collected over meals and cocktails during the course of an often contentious week. As he rattled through the scenarios
Another cadre of researchers is pushing a more benign technology that involves seeding clouds with sea salt to increase their brightness.
many thought that truffles could be like cheese or wine, in that the microflora and yeast living on the truffles played a vital role in releasing volatile compounds,
which the fungus trades nutrients with oak-tree roots. The T. melanosporum genome also reveals that the fungus reproduces sexually more often than researchers thought.
gourmands who delight in truffled duck, white wine truffle sauce or truffled risotto are likely to wrinkle their noses at the thought of button mushrooms that have been engineered to smell like the real thing.
When you taste the black truffle on hot pasta, that is something you cannot forget, says Martin. Â
New zealand's GM cattle under fire: Nature Newsscientists in New zealand whose work with genetically modified (GM) animals had been threatened by A high Court ruling have been given a reprieve.
Chicken's split sex identity revealed: Nature Newsa study of sexually scrambled chickens suggests that sex in birds is determined in a radically different way from that in mammals.
Researchers studied three chickens that appeared to be literally half-male and half-female, and found that nearly every cell in their bodies from wattle to toe has an inherent sex identity.
This cell-by-cell sex orientation contrasts sharply with the situation in mammals, in which organism-wide sex identity is established through hormones.
The confused fowl have upended a century-old rule, established for vertebrates, that all cells in an embryo start off sexually indifferent and remain so until a sex-determining gene directs the development of gonads into either ovaries or testes.
Researchers were alerted first to the chickens by an employee in the poultry industry who spotted the unusual birds while visiting farms.
Instead, they found the chickens to be almost perfectly split between male and female. The hen half was made,
Clinton says the work shows that chickens have a fundamentally different way of determining their sex from mammals:
it becomes the only game in town, Clinton says. Sam's tubes and plumbing would suggest there is no rule for all vertebrates.
where testing will begin this summer on sheep and goats on both dairy and meat farms,
and also offer a way of charting the chemical evolution of the Milky way. The interstellar dust is fundamentally the stuff we're made of,
A few days after treatment, the mice had 98%fewer parasite eggs in their faecal samples
This provides a healthy and satisfying diet, but is far from a typical Western diet.
If we continue the current dietary regime typical of OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries,
we will not have the same results in terms of food availability as we would with a more moderate diet worldwide.
and regulation of markets of agricultural foodstuffs to avoid the yo-yo whereby prices can go so high that people do not have access to food.
that hominids began walking upright in response to the spread of grasslands in eastern Africa less than 8 million years ago.
For instance, White notes that isotopic analysis of tooth enamel of Ardi herself shows a diet from a woodland habitat.
There are non-chemical alternatives to soil fumigants including planting strawberries alongside mustard or broccoli, which release chemicals that deter insects
may be a way of tracking the spread of some diseases. To assess whether mosquito populations are harbouring dangerous viruses,
such as chickens and pigs, for antibodies that signal the presence of pathogens. Both methods put people at risk of exposure to the viruses.
chikungunya and yellow fever viruses, prefers blood meals over honey. The kinds of mosquitoes they trapped with this method are not necessarily the most important vectors for some viruses,
Dominant breeders rely on helpers to feed chicks, but they also tolerate individuals that don't seem to help at all.
and halting the spread of weapons technology. On 28 may, after almost a month of negotiations, 189 nations, including Iran,
But in the Northern hemisphere, fertilization experiments which involve pumping tonnes of CO2 into forest plots indicate that the effect is limited by the availability of nutrients such as nitrogen.
But the curtailment of commercial fishing owing to fears over contaminated seafood may hasten the recovery of exploited species. In some parts of Campeche,
Argentinian growers are exporting soya meal harvested and processed from these crops to Europe, especially The netherlands.
claiming that the imported soya meal contained the DNA sequence that it had patent protection for in Europe.
It argued that citing the fact that the DNA in the soya meal was not performing the function for
500, the United nations this week warned of the spread of acute diarrhoea and waterborne diseases such as dysentery and cholera.
Goldammer says the fires were started by negligent behaviour on the part of members of the public, who lit barbecues and fireworks in forested areas.
and only a quarter of cropland is deficient in this nutrient now, says Zhang. This has increased greatly crop production.
and spread of higher plants probably drove the increase. The evolution of vascular plants completely changed history, allowing a high concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere to be sustained.
and that it was not until the rise of vascular plants those with a circulatory system to transport nutrients in the Devonian that oxygen levels rose to near-modern values.
adding that lowering the supply of nutrients in the ocean also increases oxygenation, as animal life respires less.
Quietly, you reach for a doughnut. Stress speeds up the metabolism of grasshoppers, making them seek out easily digested sugars and carbohydrates for a quick energy boost.
This and other results, published in three journals in the past month, could have big implications not just for prospective prey,
Instead of plants, the grasshoppers were fed with an artificial diet of high-sugar or protein-rich'biscuits'and he saw the same trend.
Fearful grasshoppers went for the high-sugar cookies rather than the protein-rich bars1. All that sugary food means that the stressed-out insects are ingesting foods richer in carbon and poorer in nitrogen than their calmer,
protein-pumping cousins. Meanwhile, their bodies are breaking down proteins to make even more glucose. The result is a body that is made of significantly more carbon
The stressed-out living are likely to alter their diet, and the relaxed and happy dead are likely to make better fertilizer2.
'and feed there for a few days, says Kauffman. It remains to be seen whether the physiological effects of stress on grasshoppers scale up to plants, soil, bacteria and onwards,
early humans ate ground flour 20,000 years before the dawn of agriculture. Flour residues recovered from 30,000-year-old grinding stones found in Italy, Russia and the Czech republic point to widespread processing and consumption of plant grain,
according to a paper published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
The meat-centric view of early modern humans stems partly from the fact that meat-eating leaves a more indelible mark in the archaeological record than omnivory,
Bar-Yosef says that the study proves that flour-making was common to early modern humans.
a paleoanthropologist at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, expects that flour-making dates back even further than 30,000 years.
After all, humans, ancient or modern, just aren't equipped to live on a diet of meat alone.
If you get that much meat in your diet not balanced out with other nutrients, you get protein poisoning,
in breakfast cereals imported from South africa, says Wilberforce Tushemereirwe, who heads the country's National Banana Research Programme.
it seems possible that the phytoliths are evidence that animal fodder or grains were stockpiled at the site.
The net effect was a shortening of the growing season by about one month for steppe plants and three weeks for meadow vegetation.
which may mean queen bumblebees find less nectar when they come out of hibernation. This group proposed long-term monitoring projects
Research Milky way's double bubble Using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, a team of astronomers declared last week that they had discovered two gargantuan'bubbles'of ray-emitting particles extending north and south of our Galaxy's centre (M. Su et al.
The strategy was intended to restrict the spread of toxin-resistant pink bollworms by flooding the population with sterile moths.
To prevent the spread of Bt resistance, farmers are required to plant nearby'refuges'of conventional crops.
Judith Curry turns on her colleagues: Nature Newsin trying to understand the Judith Curry phenomenon,
it is tempting to default to one of two comfortable and familiar story lines. For most of her career, Curry, who heads the School of Earth
and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of technology, has been known for her work on hurricanes, Arctic ice dynamics and other climate-related topics.
Curry has been engaging actively with the climate change skeptic community, largely by participating on outsider blogs such as Climate Audit,
Curry says. But not all of it is. If only 1 percent of it or 10 percent of what the skeptics say is right
but Curry thinks it needs thoroughgoing reform. She accuses it of corruption. I'm not going to just spout off
earning Curry epithets from her colleagues ranging from naive to bizarre to nasty to worse.
The first paints Curry as a peacemaker someone who might be able to restore some civility to the debate and edge the public toward meaningful action.
Is Curry making things worse or better? Curry's saga began with a Science paper she co-authored in 2005,
which linked an increase in powerful tropical cyclones to global warming. It earned her scathing attacks on skeptical climate blogs.
Curry says, but the critics argued that these issues were much more significant than we had acknowledged.
Curry says, and we now have very cordial interactions with Chris Landsea (whom we were at loggerheads with in 2005/2006),
In the course of engaging with the skeptics, Curry ventured onto a blog run by Roger Pielke, Jr.
The latter, Curry adds, became my blog of choice, because I found the discussions very interesting and
'It was here that Curry began to develop respect for climate outsiders or at least, some of them.
Curry says, I realize I engaged in groupthink myself not on the hurricane paper per se
Curry says, on the subject of atmospheric aerosols that is, particles such as dust and soot that affect cloud formation.
Still, once Curry ventured out onto the skeptic blogs, the questions she saw coming from the most technically savvy of the outsiders including statisticians,
Climate skeptics have seized on Curry's statements to cast doubt on the basic science of climate change.
Curry is not alone in criticizing the IPCC and individual climate scientists; in the wake of Climategate, an error about glacial melting in an IPCC report,
the central issue that concerns Curry also happens to be the key problem in translating climate science into climate policy.
what temperatures have actually been over those hundreds of years and Curry, along with many skeptics, does not think we have as good a handle on that as the scientific community believes.
More important, other scientists part ways with Curry over how significant those uncertainties are to the final calculation.
For that reason, Curry's charges are misleading, her critics say. We've seen a lot of strawmen from Judy lately,
however, Curry is in harmony with her colleagues. The public needs to understand that in science uncertainty is not the same thing as ignorance;
In fact, Curry says, we don't know how to quantify it, so we don't even include it in our models.
as Curry's overall critique might lead one to assume, the IPCC's 2007 Fourth Assessment Report flags this uncertainty.
Curry says. The rise in temperature from a doubling of CO2 could be one degree.
There is no question Curry has caused a stir; she is cited frequently by some of the harshest skeptics around,
What scientists worry is that such exposure means Curry has the power to do damage to a consensus on climate change that has been building for the past 20 years.
To Curry, the damage comes not from the skeptics'critiques themselves, most of which are questionable,
By treating Curry as a pariah, Haslam says, scientists are only enhancing her reputation as some kind of renegade who speaks truth to power.
it is not in the interests of climate scientists to treat Curry as merely an annoyance or a distraction.
the two competing storylines about Judith Curry peacemaker or dupe? are both true. Climate scientists feel embattled by a politically motivated witch hunt,
what Curry has tried to do naturally feels like treason especially since the skeptics have latched onto her as proof they have been right all along.
But Curry and the skeptics have their own cause for grievance. They feel they have all been lumped together as crackpots, no matter how worthy their arguments.
Smorgasbord of genomes for food lovers: Nature Newsgenome gastronomes rejoice! Today sees the publication of genome sequences behind two of the tastiest treats:
Now a team partly supported by rival chocolate company Hershey has become the first to get a genome of the valuable plant into a peer-reviewed journal1.
Scientists know how to convert these materials into simple sugars, but doing so requires energy and specialized enzymes, or both.
and location of nectar supplies to the hive according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
The ruling meant that GM beets which provide about half of the US sugar supply could not be grown until the US Department of agriculture (USDA) completes environmental-impact statements.
allowing sinistrality to spread throughout previously dextral populations. Sinistrality also prevented mating with dextral ancestors,
which actively feed, nurture and defend their crops, the amoebae are relatively primitive farmers, with no active cultivation at the new site.
This is probably because farmers consistently relinquish nourishment so that they can save some to migrate with,
because carrying your own food source means that you don't have to travel as far to find lunch.
and more like just bringing lunch along on the trip, says Purugganan. Farmers don't eat their seed.
After artemisinin At least US$175 million is needed to halt the spread of malaria parasites that are resistant to artemisinins,
Transgenic chickens curb bird flu transmission: Nature Newsresearchers have made genetically modified chickens that can't infect other birds with bird flu.
The H5n1 strain of influenza which raged through Southeast asia a decade ago and has killed hundreds of people to date remains a problem in some developing countries,
We have more ambitious objectives in terms of getting full flu resistance before we would propose to put these chickens into true production,
even if the GM chickens carried full resistance to influenza, there are political and economic hurdles to their widespread commercial use not least the public's aversion to GM food.
The chickens were modified by a team led by Helen Sang, a geneticist at the Roslin Institute of the University of Edinburgh, UK.
The researchers modified the chickens by injecting a lentivirus carrying the cassette into clusters of cells on top of egg yolks.
These animals can be crossbred to produce chickens that carry the cassette in every cell. The researchers infected decoy-carrying birds with H5n1
The technique may become most useful not for preventing the spread of H5n1 but for using similar cassettes to create resistance to other common poultry diseases.
but this would of course be at the expense of pastures and forests, which are a reservoir of biodiversity and carbon,
which nutrients are available. Moreover, varieties that perform better when thirsty often underperform when water is plentiful.
Business Biofuel offering Gevo, a company that genetically modifies microbes to produce chemicals from plant sugars,
owing to increasingly intensive farming practices and the world's growing taste for meat and other animal products.
owing to increasingly intensive farming practices and the world's growing taste for meat and other animal products.
and animal diseases will be critical in controlling the spread of diseases, he adds. Mcdermott points out that methods need to be tailored to the circumstances in developing countries to control the spread of livestock diseases.
For example, some diseases, such as contagious bovine pleuropneumonia a respiratory disease with high death rates can be controlled in Western countries by quarantine
and the closure of its research centre in Sandwich, UK. Most of the 2, 400 staff there are scientists.
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.
First author Camille Parmesan, a population biologist at the University of Texas in Austin, explains why.
to conserve global food security. The funding was confirmed at a meeting of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture this week in Bali, Indonesia.
We need to invest in research in crops that feed the poor, he says.
Counting the carbon cost of peatland conversion: Nature Newsup to 6%of carbon-rich peat-swamp forests had been cleared in Peninsular Malaysia
because peatlands are low in nutrients and suitable for only some types of agriculture, making them an expensive option.
which has soils that are starved of key nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. The overuse of nitrogen fertilizers elsewhere in the world,
These lollipops will not do. Research Shuttle swansong NASA's space shuttle Discovery launched for its 39th and final flight on 24 february, taking six astronauts as well as supplies and additional science capabilities to the International Space station on an 11
In rich countries, people generally have access to a diverse diet and to foods that have been fortified with various essential nutrients,
but these items are often unaffordable or unobtainable in the developing world. People in poor nations
nutrients and animal wastes and reduce pollution, he says. But a prerequisite of a mixed system is to tighten up regulations on animal-feed production
he adds. 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,
Radiation effects on egg hatching and the survival of newborn mammals still need to be surveyed
Locusts lay their eggs in moist, sandy soils and flourish when the desert blooms. If the breeding gets out of control,
Case-control studies of patients in the German outbreak pointed to salad vegetables and both cucumbers and beansprouts have been suspects.
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.
or in the environment might be enhancing the spread of Shiga-toxin-producing phage. Acheson worked on this question
cucumbers and salad vegetables prior to contracting the disease, but exactly which vegetables are responsible,
handle and consume salad vegetables. This is still our only explanation for this demographic, says Wieler.
The signal varies depending on the leaves'concentrations of nutrients, minerals, pigments such as chlorophyll, and the compounds that plants use to protect themselves against the Sun and predators.
and discovered that an invasive ginger plant was competing with native trees for the nutrient.
We have lots of our eggs in the pyrethroid basket, says Robert Newman, director of the Global Malaria Programme.
The tensions have been fuelled by high prices for commodities such as soya beans and beef, which have driven up demand for arable land
changing the flow of fundamental nutrients like nitrogen, and the pressure is only going to grow as the population rises in coming decades.
In addition to basic environmental data about soils, nutrients and land cover, the project tracks agricultural practices.
Researchers hope that by studying how the viruses jump to people they can come up with ways to limit the spread of disease without culling the bats
Spread of infection from bats to humans is an increasing problem in Asia and Africa
Although the loss of soil nutrients and moisture threatens roughly a third of the world's land area,
Ancient sea jelly makes tree of life wobble: Nature News A 580-million-year-old fossil is casting doubt on the established tree of animal life.
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.
although bamboo contains proteins, sugars and fats among other nutrients, most of its calories are locked in hard-to-digest cellulose fibres that make up plant cell walls.
Most herbivores have developed ways to break down cellulose into sugars; 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.
A broad survey of animal gut microbes found that pandas'microorganisms resembled those of black bears, polar bears and other meat-eaters3.
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,
which resembled known genes for enzymes that break cellulose into simpler sugars. The microbial enzymes may help giant pandas to extract extra energy from the small amount of bamboo that they manage to process
herbs and nuts in nine jars taken from Mediterranean shipwrecks. The researchers say DNA testing of underwater artefacts from different time periods could help to reveal how such complex markets developed across the Mediterranean.
Other'hits'included DNA from legumes, ginger, walnut and juniper and from herbs such as mint, thyme and oregano.
and that they may have contained more complex foodstuffs than previously imagined, incorporating herbal flavourings or preservatives.
Mark Lawall, a specialist in ancient Mediterranean trade at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg,
as well as fruit, fish, meat and resin. He says the DNA approach offers great promise for advances in terms of analysing amphora contents from archaeologically documented wrecks,
Nature Newspaired with rice or steeped in feijoada stew, beans are an essential feature of Brazilian cuisine.
The fish used in the study were an indigenous carp species that is considered a delicacy,
has no specific provisions for addressing agricultural greenhouse-gas emissions. The scientists recommend that parties to the UNFCCC establish a programme to develop a global sustainable agriculture strategy,
because some of the pastures are on slopes or near high-voltage power lines, for example, or because the images are too poor to make out cattle,
because researchers often used different methods and different animals spread around the world to draw general conclusions about megafaunal extinctions.
For example, the North american dish shrimp scampi and tomato broil has a recipe where the two main ingredients (shrimp
and the mozzarella, parmesan and tomato used in the recipe all share 4-methylpentanoic acid.
The team also found that some common ingredients in North american recipes milk, butter, cocoa, vanilla, cream and eggs,
when the team removed the most common ingredients that shared the least flavour compounds (beef, ginger, pork, cayenne, chicken and onion) from the analysis,
and to the kitchen, where he is keen to try the flavour combinations that arose during his analysis. In particular he wants to combine coffee and garlic.
the treatment uses viruses to deliver a healthy version of the gene to patients'liver cells.
Seaweed produces four kinds of sugars laminarin, mannitol, alginate and cellulose. The biggest fraction in brown seaweed is alginate,
which could then digest the alginate into simple sugars. The team also engineered the strain
so that it could convert those sugars into ethanol, enabling the direct production of ethanol from brown seaweed.
The main challenge in biofuels is not the ability to degrade complex carbohydrates and turn them into simple sugars,
chickens and turkeys a ban that it had ordered already in 2008, but revoked after protests from farmers,
On 4 Â January, the agency said that it would prohibit certain uses of cephalosporins in farm animals including cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys,
In animals not listed in the FDA order, such as ducks or rabbits, vets will have more discretion to use the drugs.
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.
Synbio troubles US synthetic biology firm Amyris which engineers microbes to process plant sugars into useful chemicals saw its share price plunge by 28%on 10 february,
sugar cane and beef. These standards focus on everything from soil management to workers'rights, and include limits on deforestation.
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.
Moreover, the pork industry often doesn t want the negative image of having swine flu detected in its farms.
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