happened, Justin Yeakel, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa cruz,
and his colleagues analysed the lions'remains. The team found that the pair probably consumed about 35 human victims
with one of the animals devouring the lion's share, while the other stuck to a more traditional diet.
We would expect that if they're within a cooperative coalition, they would be consuming similar things,
This shows that lion behaviour is even more flexible and complex than we originally thought. It is the first time that different food preferences have been seen within one coalition of social carnivores.
The team reports its findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 1 Lions normally dine on grazing animals such as zebra and wildebeest
but in 1898, drought, pestilence and hunting left the Tsavo region of Kenya barren of the lions'favourite meals.
However, The british government was bringing in workers to construct a railway. The lions dragged people from tents at night, killing 28 labourers and an unknown number of native Taita estimates range from none to 107.
After nine months of this, the beasts were killed finally in December. Yeakel analysed the ratios of carbon isotopes in the lions'tissues,
which should reflect the isotope ratios of their prey. Browsing animals, such as giraffes and antelopes, have different ratios of carbon isotopes to grazers
because their food shrubs and trees versus grasses carries out different types of photosynthesis. The team characterized the humans'isotope ratios by taking advantage of a fluke of history,
and found that the Taita's ratio of nitrogen isotopes was distinct from the herbivores.
The lions'remains gave Yeakel two time windows of food preferences: the last 2-3 months of the animals'lives, obtained by analysing the quickly regenerating tail tuft hairs,
and the lifetime average in bone collagen. He then modelled which prey combinations were most likely to produce the lions'isotope ratios.
The results show that for most of their lives, the maneaters'diets consisted primarily of grazing animals.
But in the final months, the authors say, one animal continued to focus on grazers, with an occasional human meal,
whereas the other was mainly feasting on browsers and people. Extrapolating from their isotope ratios,
over the 9 month period, the lions probably consumed around 10.5 and 24. 2 humans, respectively,
Dominy says that lions may team up for territorial defence2, but such extreme dietary specialization in a cooperative group has not been seen before.
Apart from the environmental pressures on the lions, the dominant maneater also had severe wounds in his mouth and jaw,
says Craig Packer, an animal behavioural scientist at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, which makes it difficult to extrapolate to other lions.
Stanley Ambrose, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, is wary of the conclusions.
As a result, a wide range of proportions of available prey items could account for the lions'isotope ratios,
Nature News Liberia's caterpillar plague Panic struck Liberia in early 2009, after a plague of caterpillars struck villages around the country, munching trees
while the UN's Food and agriculture organization (FAO) warned of further attacks to come (see'Halting the African armyworm').
'While some 400,000 villagers had to temporarily abandon their caterpillar-saturated homes, the impact of the pests turned out to be less calamitous than at first suggested.
The initial exaggerated report of the outbreak by villagers and some unqualified staff of the Ministry of Agriculture, led to rather disproportionate alarm
The situation was exacerbated by an early misidentification of the caterpillar as an armyworm (a devastating crop pest that regularly attacks eastern Africa,
In fact it turned out to be Achaea catocaloides, a less threatening caterpillar that feeds mostly on the Dahoma tree.
As for the armyworm, it continues to cause devastation in eastern Africa each year. Outbreaks and high moth catches have already been reported in northern Tanzania,
says Ken Wilson, an ecologist at Lancaster University, UK. Together with the UK-based development organization CABI, he and fellow researchers have received just around £500, 000 (US$800,
000) over the next 18 months from the UK government to develop an armyworm early warning and control system in Tanzania.
which can be sprayed on the worms and, if successful, would reduce the need to use chemical insecticides.
Butterfly paper bust-up In August the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a paper online by Donald Williamson, a retired zoologist at the University of Liverpool, UK,
reporting that ancient butterflies accidentally mated with wormlike animals to give rise to caterpillars. The study which was communicated'by Lynn Margulis, of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
She is now ramping up the project a study of the neural basis of social communication in the frog Xenopus.
so I don't have to clean frogs any more. It's not bad to clean the frogs for a while,
but at some point it keeps you from being productive. The other scientist who was profiled, Jill Rafael-Fortney, 40,
works with mouse models of muscular dystrophy at Ohio State university in Columbus. She declined an interview request.
and implanted an artificial uterus in an animal which subsequently conceived and carried a pup to full term.
In 2007, the team made this trip every day as they excavated in a dark chamber 20 metres from the cave entrance, identifying animal bones along with more than 500 quartz artefacts.
Andrew Weaver, a climate researcher at the university, claimed that there had been sustained a hacking attempt in recent weeks.
diagnostic tests can't differentiate between infected and vaccinated animals, as both will test positive for antibodies against the virus. Cows also pass on antibodies to their offspring through their milk.
Rinderpest tops the list of killer diseases in animals, says Juan Lubroth, chief veterinary officer for the Food and Agricultural organization of the United nations (FAO) in Rome.
diagnostic tests can't differentiate between infected and vaccinated animals, as both will test positive for antibodies against the virus. Cows also pass on antibodies to their offspring through their milk.
Animals raised in the isolated environment expressed more genes involved in inflammatory immune responses and cholesterol synthesis,
makes pigs good model animals for such studies.
Altered microbe makes biofuel: Nature Newsin a bid to overcome the drawbacks of existing biofuels,
Mystery of the brown giant panda deepens: Nature Newspandas are endangered increasingly in the wild, and the sighting of one with extremely rare brown-and-white fur is now raising fears that the species may be suffering from inbreeding.
In November 2009, a staff member at the Foping Nature Reserve in China's Qinling Mountains one of the panda's last remaining strongholds spotted a panda with the unusual colouring.
This is only the seventh such animal spotted in the region over the past 25 years
Wang and his Twente colleague Andrew Skidmore are concerned that the brown-and-white form indicates that breeding between closely related pandas is becoming more common.
Each panda has two versions, or alleles, of each of its genes, one inherited from its mother and one from its father.
Wang suggests that the Qinling pandas carry a dominant gene for black fur and a recessive gene for brown fur.
This means that pandas with brown-and-white fur are only possible when they inherit the recessive brown gene from both mother and father.
if the pandas were related closely. The habitat in the Qinling Mountains is fragmented seriously and the population density is very high,
The brown pandas could be an indication of local inbreeding. Conservationists worry about such inbreeding because it means that more animals rely on the same set of genetic defences to overcome environmental threats,
increasing their risk of extinction. According to Wang, brown-and-white pandas have only been seen in the Qinling population,
one of five mountain regions where pandas still live in the wild. Qinling is home to around 300 animals, roughly one-sixth of the total panda population in the wild.
The first recorded brown-and-white panda a female called Dan-Dan was discovered in 1985.
She was taken into captivity mated with a black-and-white animal and gave birth to a normal black-and-white male.
A few years later, another brown-and-white panda was seen in the wild, together with its black-and-white mother.
These anecdotal observations strongly suggest the presence of a recessive gene or genes, says Wang.
The idea is worth investigating, says Sheng-guo Fang, a researcher at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China,
who has studied the morphology and genetics of the Qinling pandas. But there could be other factors at play,
although most of the Qinling pandas appear to be normal black-and-white animals, many of the region's pandas do have touches of brown in their chest fur1.
This suggests that there could be something specific to Qinling, such as the climate or a particular environmental chemical, that affects one
The Qinling Mountains have shaped brown subspecies of other mammals, such as the golden takin, he notes.
which show that despite a dramatic contraction of the panda's range over the past few thousand years,
the remaining giant panda populations seem to have retained a lot of genetic diversity2. The evidence that giant pandas in general,
and in the Qinling Mountains in particular, are of low genetic variation is at best equivocal, says Mike Bruford, a molecular ecologist at Cardiff University, UK,
The giant panda genome, which was published online in Nature last month3, also revealed little sign of inbreeding, says Jun Wang of the Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzhen, China.
But the genome is likely to prove invaluable for solving the mystery of the brown pandas of Qinling.
There are over 125 genes known to affect pigmentation in mice says Hopi Hoekstra, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard university in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and an expert on pigmentation in mammals. There are definitely a good handful of candidate genes you could sequence in the two morphs
A comparison of brown and black pandas at Qinling and other sites should shed light on the genetic basis of this rare variety,
Carbon credits proposed for whale conservation: Nature Newsbiological oceanographer Andrew Pershing wants carbon credits for whale conservation.
That's because whales, he says, are like trees. Like any animal or plant, they are made out of carbon.
And whales are so big they each store a lot of carbon, he says. Pershing, of the University of Maine in Orono and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, Maine, calculates that
even though some whale species are now recovering from the effects of factory whaling, total whale biomass today is less than one-fifth of
what it was in 1900, before whaling decimated the population. Letting the whale population recover
he said on 25 february at the American Geophysical Union's 2010 Ocean Sciences meeting in Portland,
Oregon, could eventually sequester 9 million tonnes of carbon in their combined biomass. He compares it to planting trees.
In a forest, trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and accumulate that as biomass. Whales take carbon out of the system through their food,
then incorporate that carbon in their tissues. Whaling, by contrast, is like cutting down trees for firewood.
You're taking whales out of the population and putting their carbon somewhere else. In the early days of whaling
the carbon is released through the consumption of whale meat by humans, but you're still taking carbon out of the whale
and putting it into something that's going to respire it. Furthermore, when whales die naturally,
they usually sink to the bottom of the ocean, carrying their carbon with them. Back in 1900,
when whale numbers were high, that would have totalled about 200,000 tonnes of carbon per year, Pershing estimates.
Even though benthic creatures eventually eat the whale carcasses (see'Bone-devouring worms discovered), 'the carbon will remain in the depths,
If whales increase in numbers, other species that compete for the same food might decline.
there could still be a substantial increase in total biomass owing to the difference in size between whales
Because large animals require less food per unit mass than smaller animals, any given food source (such as krill) can support a lot more biomass in a whale than in a small animal such as a penguin.
Other scientists greeted Pershing's presentation with enthusiasm. It's exciting says Daniel Costa, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California,
Santa cruz. It means that whales are important not just because they're charismatic, but because they play an important role in the carbon cycle.
Pershing's research may actually understate the degree to which whales could sequester carbon. The iron in whale faeces is an important micronutrient that is often in short supply in waters such as the Southern Ocean,
and it can help boost algal growth which ultimately means more food for everything, including whales.
In order to drive these large algal blooms you need iron says Costa. In fact, he says, the indirect benefits of iron fertilization from whale faeces might remove more carbon from the atmosphere by boosting algal growth than the growth of the whales themselves.
Pershing adds that the same analysis applies to other large ocean animals whose populations have been reduced drastically, such as bluefin tuna and some species of shark.
These guys are huge, he says. And even though all of these animals'biomass combined represents a small fraction of total human carbon emissions,
they could still sequester many tonnes of carbon. You could use carbon as one of the incentives to rebuild the stores of these large organisms
or early 2012 at a total cost of under $0. 53 per litre roughly on a par with that of'corn'ethanol produced from sugar-rich maize cobs.
or brinjal, that is insect-resistant. The crop carries a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt),
such as rice that is insect-resistant (Bt rice) or enriched with Vitamin a and micronutrients. Our national labs have all the genes for rice improvement,
and its moons since 2004, will get to fly until 2017, NASA announced on 3 february. The mission was slated originally to come to end in 2008,
The new schedule calls for 155 orbits around the planet, 54 fly-bys of the methane-shrouded Titan and 11 fly-bys of the icy moon Enceladus.
Awards Wolf winners: Physicists Anton Zeilinger, John Clauser and Alain Aspect share the prestigious 2010 Wolf Prize in Physics for their work on quantum entanglement.
Biologist Axel Ullrich took the medicine prize for his research in cancer (he co-developed trastuzumab,
) Pika not protected: The US Fish and Wildlife Service has denied endangered-species protection to the American pika (Ochotona princeps.
Campaigners had argued that the small herbivore (pictured) would be threatened by rising temperatures. It would have been only the second mammal other than the polar bear to be afforded such protection explicitly because of climate change.
Federal biologists said that pika, which live in mountainous parts of ten western US states, would be able to migrate
or adjust to warmer climes. Cloud access: The US National Science Foundation (NSF) announced on 4 february that selected NSF-supported researchers would be given access, via three-year agency grants,
to store and analyse data using Microsoft's cloud-computing service. Two related products developed by Google and IBM,
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