Lack of water makes plants less capable of fending off pathogens and insects. After the 2003 heatwave, caterpillars devastated Mediterranean oak forests near Montpellier in France.
"In others, even significant anomalies seem to cause only little harm. CARBO-Extreme teams have conducted field experiments that simulated drought in different climates and vegetation types, from Atlantic pine forests to alpine meadows.
NICE head departs The head of the National Institute for Health and Care (formerly Clinical) Excellence (NICE) in London stepped down on 31 Â March.
Michael Rawlins has led the body, which is tasked with assessing the cost-effectiveness of medicines, since 1999.
The government confirmed last month that NICE will have a central role in a new pricing scheme for medicines under which, from 2014,
drug companies will be paid what their products are deemed to be worth. See go. nature. com/37lsu2 for more.
Bird flu deaths Two men have died after being infected with a type of bird flu never before seen in humans
Patent blocked India s Supreme court ruled on 1 Â April against an attempt by Swiss drug company Novartis to patent the anticancer drug Gleevec (imatinib mesylate.
India s patent law limits the ability of drug firms to make minor modifications to drugs to extend their patent life, a tactic known as evergreening.
The nation s support for cheap generic drugs has reduced prices, notably those of anti-HIV medicines.
Monsanto will gain access to some Dupont patents covering disease resistance and maize (corn) defoliation.
Diabetes drug US regulators have given the green light to the first in a new class of drugs to treat diabetes.
On 29 march, the Food and Drug Administration approved canagliflozin (Invokana), which was developed by Johnson & johnson, headquartered in New brunswick, New jersey.
increasing the amount of sugar patients excrete in their urine. Companies have been racing to bring an SGLT2 inhibitor to market;
last year regulators shot down another such drug, dapagliflozin, citing cancer concerns. Source: US National Snow and Ice Data Centera record low in the extent of sea ice in the Arctic last September has been followed by a record refreezing of uncovered ocean surface,
and"the increasing dominance of first-year ice in the Arctic. 6-10 april Discussions on mapping the epigenomes of cancer take place at the American Association for Cancer Research s annual meeting in WASHINGTON DC. go. nature. com
Novel bird flu kills two in Chinascientists and public-health officials worldwide are on alert after China announced on 31 march that two people had died
and a third was seriously ill from being infected with a new avian influenza virus, H7n9, that has never been seen before in humans.
Emerging preliminary analyses of the genome of the virus point to the possible spectre of a pathogen that might spread silently in poultry without causing serious disease.
That would make the virus difficult to monitor, with animal reservoirs of the virus likely going undetected.
regular human infections might then occur providing opportunities for the virus to adapt better to humans,
potentially sparking a pandemic. Scientists stress that it is much too early to do a full risk assessment of the potential pandemic threat.
But the initial analysis of viral sequences is"worrisome because they show several features that are suggestive of adaptation to humans,
says Masato Tashiro, a virologist at the Influenza Virus Research center in Tokyo, the World health organization (WHO) influenza reference
and research centre in Japan. The epidemiological picture is troubling too says Malik Peiris, a flu virologist at the University of Hong kong.
Any time an animal influenza virus crosses to humans it is a cause for concern,
and with three severe cases of disease over a short period of time, we certainly have to take it seriously,
he says. There's no obvious indication of human-to-human spread, so we should not overreact,
but neither should we be complacent. The first case infected by the novel H7n9 virus was an 87-year-old man in Shanghai who became ill on 19 february
A 27-year-old man in the same city fell ill on 27 february and died on 10 march.
A 35-year-old woman in Chuzhou City in Anhui province, some 350 kilometres west of Shanghai, fell ill on 9 march and remains seriously ill.
All three developed flu-like symptoms before developing severe pneumonia. The cases were announced on 31 march by China's health ministry, the National Health and Family planning Commission,
which informed THE WHO on the same day. So far, there seems to be sustained no spread of the virus between people.
or tested positive for the virus. Some uncertainty hangs over whether family members related to the first patient who were hospitalized with severe pneumonia just before their elderly father might have passed on the virus to the housebound man
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 published them on the GISAID flu sequence database on 31 march. Researchers around the world have
which occurs when different virus strains infect a host at the same time and swap genes with each other.
Flu viruses have eight genes: two that encode the haemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N) proteins that stud the surface of the virus,
because this protein allows the virus to bind to host cells seems to belong to a Eurasian group of H7 avian flu viruses.
This is in contrast to the 2009 H1n1 pandemic virus, which was a mix of viruses that infect birds, pigs and humans.
Most of the genetic analyses are still being carried out confidentially within THE WHO's global flu-research networks.
A striking feature of the novel virus is that its H protein is structurally similar to that of viruses that don t cause severe sickness in birds,
Flu viruses that don t sicken birds can, however, cause severe disease in humans simply because we lack any immunity to them.
They also may be more lethal in people depending on how the viruses bind to receptors in the human airway.
The virus also contains several other genetic variations that are known from past studies in mice and other animals to cause severe disease.
which would fit with a picture of a virus much like that of the novel coronavirus that emerged in the middle East last year  that can cause severe disease.
The fact that the virus does not seem to cause serious disease in birds has potential epidemiological and public-health implications,
and thus could create a reservoir of infection that would lead to frequent sporadic human infections that crop up without warning.
China has reported not any recent H7 flu infections in birds, perhaps because such infections would not show up as serious disease,
or maybe because of shortcomings in surveillance or reporting. A key requirement now, Peiris says, is to track down which birds
Flu experts say that other urgent requirements include testing any human cases of serious pneumonia for traces of the virus
Among researchers and public-health officials, says Peiris, It's not an atmosphere of alarm, but an atmosphere of concern
These findings, published online today in Nature1, could help scientists to design insect repellents to combat malaria, dengue and agricultural pests.
Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carries dengue and yellow fever, and Anopheles gambiae, which hosts the malaria parasites,
Pathogen genome tracks Irish potato famine back to its rootsthe great potato famine of the 1840s was a defining event in Ireland s recent history.
It is the first ancient plant pathogen to have decoded its genome. In 2011, scientists reported the sequence of the plague-causing bacteria responsible for the Black death of the 1340s.
Phytophthora infestans, which causes potato late blight, is an oomycete a type of single-celled organism related to brown algae.
the disease probably arrived at the port of Antwerp in Belgium in the summer of 1845,
Ireland s dependence on potatoes was the reason the epidemic exacted a far greater toll there than it did on the rest of the continent.
and modern strains, including many disease genes that were missing from the famine strains. Their work also suggests that P. infestans may have been exported to Europe more than once during the famine."
"What happened was that this pathogen had seen never cultivated potatoes before, says Bill Fry, a plant pathologist at Cornell University in Ithaca,
New york. It spread through potato fields like wildfire in Ireland and other countries where potatoes were grown intensively."
security, manufacturing, infrastructure, health costs, and natural resources and the environment. Laura Leon/Polaris/eyevineendangered ecosystems get listed The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on 8 may updated the criteria for its Red List of Ecosystems (D. Â A. Â Keith et
Polio in Somalia Somalia has recorded its first case of wild poliovirus since March 2007 the World health organization said on 11 Â May.
A 32-month-old girl living near Mogadishu has been paralysed by the virus. There have been no polio immunizations in some parts of the country since 2009.
Also present were scientists representing the US National institutes of health one of the initiative s two other government-agency partners.
NIH budget blues The US National institutes of health (NIH) announced on 8 Â May a final 2013 budget of US$29. 15 Â billion
and rumours about vaccines as they occur in real time. The system, described in a 13  May paper (H.  J.  Larson et  al.
Heidi Larson of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine hopes that real-time monitoring will help health officials to know where to focus
if trust in vaccines falls. 18-21 may The American Society for Microbiology holds its annual general meeting in Denver, Colorado,
with scientific discussions including threats from the avian influenza viruses H7n9 and H5n1. gm. asm. org21-23 may The Pasteur institute in Paris hosts an international symposium on HIV research,
marking 30 Â years since the first reports of a retrovirus associated with AIDS. www. 30yearshiv. org
Pear-shaped nucleus boosts search for new physicsa lopsided atomic nucleus may help to refine nuclear theory.
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.
if the population crash was caused by diseases introduced by the hunters and their dogs so they teamed up with Alex Greenwood, head of the wildlife diseases department at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin,
as well as other colleagues in Germany and Iceland. They screened for four common canine pathogens in foxes captured on Mednyi Island and in the pelts of museum specimens of Commander Island foxes.
All they found was a handful of cases of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which causes the disease toxoplasmosis,
but that alone did not account for the population crash. So the researchers looked at the foxes diet.
But Dominique Berteaux, an Arctic ecologist at the University of Quebec in Rimouski, Canada, cautions that the team has not definitively proved a link between mercury contamination
Studies show that the types of omega-3 fatty acids found in oily fish help to protect against heart disease, arthritis, Alzheimer s disease and even depression.
and inconclusive, says Dariush Mozaffarian, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public health in Boston,
Hepatitis drug A new hepatitis-C drug sofosbuvir, has been found to be highly effective in clinical trials.
Developed by Gilead of Foster City, California, the drug is one of several in development that could replace existing hepatitis-C treatments,
which can cause harsh side effects. See go. nature. com/fpasug and page  18 for more.
On 26 april, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) closed a public consultation on its finding that the engineered fish pose no significant environmental concern.
Lab-death trial Patrick Harran, a chemist at the University of California, Los angeles, will stand trial for the death of research assistant Sheharbano Sangji,
Harran will be tried on three counts of violating health and safety standards a Los  Angeles judge ordered on 26  April.
Wellcome head Jeremy Farrar, an expert in infectious diseases, is the next director of the Wellcome Trust,
the London-based biomedical research charity announced on 24 Â April. Farrar will take up the post in October succeeding Mark Walport,
ORITHE office that oversees misconduct investigations involving US-government-funded biomedical researchers has seen the number of allegations it has received since 2001 rise by 216%.
Last week marked the end of the public s opportunity to weigh in on a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) draft assessment of the salmon.
Aquabountythe US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been slow to approve a genetically modified (GM) salmon made by Aquabounty of Maynard, Massachusetts.
Drug application with the FDA. 2001 â Aquabounty submits its first regulatory study to the FDA. 2009 â The FDA releases guidance for its evaluation of genetically engineered animals as veterinary drugs;
because they fear contamination of the wild stock and worry that it could drive down the price of farmed salmon.
Mark Walton, chief marketing officer at Recombinetics, an animal-biotechnology company in St paul, Minnesota, says that his company will focus initially on medical applications   using modified farm animals as disease models
Medical applications of GM technology do not stir consumer passions in the same way as GM foods,
They classified streams according to three different levels of pesticide contamination: uncontaminated, slightly contaminated and highly contaminated.
But toxicologist Keith Solomon of the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, says he has concerns about the study's sample size.
Unfortunately during a global economic crisis, budget cuts come at the cost of ecosystem health monitoring.
Skeletons show rickets struck the Medici familyas the wealthy rulers of Tuscany and patrons of Leonardo Da vinci and Galileo,
the Medicis were the'first family'of the Italian Renaissance. But all their wealth could not buy good health for their young sons and daughters.
A study1 of the skeletons of nine Medici children born in the sixteenth century shows that they had rickets,
a Vitamin d deficiency that causes bones to become soft and even deformed. What s more, the disease was partially a result of the privileged upbringing these children enjoyed,
which in particular led them to stay mostly indoors. Rickets is associated usually with poverty and living in heavily polluted
close-built cities where there is little exposure to sunlight. But the Medici kids, ranging in age from newborn to 5 years old,
De Agostini Picture Library/AKGLACK of sun exposure may have contributed to the rickets suffered in early childhood by Medici heir don Filippino,
An examination of the bones, both visually and by X-ray, showed that six of the nine children bore convincing signs of rickets,
The study pinpoints rickets as a cause of his condition. Rickets is prevented easily by eating foods such as eggs and cheese,
and by spending short amounts of time exposed to sunlight, which triggers Vitamin d production. To understand why the Medici children had this avoidable illness,
the researchers analysed the nitrogen isotopes found in bone collagen, which reflect the main source of protein in the diet.
Even two Medici newborns showed signs of rickets, although they should have received all the Vitamin d they needed before birth from their mothers.
a specialist in children s skeletal diseases who was involved not in the study. She says that she is not surprised the Medici heirs had a disease that is more often linked with living in smoggy industralized cities,
where air pollution blots out sunlight.""Poor children were living in small houses, and they were running around outside,
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),
what else will be needed to control this disease and what happened when he got the country s leading experts together for a workshop meeting on this subject at the end of April.
My basic message to the meeting was we ve basically lost control of tuberculosis (TB) in the countryside.
That includes cattle movement controls, increasing biosecurity, development of vaccines and control of the wildlife reservoir.
Defraian Boydthe problem is tuberculosis not badgers. Badgers happen to be in the middle of this, and unfortunately the methods for dealing with that problem mean we need to reduce the densities of badgers.
and showed the effect that sustained removal of badgers can have on reducing bovine tuberculosis in cattle.
I would also point to vaccines as well. Vaccines, at the end of the day, are going to be what allows us to actually eradicate TB.
Clearly reducing wildlife populations and killing cattle is not going to actually produce the elimination that we re really striving for.
We re already moving as rapidly as we can towards getting a vaccine for cattle.
so we might have pilot vaccination trials. However, the BCG vaccine bacillus Calmette-Guã rin, the common vaccine for TB is probably only going to be about 60%effective,
so it s not going to be the silver bullet. We probably have to also move to vaccination of badgers.
There s an injectable vaccine available at the moment, but it s far too expensive to roll out on any wide-scale basis
. So we need to get an oral vaccine for badgers, and we re still some way from doing that.
I think social science has a major role to play in this. This isn t just about badgers and cattle.
We have to understand those social dynamics as much as we have to understand the epidemiological dynamics of the disease.
I think that we can eradicate tuberculosis, but it all depends to some extent on resources but, more than that, on the determination of people generally.
But such clocks could also potentially have adverse health effects. Â"You have to wonder
A chemical analysis of archaeological artefacts finds evidence that wine was being produced in the south of France by the fifth century bc."
or added to give the wine medicinal properties. A limestone platform (see picture), dated to about 425-400 bc,
"This chemical analysis adds another line of evidence it s helpful, but not revolutionary, he says.
19 25 july 2013india trials halted The US National institutes of health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, last week confirmed reports that it has postponed some of its roughly 30 clinical trials in India,
and has stopped enrolling participants in others. In January, the Indian health ministry tightened regulations on clinical trials.
Sponsors are required now to provide compensation to participants who are injured as a result of a trial, or to the surviving relatives of those who are killed."
"NIH has expressed its concerns about the new regulations, and looks forward to hearing clarifications from the Indian government,
with some exceptions for work promising"major therapeutic progress for serious diseases (see Nature 469,277;
research will be regulated strictly by The french Biomedicine Agency. Carbon tax scrapped Australia will shift from a carbon tax to an emissions trading system for greenhouse gases one year ahead of schedule, announced Prime minister Kevin Rudd on 16 Â July.
The European Food safety Authority in Parma, Italy, concluded in May that maize (corn) seeds treated with fipronil pose a high acute risk to honeybees. ips trial approved On 19 july, Japan s health minister,
Masayo Takahashi, a stem-cell biologist at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, plans to use sheets of retinal cells derived from ips cells to repair retinal epithelium in patients
a common cause of blindness. Final approval by Takahashi s institution is expected soon, and she plans to start recruiting patients as early as September.
Science & Society Picture Libraryturing pardon Four years after issuing a formal apology, the UK government has cleared the way to grant a posthumous pardon to The british mathematician Alan Turing (pictured),
Pharma probe The Chinese government is investigating four senior executives of Glaxosmithkline (GSK) in China for allegedly bribing officials
and physicians to boost GSK drug sales, funnelling the money through travel agencies. The executives are suspected of giving 3 Â billion renminbi (US$489 Â million) in bribes since 2007
The government says that the probe is part of nationwide crackdown to ensure fair competition in the pharmaceutical industry.
GSK, headquartered in London, says that it is conducting its own review and is cooperating with the Chinese police.
Deadly pig virus slips through US bordersthe pathogen, a type of coronavirus called porcine epidemic diarrhoea virus (PEDV),
and it caused mass epidemics in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. As pigs there developed immunity, the virus petered out and now causes only occasional, isolated outbreaks.
The virus poses no health threat to humans. The US Department of agriculture (USDA) had tried to keep PEDV and other diseases out of the country by restricting imports of pigs and pork products from certain nations, such as China.
But on 10 Â May, the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Iowa State university in Ames confirmed that PEDV had infected pigs in Iowa, the leading producer of US pork.
according to Gregory  Stevenson, a pathologist at Iowa State. The fact that the virus has now spread to 14 states in total is a sign that the outbreak is still flaring
and could become an epidemic (see Pig virus on the wing). SOURCE: US Department of agriculture"It s a real threat, says Lisa  Becton, a veterinary surgeon and director of swine health information at the National Pork Board, an industry group in Des Â
Moines, Iowa. To understand the virus s enigmatic US entry, scientists are sequencing VIRAL DNA isolated from pigs and comparing it with PEDV variants from elsewhere in the world.
and vaccines to prevent the virus from spreading. The National Pork Board has approved $800, 000 to fund research and education.
because the pathogen thrives in the specific conditions found in pig guts. Researchers in Europe and Asia have managed already to infect cells,
but only after years of working with the virus. In the United states, the same import restrictions that were set up to help to prevent PEDV from entering the country have made it difficult to import the necessary lab materials for working with the virus, such as vaccines, infected cells
and pig antibodies.""What s hampering the research is that we don t have reagents, says Linda  Saif, a virologist at Ohio State university in Wooster.
They found it to be 99.4%identical to a Chinese strain of PEDV. On the basis of that sequence
Li Bocordgrass has been spreading there"like a cancer, says reserve director Tang Chendong, so far consuming more than 10%of the wetland.
"It s bad news for Europe, for European farmers and for global food security, says Jonathan Jones, who uses both GM and conventional approaches to study disease resistance in plants at the Sainsbury
Weeds warrant urgent conservationfaced with climate change, plant breeders are increasingly turning to the genomes of the wild, weedy relatives of crops for traits such as drought tolerance and disease resistance.
Losing a single pollinator species harms plantsremoving even a single bee species from an ecosystem has serious effects on plant reproduction,
would ban research involving addictive drugs or transplants of living cells from other species. It would also stop the breeding of dogs, cats and primates in Italy for research,
and require anaesthetic for any procedure causing mild pain in animals (such as giving injections). Concerned scientists say that the restrictions could halt important biomedical research,
and fear that Italy is becoming increasingly hostile to animal studies. Indian power India s plans to expand its nuclear power capacity are moving ahead,
NIH funding The US National institutes of health (NIH) received a tentative boost on 11 Â July when the US Senate committee on government spending approved a US$31-billion budget plan for the agency nearly $2 Â billion more than the NIH received this year.
Although the plan must still be voted on by the full Senate NIH supporters cheered the proposed increases.
The plan includes $84 Â million in new funds for Alzheimer s disease research at the NIH s National Institute on Aging.
See go. nature. com/qkxiar for more. Myriad back in court One month after the US Supreme court invalidated gene patents held by Myriad Genetics of Salt lake city, Utah,
the company has sued two competitors for infringing different patents on tests for the cancer-related genes BRCA1 and BRCA2.
) Alzheimer s retest Eli lilly, a pharmaceutical company based in Indianapolis, Indiana, announced on 12 Â July that it will focus on patients with mild Alzheimer s disease in a forthcoming clinical trial of the drug solanezumab.
The antibody-based drug, which targets the amyloid-Ã Â protein, will be tested in a large-scale phase III trial.
In 2012, the company reported lacklustre results in two previous trials, which pooled data from patients with mild and moderate forms of Alzheimer s.
But secondary analysis hinted that the drug might help patients with mild forms of the disease.
NASA/ESA/M. Kornmessertrue blue planet Using the Hubble Space Telescope astronomers have discovered the deep blue hue of exoplanet HD Â 189733 Â b (pictured in an artist s impression) the first planet beyond the Solar system to have its colour directly measured.
Research restart Research on the rinderpest virus is set to resume after being off limits since 2011,
when the deadly cattle disease was eradicated. The ban was enacted as a temporary measure to safeguard against accidental
Theft plea A former researcher at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, pleaded guilty last week to accessing a protected computer without authorization and taking information worth in excess of US$5, 000.
Hua Jun Zhao, from China, had been under investigation for allegedly stealing patented cancer-research material,
biofilms and zoonotic pathogens is on the agenda at the 5th Congress of European Microbiologists in Leipzig,
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