If farming had spread solely as a cultural process, we would not expect to see a farmer in the north with such genetic affinity to southern populations,
says that one farmer from Scandinavia is certainly not enough to explain the spread of farming in places like Spain
delivering key nutrients such as nitrogen when the crops need it most. Organic approaches such as laying crop residue on the soil surface,
build up nutrients over a longer period of time.""There is not the synchrony between supply of nutrients and crop demand, says Andrew Macdonald, a soil scientist at Rothamsted Research, an agricultural-science institute in Harpenden, UK.
Organic approaches fare better when producing fruits such as strawberries which have yields only 3%lower than in conventional farming and oilseed crops such as soybean,
Prompted by research published this week2 showing that the bloodsuckers can store DNA from their meals for several months,
including the Truong Son muntjac deer (Muntiacus truongsonensis) and the Annamite striped rabbit (Nesolagus timinsi),
W. Kolvoort/naturepl. combloodsuckers feast on the forest s rare delicacies.""It is a very easy way to get a snapshot of
The Vietnam field trial suggests that leeches preserve DNA from only their most recent blood meal so an animal s range is likely to include the location where the leech was found.
In the Molecular Ecology special issue, various research teams worked out the diet of a leopard by sequencing DNA in its faeces3;
including a poisonous herb called Ephedra and the woody vine Aristolochia. Sometimes known as birthwort, Aristolochia  contains aristolochic acid,
which can cause kidney and liver damage and bladder cancer. Medicinal use of the herb probably explains high rates of bladder cancer in Taiwan,
according to a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences2. At least one of the four medicines that contained Aristolochia DNA also contained aristolochic acid.
Monkey genetics track social statusimagebroker/FLPAGROOMING is one way in which rhesus macaques show deference and curry favour.
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,
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,
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.
Bovine TB disguised by liver flukebovine tuberculosis (btb) could be spreading across Britain because the most widely used test for the disease is ineffective
when cattle are infected with a common liver parasite. The liver fluke Fasciola hepatica was known already to affect the standard skin test for btb,
when they were infected with liver fluke2. The United states, Canada and Australia have eradicated btb, but Britain and Ireland have struggled to control it.
War on weeds loses groundwith its jumble of leaves and pointy, green, flower spikes, the plant known as pigweed or palmer amaranth (Amaranthus palmeri) isn t much to look at.
But health officials fear that the spread of insecticide-resistant mosquitoes could bring about a resurgence of the disease.
Switzerland, issued a strategic plan to curb the spread of resistance.""We don t want to wait for failures to happen,
the report urges that a global database be set up to track the spread of resistance,
Canadian company Iogen Energy in Ottawa announced on 30 april that it has shelved plans to build a large-scale facility in Manitoba to produce fuel ethanol from cellulose, the long molecular chain of sugars that forms
Most fuel ethanol is made by fermenting the sugars in grains or sugar cane, but cellulosic ethanol can be made from municipal waste, wood chips, grass,
But cracking apart the tough cellulose molecules is a lot harder than brewing up simple sugars.
and improving nutrition and diets. Frank Rijsberman, the new chief executive officer of the CGIAR consortium, said that the organization had made a deliberate decision to shift its strategy to focus on outcome-driven research.
and spread of the gene variants needed for the adult population to digest the lactose found in milk,
whether the animals were kept for meat, dairying or other uses. Evershed and Dunne hoped to overcome these problems by examining fat residues left on the pottery shards.
000 years ago in Europe and later spread to Africa could have offered a unique benefit in a parching climate.
Manney sees zoonotic diseases those that can spread to humans as posing an even greater source of risk and uncertainty.
she removed many of the bill s contentious provisions, including one that would have granted effectively an amnesty for any illegal deforestation conducted before July 2008.
"Now we are in the middle of this mess, and I don t think it is going to end soon.
and enforcement agencies or whether it will sow doubts and ambiguities that may undercut compliance.
Researchers are investigating how certain crop varieties including sorghum and pearl millet which originated in Africa are able to withstand heat
There has already been some success with sorghum, which has shown improved productivity in drought conditions that occur late in the growing season in temperate and tropical environments,
when handlers discovered eggs in the enclosure he shared with two females, but the eggs were found to be unfertilized2.
On 24 Â June this year Fausto Llerena, a ranger at the Galapagos National park and George s long-term keeper, found him slumped in his corral.
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.
and livestock provide ripe conditions for endemic zoonotic diseases to arise and spread, the study says.
Demand for livestock products such as meat and milk is rising across the globe and could offer poor farmers a route out of poverty as markets expand,
reducing milk and meat production in cattle by 8%.In addition, 27%of livestock in developing countries showed signs of current
including margarine and biscuits. But the emerging biodiesel market is also thirsty for the oil.
the study authors show that yield increases of 45-70%are possible for most crops through improved nutrient management
The spread of the disease comes with a heavy economic toll last year, the Russian Federation lost 300,000 of the country s 19 million pigs to swine fever, at an estimated cost of about 7. 6  billion  roubles (US$240  million).
and European and Asian countries are on the alert to deal with outbreaks that could cost their pork industries billions of dollars.
In 1957, the virus jumped to Portugal after pigs near Lisbon s airport were fed infected human food scraps (the virus particles can survive meat curing processes.
and import of the region s ham including the coveted jam  n ibã rico was banned by many countries,
C. Netherton/OIETHE recent spread of the virus means that the Ukrainian outbreak, now under control after authorities culled 208 pigs
if it includes contaminated pork products. Swill feeding, in which pigs are fed scraps of human food waste,
The FAO warns that continued spread of African swine fever could be very costly Russia does not export its pork,
and quarantine that could disrupt Russia s billion-dollar pork industry. Meanwhile, backyard farmers often do not report suspected cases for fear of losing their livelihood."
While animal health officials focus on containing the spread of African swine fever, scientists believe that it should be possible to develop a vaccine to eradicate the disease.
Meat from animals fed on GM CROPS would not need to be labelled. Bob Goldberg, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Los angeles, says the proposition is"anti-science,
one hectare of recovered pasture could store four times as much carbon as one hectare of degraded pasture.
Rinderpest is as deadly to cattle as highly pathogenic H5n1 avian flu is to chickens. In past decades, outbreaks ripped through herds and wiped out up to 90%of animals, often leaving famine,
and must be kept at precise temperatures and fed particular nutrients. But culturing mammalian cells is currently the only way to make some complex protein drugs.
they are decorated usually with plant-specific sugar molecules, which could prompt a dangerous immune reaction if injected into patients.
a structure where the problematic sugars are added. The engineered maize seeds produced proteins decorated with sugars that could be converted to human forms.
Richard Pattison a cell biologist at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant science in Ithaca, New york, calls the approach"very elegant.
Most attempts to solve the sugar problem require mutating the protein, which could disrupt its function,
However, making proteins with certain sugar patterns using these systems is still difficult or impossible.
uncertainty about acrylamide s true health effects and the challenge of weeding out a mole  cule present in hundreds of products.
4. They found that sugars and amino acids such as asparagine found in potatoes and cereals were making acrylamide (C3h5no) as a by-product of the Maillard reaction,
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,
in soft bread, for example, mean acrylamide levels dropped from 75 to 30 â°Ã Â g per kilogram.
Egg freezing is safe Egg freezing is no longer an experimental procedure, says the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama,
That change in policy is expected to accelerate the growth of clinics that offer to freeze the eggs of women who face fertility-damaging treatment
She rejected nine provisions that, among other things, would have removed forest protection along rivers and slopes,
Politicians also reference unforeseen dangers from GE foodstuffs. The FDA evaluates animals as strictly as it does drugs.
including chickens engineered to be resistant to the bird-flu virus. A BBSRC spokesperson told Nature:"
Badger battle erupts in Englandengland s West country is a bucolic landscape of winding country lanes and gently rolling pastures.
Adam Quinney, a beef farmer and vice-president of the National farmers union in Stoneleigh which is lobbying for the cull,
The same study in Zambia found that five more of the 150-odd complex sugars in breast milk seem to have a protective effect.
HIV-negative infants who consumed these sugars had a better chance of reaching their second birthday than did HIV-negative babies who drank breast milk lacking those sugars irrespective of their mothers'HIV status. Once a baby had caught HIV, however
Several labs are trying to identify how variation in the prevalence of the large sugar molecules in breast milk, collectively known as human milk oligosaccharides (HMOS), influences infant health.
and the inability of affected infants to secrete a suite of oligosaccharides in their mucus. These babies are considered particularly likely to benefit from drinking the sugars via breast milk,
In rats, they found that upping the levels of that sugar could reduce the severity of NEC on its own3.
A quick milk test for this sugar might be able to tell physicians how much they should worry about infants developing NEC. In a step towards that approach,
But adding DSLNT to the diets of premature babies is still a long way off. It is longer than any oligosaccharide that has so far been synthesized in the lab
its output second only to that of the United states. Fermenting the sugars in the country s abundant sugar cane produced a motor fuel that lowered carbon dioxide emissions,
J. Tabasco is something of a porcine goddess at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where her ruddy,
which genes were involved in the selection of desired traits such as a longer spine to give more bacon on different continents."
Leonard untangled the taxonomic mess of similar-looking, but only distantly related, fungi with multicellular dark spores that were causing disease in grains such as corn.
Leonard found E. rostratum on corn, sorghum and Johnsongrass fairly often, although it was not nearly as common as several more severe corn pathogens.
The nutrients are there, and the temperature is certainly right. Those who suffered the worst infections,
South Pacific coconut gene bank under threatthe international collection of the South Pacific's coconut palm species,
The warning came at a meeting on the Pacific coconut research and development (R&d) strategy in Samoa last week (31 october-1 november),
The deadly disease, Bogia Coconut Syndrome, is threatening the survival of a gene bank of region's most important tree
the coconut, a number of which are endemic. Named after the town of Bogia on the north coast of mainland PNG,
because the country was relatively free of coconut pests and diseases. In an attempt to contain the disease, movement of coconuts and coconut palms, both from the gene bank and for commercial reasons,
out of the affected region has been banned, with roadblocks in place to help enforce this. But these restrictions are preventing the gene bank from fulfilling one of its key roles:
and is one of five international coconut collections around the world. Roland Bourdeix, coordinator of the International Coconut Genetic Resources Network, is arranging an urgent mission to PNG to assess the situation.
We hope to rescue the collection, Bourdeix says. We'll relocate it if there's a safe way to move the plants.
The crisis is at least providing an opportunity to rethink the strategy for regional coconut conservation
We are supporting research to try to identify the Bogia Coconut Syndrome vector and better understand the host range of this disease.
everyone will be placed better to assess the threat both to coconuts and livelihoods in general
Fungus that controls zombie-ants has own fungal stalkeran article by Scientific American. An unsuspecting worker ant in Brazil's rainforest leaves its nest one morning.
Deadly infection This clever Ophiocordyceps fungus depends on ants to reproduce and spread, but it has found an abundant host animal.
scientists have seen also small bugs laying their eggs in the infected ant corpse, where their larvae can then eat the growing fungus.
UK unveils plan to fight deadly ash diseasethe UK government today announced an action plan to control the spread of'ash dieback,
Even if biologists can halt the spread of C. fraxinea in the United kingdom, the worldwide spread of plant pathogens shows little sign of abating in a globalized economy."
"We are going to have to re-prioritize the Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs. We need to treat plant diseases as seriously as we do said animal diseases,
Art of cheese-making is 7, 500 years oldtraces of dairy fat in ancient ceramic fragments suggest that people have been making cheese in Europe for up to 7, 500 years.
In the tough days before refrigerators, early dairy farmers probably devised cheese-making as a way to preserve,
and get the best use out of, milk from the cattle that they had begun to herd. Peter Bogucki, an archaeologist at Princeton university in New jersey, was in the 1980s among the first to suspect that cheese-making might have been afoot in Europe as early as 5
500 bc. He noticed that archaeologists working at ancient cattle-rearing sites in what is had now Poland found pieces of ceramic vessels riddled with holes, reminiscent of cheese strainers.
Bogucki reasoned that Neolithic farmers had found a way to use their herds for more than milk or meat1.
"This research provides the smoking gun that cheese manufacture was practiced by Neolithic people 7, 000 years ago, says Bogucki."
"This is the first and only evidence of Neolithic cheese-making in the archaeological record, says Richard Evershed,
Cheese-making would have given the Neolithic farmers a way to make the most out of the resources available from their herds.
however, traditionally made cheese contains much less lactose than fresh milk.""The making of cheese would have allowed them to get around the indigestibility of milk without getting ill,
Evershed says.""It s one small step, but it s filling out the picture of that transition from nomadism,
says Heather Paxson, a cultural anthropologist at Massachusetts institute of technology in Cambridge, who studies US artisan cheese-makers.
She suggests that Neolithic people might have curdled their milk with bacteria that are found in nature, resulting in a clumpy version of modern mozzarella.
so there is no indication that cheese was being made there
China sacks officials over Golden Rice controversychina has sacked three officials for breaching Chinese laws and ethical regulations during a trial in
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.
Mess in Texas The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) announced the freezing of an US$11-million commercialization grant to Peloton Therapeutics in Dallas on 29 november,
"It s a great city for a test case, isolated and flat as a pancake, says Shepson.
says that the wet weather in some areas of Ceylon was ideal for the spread of the fungus,
so that the insects are exposed not to the insecticides through pollen and nectar. Dust and plant sap contaminated with the chemicals may also pose a risk to bees,
according to the German reinsurance group Munich re. Sandy alone accounted for an estimated $50 Â billion. 17 billion Number of stars in the Milky way that harbour a roughly Earth-sized planet in a close orbit,
Being able to judge which flowers will provide the most nectar, and which have already been plundered by other pollinators,
It has long been known that bumblebees build up a positive electrical charge as they rapidly flap their wings;
while hovering around looking for pollen or nectar. So it would make sense for them to attend to such cues
Higher consumption of meat and diary products, especially in developed countries, has increased substantially global nitrogen pollution."
Seed-patent case in Supreme Courta technology called a terminator was never going to curry much favour with the public.
colonize roots and gain nourishment from the plants while helping their hosts to absorb water and nutrients from the soil.
Whereas about 47%of the soil carbon on the large islands came from roots and ectomycorrhizal fungi
swallowed its eggs, transformed its stomach into a womb and vomited up its young once sufficiently grown.
and others like it into hundreds of eggs from a closely related species. Last February we saw a miracle starting to happen,
a humpback slapping the surface of the water with its tail fluke before proceeding with a standard bubble feed.
Although the risk factors for the spread of H7n9 are known not, voluminous research on its cousin,
density in 2010), pigs (B), chickens (C) and ducks (D) in China and Asia in general.
An international team of researchers compiled maps for Nature showing the population densities of chickens, pigs, ducks and humans in many parts of China and throughout Asia.
They calculate that 131 million people, 241 million domestic chickens, 47 million domestic ducks and 22 million pigs live within a 50-kilometre radius of each of the 60 H7n9 human cases that had occurred up to 16 april.
Map supplied by A j. Tatem, Z. Huang and S i. Hay (2013. Unpublished data. A j. T.,University of Southampton, UK;
) There has been no evidence of sustained human-to-human spread of H7n9 so far. But what if it did happen?
an animal epidemic that has spread abroad, or the international spread of a partially or fully human-adapted virus. Maps presented are for data-visualization purposes only;
boundaries and names shown do not express any opinion on the legal status of any country, territory or the delimitation of territory boundaries
which provide nutrients to the soil below. It says that sustainable intensification of African agriculture will produce higher yields and more nutritious foods while reducing reliance on fertilizers and pesticides,
On 17 april, the corporation filed a court brief arguing that Canadian anti-dumping regulations do not apply to"ocean pasture replenishment and restoration.
But a growing body of research suggests that sublethal exposure to the pesticides in nectar
although the long-term response varied depending on the availability of nutrients in the soil, such as nitrogen4.
although other nutrients, such as phosphorus, could be limiting factors. The idea of conducting a FACE experiment in the tropics has been around for years,
Another challenge is developing tools to track nutrient cycles in the soil and to monitor the peculiar growth dynamics of tropical forests.
There is still no evidence of any sustained human-to-human spread of the H7n9 virus
But with H7n9, it is only the appearance of new human cases that shows where the silent spread in birds
so long as the virus does not start to spread among humans the potential number of human cases can be curtailed by taking urgent tough measures such as keeping poultry flocks away from wild birds
humans can be exposed to POPS by eating meat and fish. And the mountain communities are hit hardest,
the H7n9 virus was found in chickens, pigeons and ducks in live bird markets in Shanghai and Hangzhou making markets the leading suspected source.
Researchers know that H7 flu viruses mainly infect wild birds such as ducks, geese, waders and gulls,
"It s likely wild ducks and geese that are carrying it, he suggests. But this H7n9 virus has not yet been detected in wild birds in the area."
and to acquire the ability to spread between people. That does not seem to have occurred yet.
then that would imply human spread; if viral sequences are more diverse, it would imply that each person had picked separately up infections from birds.
"further spread may be inevitable, warns Tashiro. Humanity has never been exposed widely to H7 or N9 flu viruses,
Canagliflozin blocks sugar reabsorption in the kidneys by inhibiting the sodium/glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) protein
increasing the amount of sugar patients excrete in their urine. Companies have been racing to bring an SGLT2 inhibitor to market;
There's no obvious indication of human-to-human spread, so we should not overreact, but neither should we be complacent.
if any human spread is occurring, it is not happening easily. Chinese researchers have moved swiftly to decipher the new virus. THE WHO Chinese National Influenza Center in Beijing has sequenced isolates from each of the three cases,
and spread between, humans. Analyses suggest that the virus is a novel virus that has been generated by reassortment
But it could also indicate that the virus doesn t spread as easily as one that affects the nose and throat
But on landing, instead of settling in for a blood meal, they fled, suggesting that DEET can deter mosquitoes not just via its smell but also via direct contact.
After mating, the females cut slits into tree branches and lay their eggs there. By the time the eggs hatch
in six to ten weeks, the ground will be littered with the bodies of their parents. The new generations of nymphs will fall to the ground,
If you have a diet of potato and milk, you don t need anything else. The disappearance of that staple had devastating consequences,
New york. It spread through potato fields like wildfire in Ireland and other countries where potatoes were grown intensively."
Seafood diet killing Arctic foxes on Russian islandan isolated population of Arctic foxes that dines only on marine animals seems to be slowly succumbing to mercury poisoning.
The Icelandic coastal foxes, likewise, have the option of moving inland to vary their diet."
says it is excellent in salads: the taste is nutty and green, 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.
Following FDA approval, Aquabounty hopes to sell its salmon eggs to farmers and expand to markets in Argentina, Canada, Chile and China.
Goulson's review also cites earlier studies suggesting that grain-eating birds such as partridges may be dying after eating as few as five seeds treated with neonicotinoids.
The insecticide is applied most often as a seed dressing to crops such as maize and soya beans.
Rickets is prevented easily by eating foods such as eggs and cheese, and by spending short amounts of time exposed to sunlight,
which reflect the main source of protein in the diet. They found that most of the children were weaned not until they were 2, in keeping with Renaissance custom.
breast milk was supplemented with'paps'made of soft bread and apples. Neither cereals nor breast milk contain much Vitamin d
as pilot culls to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis begin. As protesters descended on the nation s capital last week, the chief scientific adviser of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs (Defra),
How the chicken lost its penisthe case of the missing bird penis is a longstanding mystery in evolutionary biology.
Male chickens, which possess only a rudimentary phallic nub, pump their sperm into females using a'cloacal kiss'a move that presses together the male and female cloacas,
a developmental biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, looked for differences between developing duck and chicken embryos.
The scientists watched penile development through tiny windows cut into duck and chicken eggs. They found that chickens initially form penises similar to those of ducks
but that on about the ninth day of development, the nascent chicken penis called a genital tubercle stops growing
and begins to shrink.""We expected to find some critical outgrowth factor was missing, says Cohn,
but the team discovered that many of the same genes that drive penis growth in ducks continued to be expressed strongly in chickens.
Chickens showed increased levels of Bmp4 a protein that promotes cell death near the tip of the tubercle."
Researchers were able to stave off genital cell death in chickens by treating one side of the tubercle with Noggin, a protein that blocks Bmp activity.
Treating one side of growing duck tubercles with Bmp4 resulted in localized cell death and penis shrinkage, mimicking normal genital development in male chickens.
The results suggest that genital growth in birds is controlled by a common programme that has been customized by evolutionary tweaks in Bmp signalling
But the data do not explain why chickens shed their penises. Cohn suggests that phalluses may have been lost as a secondary consequence of evolution in other body parts such as limbs and teeth, the development
female chickens and other birds may have selected males with smaller penises in part to escape forced copulation.
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