says Tim Wheeler of the University of Reading, UK, who studies the impact of climate change on agriculture
Wheeler says that, in general, the new numbers seem reasonable if on the high side. He adds that the costs of dealing with the environmental and human problems already facing the world could swamp the additional costs of future climate change the cost of achieving the United nations Millennium Development Goals,
Ward's team found that Lucy's metatarsal was more like that of a modern human than a chimpanzee.
For the tree-dwelling chimpanzee, the fourth metatarsal lies flatter against the ground, and the middle of the foot is mobile.
This flat-footed structure grants chimpanzees tremendous flexibility and allows them to grasp branches in trees.
whether A. afarensis had a flexible foot like a chimpanzee or a more humanlike arched one.
many had speculated that the species had feet that were something of a compromise between those of chimpanzees and humans.
Under the agreement, 21 forestry companies and 9 environmental groups are discussing ways to preserve large sections of Canada's northern forest a big storehouse of carbon and a crucial habitat for the threatened woodland caribou
(Rangifer tarandus caribou) without diminishing lumber and pulp production. The companies that hold the rights to log roughly one-quarter of Canada's boreal forest have agreed to discuss giving them up in some unspecified areas;
In the first track, working groups of company officials and environmentalists in seven provinces are trying to identify areas of caribou habitat to be removed from logging plans.
has said that the agreement means upwards of 20 million hectares of caribou habitat need to be conserved.
What we agreed to do is to increase the protected areas in the caribou range in ways that won't disrupt the work of our mills.
but it obviously won't be close to the total 29 million hectares of caribou habitat. The original agreement pledged to respect the principles of ecosystem-based management,
and put the fish on a par with other long-distance seed movers of the animal world African hornbills and Asian elephants.
in part because it is much easier to study seed distribution by birds and terrestrial mammals.
Nature Newspolicy Events People Research Funding Trend watch Coming up Policy Wolf delisted The grey wolf will be removed from the US government's endangered species list in some northwestern states
Grey wolf populations have recovered significantly in northwestern states, but environmental campaigners such as the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona, bemoaned the fact that politicians had lifted protection rather than waiting for due process under the Endangered Species Act.
The US$55-million project follows a mouse brain atlas released in 2006, and a map of the mouse spinal cord two years later.
See go. nature. com/l9923y for more. Funding Golden rice funds The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving US$18. 6 million to research on transgenic, nutritionally fortified rice and cassava.
birds and forest-dwelling mammals were exposed to daily doses up to 100 times greater -and fish and marine algae to doses several thousand times greater-than are considered generally safe.
rodents and trees-in particular pine and spruce. The reported values are written not in stone but they're definitely plausible,
Radiation effects on egg hatching and the survival of newborn mammals still need to be surveyed
and toxins',including camel, goat and sheep pox viruses. The report was a response to an executive order from US President Barack Obama last year.
Events Primate peril Employees at a major US primate-research centre and the animals it houses, all survived unscathed a massive chemical explosion at a nearby plant on 14 june.
The New Iberia Research center in Louisiana holds 6, 500 macaques and 360 chimpanzees. Some 1, 900 rhesus and pigtail macaques were housed within 350 metres of a fire and multiple explosions at the Multi-Chem facility in New Iberia,
but none seemed to be harmed; they are now being monitored for stress and other adverse affects.
He says they saw Shiga-toxin-producing phage transfer between E coli in response to sub-therapeutic levels of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin in vitro and in the intestines of mice.
Phage are particularly abundant in the guts of ruminants says Alfredo Caprioli, from the European Reference Laboratory for verotoxin-producing E coli in Rome,
West africans at risk from bat epidemics: Nature Newsserious viruses carried by bats pose a considerable risk to people in West Africa,
warn epidemiologists cataloguing bat-human interactions in the region. Bats are thought to have been the source of several of the nastiest viruses to jump to humans from animals during the past 40 years,
traditional bushmeat species such as apes and antelope are no longer easily available owing to over-hunting and, in some cases,
but in 2008 the team reported finding antibodies to them in Eidolon helvum fruit bats in Ghana, West Africa, indicating that these bats had been infected too1.
Patients and doctors are showered daily with bat urine which could be infected with the virus. Such huge colonies in residential areas are uncommon in Asia and Australasia.
were collected from a survey of 551 Ghanaian bat hunters, vendors and consumers. There is a massive bat-bushmeat industry in Ghana that has not been picked up in previous studies of the bushmeat trade
says Cunningham. All this adds up to a potentially disastrous public-health problem in West Africa, says Cunningham and one that is currently not recognized
Mcnulty also fed the five bacterial strains from the yoghurt to'gnotobiotic'mice animals raised
As with the twins, the yoghurt bacteria did not change the composition of the rodents'resident communities.
but gnotobiotic mouse models will be vital for such studies. Using the mice, he can examine the effect of probiotic foods under tightly controlled conditions,
with defined communities where all the actors and genes are known. The mouse models provide a foundation for critically evaluating the claims from manufacturers of functional foods and probiotics
he says. It's too early to be drawing conclusions, say other researchers. Dusko Ehrlich, a microbiologist at The french National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), thinks that the team did not look at enough twins,
However, he cautions that there are limits to studying mice with human gut bacteria because different species have their own specifically evolved sets.
we're always looking to refine these mouse models to be more like the human context.
The fact that we see shared responses in mice and humans is good evidence that we're doing something right.
Microbes help giant pandas overcome meat-eating heritage: Nature Newsgiant pandas don't digest bamboo by themselves. Microorganisms in their guts may help the endangered animals to subsist on plants
despite a gut that is better suited to eating meat, finds an analysis published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
Pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) are among the pickiest eaters in the animal world. In the wild, they eat more than 12 kilograms of bamboo each day and little else.
A 1982 study of two pandas Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing in the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in WASHINGTON DC,
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.
But pandas are bears, a generally carnivorous family, and neither produce the enzymes necessary to digest cellulose nor harbour the same microbes as ruminants.
A broad survey of animal gut microbes found that pandas'microorganisms resembled those of black bears, polar bears and other meat-eaters3.
Fuwen Wei, an ecologist at the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing,
The team collected stool samples from seven wild pandas in the Qinling and Xiangling mountains in central and western China,
as well as from eight captive pandas. By sequencing stool DNA, the researchers determined the different kinds of bacteria present,
Although wild and captive pandas have different diets and lifestyles the captive pandas eat a more diverse diet that includes fruit and milk they tended to harbour similar microbe species in their guts.
Wei's team found that samples from both groups contained previously unknown genes produced by Clostridium bacteria,
The microbial enzymes may help giant pandas to extract extra energy from the small amount of bamboo that they manage to process
and pseudo-thumbs, bones that allow them to grip plant stalks that help pandas to live on bamboo,
But Ruth Ley, a microbiologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New york, says that pandas still harbour fewer cellulose-digesting enzymes than even non-exclusively herbivorous species such as humans.
The main way the panda has adapted to the low-quality diet is not via microbiota like the vast majority of other animals,
"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,
How mammoths lost the extinction lottery: Nature Newswoolly mammoths, woolly rhinos and other large animals driven to extinction
since the last ice age each succumbed to a different lethal mix of circumstances. This conclusion the result of a huge analysis of fossils, climate records and DNA hints that it could be more difficult than thought to identify the species at greatest risk of disappearing today.
we would have woolly mammoths and no reindeer, so Santa would drag his sleigh with woolly mammoths.
Fifty thousand years ago, no fewer than 150 genera of large animals roamed the planet,
including woolly mammoths, giant sloths and cave bears. Within 40 000 years two-thirds of them were gone.
For a more consistent picture, he and his colleagues charted the population dynamics of woolly mammoths
woolly rhinos, wild horses, reindeer, steppe bison and musk ox. The researchers created a series of snapshots of the European,
As the climate subsequently warmed, woolly rhinos woolly mammoths and the Eurasian populations of musk oxen went extinct as populations became more and more isolated from one another.
But these extinctions happened thousands of years apart, and the animals'ranges changed in different ways.
For instance, woolly rhinos roamed much of Europe and Asia until their extinction around 14,000 years ago,
whereas the mammoths'range inched northward until they disappeared around 4, 000 years ago. Humans are off the hook for some extirpations,
Wild horses, on the other hand, lived across Europe and Asia until very recently, and two-thirds of European and Siberian archaeological sites contain their bones,
And woolly mammoths reproduced slowly, whereas reindeer are more fecund, almost like a rodent, she says.
The team found no way to predict the future extinction of a species, based on either an animal's genetic diversity or the size of its range.
000 to 35,000 years ago I would have predicted that reindeer would go extinct while Eurasian musk ox would do well,
what happened to the mammoth, he says. But when we think about species today, megafauna represent a minute fraction of the fauna we have.
Chimp research Most biomedical research on chimpanzees is"unnecessary, the US Institute of Medicine found in a report released on 15 december.
The report means that research using chimps that is funded by the US government will be curtailed sharply.
where director Francis Collins said that"something like 50%of the agency's roughly 37 projects involving chimps would be phased out
) Just 8. 5-9. 0 millimetres long from snout to vent about a millimetre shorter than other tiny frog species the amphibian was found living in leaf litter
marine mammals and other sometimes controversial topics, prohibits agency employees from distorting science and protects the rights of NOAA scientists to speak openly about their work
found that just five mutations allowed avian H5n1 to spread easily among ferrets, which are a good proxy for how flu behaves in other mammals,
including humans. All five mutations have been spotted individually although not together in wild viruses. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues have submitted similar work to Nature,
or mammals, may be better than no warnings at all. But even if a candidate pandemic H5n1 virus was detected in poultry,
The relative ease of making H5n1 transmissible between mammals in the lab should now prompt the world to address these glaring inadequacies in surveillance
and journalist Brian Deer over a string of articles that branded him a fraud (F. Godlee et al.
which are deadly to both horses and humans. Her research requires the highest level of biological security containment BSL-4
but no BSL-4 labs in the United states can accommodate horses, so she collaborates with researchers in Australia."
The genetic make-up of one individual a female farmer known as GÃ k4 bears a startling similarity to that of modern-day Mediterraneans.
which make up the lion s share of the food consumed around the world. Cereals and vegetables need lots of nitrogen to grow,
and considered bringing in trained dogs to help the hunt, at an estimated cost of US$400,
but 21 of the 25 leeches they tested contained DNA from other mammals, including the Truong Son muntjac deer (Muntiacus truongsonensis) and the Annamite striped rabbit (Nesolagus timinsi),
which was discovered only a decade ago. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists both species as data deficient because scientists know so little about their populations or habitat.
In the Molecular Ecology special issue, various research teams worked out the diet of a leopard by sequencing DNA in its faeces3;
but it s a very promising method for finding it and pretty much any other mammal in the forest
or decorated with the outline of a bear contained traces of DNA from the Asian black bear (Ursus thibetanus),
Monkey genetics track social statusimagebroker/FLPAGROOMING is one way in which rhesus macaques show deference and curry favour.
and her colleagues studied 49 captive female rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). At the start of the study, all the animals had a medium social rank,
The researchers divided the monkeys into ten new groups, where their social ranks changed. Typically, the first animal assigned to a group had the highest ranking and the last the lowest,
Tung and her colleagues analysed blood samples from the monkeys for differences in gene expression. Of the 6, 097 genes tested
Increased activity in immune-system genes, particularly those related to inflammation, was twice as common among low-ranking monkeys as would be expected by chance.
although the study did not look at the monkeys'health. The changes did not seem permanent.
Analysing samples from seven monkeys that changed rank a second time when other animals entered the group showed that their gene expression responded rapidly,
but this is the first study to look at nonhuman primates, says Tung. Research has shown also the health consequences of low social status on both animals and humans.
The results of the macaque study are"potentially highly relevant to humans because they confirm that health depends on social status,
and not vice versa, says Michael Marmot, an epidemiologist at University college London, who led the Whitehall study."
The macaque study suggests potential mechanisms for the Whitehall study's findings, Marmot adds. The link between genes and social status may be more difficult to tease out in humans than in monkeys,
says Tung, owing to the greater complexity of our society. The monkey experiment is an"important study,
says Dario Maestripieri, a behavioural biologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois. But, he adds,
researchers should replicate the experiment using bigger groups that include males, to see if the effect is seen in a more natural social situation.
and is hoping to examine how social rank affects the macaques'susceptibility to infection
Million-year-old ash hints at origins of cookinggreatstock Photographic Library/Alamythe plant and animal ash was found thirty metres inside the Wonderwerk Cave beyond the reach of a lightning strike.
Berna and his colleagues searched the sediments for bat faeces, because large piles of rotting guano can become hot enough to ignite spontaneously.
and carbon-storage potential than others, says William Laurance, a forest-conservation scientist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.
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,
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.
The Welsh government backed out of the trial last month. David Williams, chairman of the UK charity, the Badger Trust, believes the decision to cull should be reassessed in light of the new research."
"The unreliability allows disease to remain undetected, and badgers are blamed when infected cows are found later,
he says.""We have queried frequently the accuracy of testing, only to be told it is acceptable by EU standards
who has become frustrated by the badger-centric debate.""If this can make people look more at epidemiology than politics,
Because pigs mimic these human diseases more closely than mice, they are desirable models for drug testing
such as that granted to transgenic mice, but so far the FDA has provided not one. Although delays have driven nearly other GE animal companies under,
"Pinz  n has rats. Santiago had pigs and goats. Pinta had goats, but only for 20  years.
One of the most fascinating populations lives around Wolf volcano at the northern tip of the island of Isabela.
of sea to reach Wolf, probably carried by pirates and whalers. Using DNA from museum specimens
6 that Wolf is also harbouring descendants of the long-lost Floreana lineage and the recently lost Pinta one.
The researchers hope to mount a return expedition to Wolf volcano next year, in an effort to locate the Floreana-and Pinta-like tortoises.
In theory, these animals could be taken off Wolf volcano for captive breeding. Floreana has been affected heavily by habitat destruction
But the Floreana-like tortoises on Wolf could help with a long-term project to restore the island s ecology.
and African elephant poaching levels are at their highest for a decade, according to a 21 june report from the United nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
says William Laurance, a forest-conservation scientist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia. Indonesia, the world s largest grower of oil palms (see Palm sprouts),
Jaguars, lowland tapirs, woolly spider-monkeys and giant anteaters are almost absent in Brazilian northeastern forests, which are among the most ancient and threatened tropical ecosystems on the planet.
and the United kingdom, focused on populations of 18 mammal species in 196 forest fragments, within an area of more than 250,000 square kilometres.
The researchers estimated the population density of the mammals from before European colonists arrived roughly 500 years ago,
Only three species (two small monkeys and one armadillo) are still present across the region.
even big forest patches are in fact largely empty of mammals a proxy for the general health of the ecosystem."
Estimates of earlier mammal populations were based on the relationship between forest area and its capacity to support various species
Canale and his co-authors spent two years driving along dirt roads in three Brazilian states to interview local people about the presence of large mammals."
"In most places, jaguars, tapirs, woolly spider-monkeys and white-lipped peccaries weren t even in living memory,
Chandrayaan-1. Primate transport Air china said on 31 Â July that it would stop shipments of nonhuman primates for research.
which has led to many major air carriers refusing to fly primates bound for research centres (see Nature 483,381-382;
) PETA says that China Eastern is the only major airline now known to be flying primates out of China the country that last year transported more than 70%of the primates bound for US labs. See go. nature. com/ckhq93
A. DI MEO/EPA/CORBISITALIAN dog-breeding facility at risk One of the largest suppliers of beagles (pictured) for mandatory drug testing in Europe could struggle to survive after an Italian court ordered its temporary closure
and granted guardianship of the dogs to the animal-rights groups that filed charges of maltreatment.
By 6 Â August, some 1, 400 beagles had been placed in private homes; they will not be allowed to return to Green Hill
whether vaccines can be developed against another related virus, the sheep and goat disease called peste des petits ruminants,
Arctic drilling stops Plans to drill for oil and gas resources off the coast of Alaska have been abandoned following damage to oil containers on the spill-cleanup barge Arctic Challenger,
The setback means that the mission no longer meets the safety requirements for a permit to drill specific wells. Shell will continue to bore exploratory top holes in the Chukchi sea in preparation for further drilling,
Chimp research cut The US National institutes of health (NIH) is ending its funding for chimpanzee work at the largest centre for such research that it supports.
The agency will retire 110 Â chimpanzees from the New Iberia Research center, part of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette,
There are still 308 Â chimpanzees available for invasive experiments at two other NIH-supported centres;
Rat study sparks GM furoreeurope has never been particularly fond of genetically modified (GM) foods, but a startling research paper published last week looks set to harden public and political opposition even further,
and Chemical Toxicology, looked for adverse health effects in rats fed NK603 maize (corn), developed by biotech company Monsanto to resist the herbicide glyphosate
It reported that the rats developed higher levels of cancers had larger cancerous tumours and died earlier than controls.
The rats were monitored for two years (almost their whole life  span), making this the first long-term study of maize containing these specific genes.
An earlier test of NK603 maize in rats in a 90-day feeding trial the current regulatory norm sponsored by Monsanto showed no adverse effects3.
Other scientists point out that the Sprague-Dawley strain of rats used in the experiments has been shown to be susceptible to developing tumours spontaneously,
such as claims that graphs in the paper showing rat survival over time do not include data for the controls.
The authors concede that Sprague-Dawley rats may not be the best model for such long-term studies,
but argue that the difference between the NK603-fed rats and controls is marked, and that many fewer control rats developed tumours in middle age.
The 90-day trial of Monsanto s NK603 maize used in its authorization also used Sprague-Dawley rats,
and his colleagues have isolated a new strain of H1n2 influenza from Korean pigs that kills infected ferrets the model animal of choice for influenza work
Most of these viruses did not cause any signs of serious disease in ferrets. Sw/1204 was the exception.
It replicated in the airways and lungs of three infected ferrets killing one and causing such severe disease in the others that they had to be euthanized.
The virus also spread through the air to infect three healthy ferrets that were housed in cages next to infected ones.
Vietnam, says that the study"certainly underscores the need for surveillance of mammals. But he adds that humans, poultry,
Recent experiments show how Avian flu may become transmissible among mammals. In an era of constant and rapid international travel,
says William Laurance, a conservation biologist at James Cook University in Cairns, Queensland, Australia.""Much of this forest disruption is illegal,
2007 and 2008, the researchers found that agricultural production provides the lion s share of greenhouse-gas emissions from the food system,
Swedish scientists discovered in 2002 that a wide range of baked and fried goods contain worryingly high levels of acrylamide1 a simple organic molecule that is a neuro  toxin and carcinogen in rats.
Badger cull stalled The british government on 23 Â October delayed a controversial cull of badgers (Meles meles) that has provoked years of heated debate among researchers, farmers and politicians.
which badgers can transmit to cattle (see Nature 490,317-318; 2012) but it will now take place no sooner than next summer.
No native microbes were found by an early analysis of the ice on the drill used by a Russian team to penetrate Lake Vostok, a body of water buried deep under Antarctica s ice, in February.
Chimp haven The US National institutes of health (NIH) said on 17 Â October that it will send 20 Â chimpanzees to permanent retirement in a federally funded sanctuary by August 2013 double the number it announced last month.
The animals are among 110 Â NIH-owned chimpanzees that the agency is removing from the New Iberia Research center in Lafayette, Louisiana Officials at the 80-hectare Chimp Haven sanctuary in Keithville,
Primates were always tree-dwellersprimates love to climb and most make their homes high up in the branches of trees,
Now, the discovery of some ankle bones is making it look likely that primates were arboreal from the very beginning.
The earliest primate, Purgatorius, lived around 65 million years ago and is well known from the same fossil beds in Montana that yield tyrannosaurs just a few metres deeper down.
as is typical with mammals, they have all been survived teeth that owing to the presence of protective enamel.
the ankle bones are the right size for pairing with all of the teeth that have been collected in the same area and look a lot like the ankles of later primates.
"The anatomy of these specimens certainly matches that of known Paleocene primates, but a skull or a full skeleton would tell us so much more,
Primate or not, the ankle bones suggest considerable flexibility.""This animal s foot clearly had a wide range of motion,
"We really think this closes the question of where the first primates were living, says Chester.
"We think there is a connection here between primates and plant evolution, with fruits playing a role in luring them up,
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