and diseases are moving towards the poles at about the same speed as warmer temperatures.
"Our defences, pesticides and fungicides, are being asked to deal with larger and larger numbers of pests and diseases,
which cause plant diseases. Several highly virulent strains of fungi have emerged in recent years around the world,
and the oomycete Phytophthora infestans remains a persistent problem even 168 years after causing the great Irish potato famine4.
which document crop pests and diseases around the world from 1822 to the present.""No one has looked at any of these datasets.
says co-author Sarah Gurr, a plant pathologist also at Exeter. Co-author Mark Ramotowski, who did his work as a student at the University of Oxford,
and can leach into water supplies, leading to health problems. Soil scientists have wanted long to assist poor farmers with their selection
but the ecological and health effects of fertilizer chemicals raise serious concerns. China in particular, is facing a major pollution problem from overuse of nitrogen fertilizer,
"Understanding the health and condition of tropical soils is a prerequisite for any wise use of fertilizers.
His reward for this dedication was several bouts of malaria, one rather disgusting skin disease that his doctors linked to baboon faecal matter,
and a fresh perspective on Africa's wild animals. This photo, entitled'Essence of Elephants',was the winner of the exhibition's Animal Portraits award.
Study linking GM maize to rat tumours is retractedbowing to scientists'near-universal scorn, the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology today fulfilled its threat to retract a controversial paper claiming that a genetically modified (GM) maize causes serious disease in rats,
after the authors refused to withdraw it. The paper, from a research group led by Gilles-Eric SÃ ralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen, France,
The known high incidence of tumours in the Sprague-Dawley strain of rat cannot be excluded as the cause of the higher mortality
says co-author and physician Jo  l Spiroux de Vend Â'mois, who is also president of the Paris-based Committee for Research and Independent Information on Genetic engineering (CRIIGEN),
The retraction is"a public-health scandal, he says. Goodman however denies any involvement in the decision to retract the paper.
Food and Chemical Toxicology asked me to become an associate editor in January 2013 because of my extensive experience in the area,
The study found that rats fed for two years with Monsanto s glyphosate-resistant NK603 maize (corn) developed many more tumours
It also found that the rats developed tumours when glyphosate (Roundup), the herbicide used with GM maize,
'At the 28 november press conference, Corinne Lepage, a Member of the European parliament and former French environment minister, said that SÃ ralini s paper asked"good questions about the long-term toxicity of GMOS GM
The cyanide poisoning of up to 300 Â animals at watering holes in a game park in Zimbabwe last month served as a particularly unpleasant reminder of the lengths to
Brain implant Patients with epilepsy who fail to respond to medications could benefit from a newly approved brain implant.
California, received a green light from the US Food and Drug Administration on 14 Â November.
which epileptic seizures are thought to originate. Malaria strategy Researchers should aim to develop malaria vaccines by 2030 that can reduce the disease by 75,
%the World health organization said on 14 Â November in its updated Malaria Vaccine Technology Roadmap. The original 2006 roadmap had called for a malaria vaccine with an efficacy of 50%against severe disease
and death a target that seems unlikely to be met (see Nature 502, 271-272; 2013).
) To accelerate progress, the revised plan recommends rapid assessment of new candidate vaccines using controlled studies in humans.
Heart health Long-awaited clinical guidelines released on 12 Â November could change how physicians tackle cholesterol.
The guidelines, issued by the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, advocate treating patients on the basis of their risk of cardiovascular disease,
rather than trying to reduce bad cholesterol (made up of low-density lipoprotein) to specific target levels,
) Broad investment American philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad announced on 14 november a US$100-million investment to continue funding biomedical research at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
and Drug Administration (FDA) approved on 13 Â November a breakthrough therapy to treat a rare blood cancer called mantle-cell lymphoma.
Ibrutinib, developed by Pharmacyclics of Sunnyvale, California, is only the second drug to be approved under the FDA s Breakthrough Therapy Designation programme a pipeline launched last year to fast-track regulatory approval of particularly promising treatments.
See go. nature. com/w5xfjo for more. Source: C.  Southan et  al. PLOS ONE 8, e77142 (2013) The number of potential drug leads disclosed in patents each year has plummeted over the past seven years.
But potentially bioactive molecules described in research journals are still rising, according to a data-mining study of molecular structures in more than 140,000 journal articles and patents (C.  Southan et  al.
and mergers among pharmaceutical companies may be behind the fall in global output. 22 november The European space agency is scheduled to launch Swarm,
But at the end of November he is scheduled to move to Australia to take charge of food, health and life sciences at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia.
Our chemical ecology group which is led by chemist John Pickett is world leading. The idea of introducing aphid alarm pheromones into wheat to protect it against aphid attack that comes out of that group.
cut back influenza monitoring and resulted in the loss of observing time at major telescope facilities.
the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed eliminating most artificial trans-fats forms of fat associated with increased heart risk from processed foods.
Poisoning puzzles Scientists at the University Centre of Legal Medicine in Lausanne, Switzerland, announced on 6 Â November that they had found traces of the radioactive metal polonium-210 in the exhumed body of Yasser Arafat, former president of the Palestinian National Authority.
so the results do not clearly establish that Arafat was poisoned, nuclear physicists told Nature. Separately, a forensic analysis of exhumed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda,
found no evidence that he was poisoned. See go. nature. com/mpdrjd and go. nature. com/5jqggr for more.
Rare-disease deal Pharmaceutical giant Shire, headquartered in Dublin, announced on 11 Â November the purchase of drug company Viropharma for US$4. 2 Â billion.
Viropharma develops drugs for rare diseases. The bulk of its roughly $400 Â million in annual sales revenue comes from a drug used to treat a rare blood condition known as hereditary angioedema.
Source: ethan perlsteinscience projects seeking crowdfunding in the past two years have included a glow-in-the-dark plant that raised US$484,
The data were collected by Ethan  Perlstein, an evolutionary pharmacologist in Oakland, California (see go. nature. com/3fembu).
which causes pine-wilt disease, has killed more than 50 million trees and resulted in economic losses of US$22 billion since 1982.
"This is an important study that points to a new way of preventing this deadly disease,
says Manuel Mota, a plant pathologist at the University of°vora in Portugal, who was not part of the latest study.
is to identify all fungal species that are involved in facilitating pine-wilt disease.""It s unlikely that one single species is to blame,
and reclaimed by nature, causing a headache for today s policy-makers. Should it be replanted to feed hungry mouths,
Schierhorn estimates that some 10 million hectares could be recultivated without excess stress on water resources and soils."
The pathogen, which was limited until now to parts of Asia and a region of Australia, has a particularly devastating effect on the popular Cavendish cultivar,
Expansion of the disease worldwide could be disastrous, say researchers. The disease is caused by strains of a soil fungus called Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense (Foc.
A strain of Foc previously wiped out the Gros Michel cultivar, which was exported the main banana variety from the nineteenth century until the 1950s.
In response, the industry replaced Gros Michel plants with the Cavendish variety, which is resistant to that Foc strain.
But Cavendish is susceptible to the new Foc Tropical Race  4 (Foc-TR4) strain,
and could meet the same fate as Gros Michel if the fungus reaches Latin america, the world s leading banana exporter, says Rony  Swennen of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium,
Although Foc strains spread slowly, they are almost impossible to eliminate from soil. Foc-TR4 was detected first in Asia in the 1990s,
which produces pathogen-free plantlets. Source: FAOTO slow the spread, good farm hygiene, and prompt quarantine and destruction of infected plants are crucial.
He estimates that the disease has been present for two to three years. Gert  Kema, a Fusarium researcher at Wageningen University and Research Centre in The netherlands and co-author of the Jordan report,
and this biodiversity is an important rampart against disease. Researchers do not yet have a full picture of the susceptibility of these varieties,
Dale is trying to engineer Gros Michel bananas for resistance to the original Foc strain.
which expresses a stress-response gene from bacteria. Although symbiotic plant-microbe relationships such as those of the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that live in the roots of legumes have been known for many decades,
although poisonous to livestock, were resistant to attack by weevils. This spawned a niche industry that develops
and markets endophyte-hosting turf varieties that repel pest attacks without being toxic to animals.
so the plants don t turn up all their stress defences, says Rodriguez. Those findings led him to look for other endophytes optimized to tackle the problems likely to be caused to particular food crops by climate change (R.  S.  Redman et  al.
Bioensure has been approved for use by the US Food and Drug Administration and the Department of agriculture and independent tests have shown the mixture to be nontoxic.
Mogens Nicolaisen, who works with plant pathogens at Aarhus University in Denmark, thinks that endophytes could be a good way to help introduce resistance to both drought
and disease, including pathogens such as wheat rust, an area that Rodriguez says he is pursuing. But
Pharma patent flap Advocates of affordable medicines expressed outrage last week after leaked documents revealed a proposed public-relations campaign by a lobbying firm in Arlington, Virginia,
to stymie drug-patent reform in South africa. The country is considering loosening patent protections to improve access to cheaper, generic drugs,
in line with moves in India and Brazil in recent years (see Nature 500, 266; 2013.
The Innovative Pharmaceutical Association South africa, a trade group based in Randburg, acknowledged receipt of the campaign proposal,
Help for headaches Britain s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has approved the treatment of migraine headaches with a magnetism-based procedure applied through the scalp.
Guidelines issued on 22 Â January said that transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) could be used to reduce headache severity or frequency.
However, the agency warned that TMS is not a cure, and that evidence for its efficacy and long-term safety is limited.
regulators in the United states approved the country s first commercial TMS device to relieve migraine pain.
The Yutu (Jade Rabbit) rover experienced a"mechanical control abnormality as it prepared to hibernate over its second lunar night (roughly equivalent to 14 days On earth)
Pig virus spreads Canada confirmed its first case of porcine epidemic diarrhoea virus on 23 Â January.
which causes diarrhoea and vomiting in pigs, was detected on a farm in Middlesex County, Ontario.
It caused mass epidemics in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Last spring, the United states reported its first case (see Nature 499,388;
and Drug Administration to test therapies involving embryonic stem cells. See Nature http://doi. org/q8f (2014) for more.
3 february The World health organization releases its Third world Cancer Report, six years after its previous publication. The latest report will include updated trends in cancer incidence,
prevalence and mortality. go. nature. com/x39hvk
Plant killers protect rainforest diversityvoracious pests may be foes of individual plants, but they can benefit forests.
mountain pine beetles and blister rust fungus once thwarted by the cold, dry climate have devastated the trees,
chemists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have invented now a process that they say easily extracts sugars from lignin and cellulose fibres."
Chemist James Dumesic, who is also part of the Wisconsin-Madison team, has worked with the liquid for years as a potential fuel in its own right,
Polio progress On 13 Â January, India marked its third consecutive year without a case of polio,
clearing the way for the World health organization to certify the Southeast asia region as polio-free. The achievement is a major milestone for India,
where high population density and poor sanitation had enabled the poliomyelitis virus to spread. Pakistan Afghanistan and Nigeria remain the only countries never to interrupt transmission of polio,
and the virus reemerged last year in war-torn Syria and the Horn of Africa. Pesticide risks On 8 Â January, the US Environmental protection agency announced the award of nearly US$500,
Novartis woes The Japanese health ministry filed a criminal complaint on 9 Â January against Swiss pharmaceutical firm Novartis,
Advertisements for the best-selling drug relied on studies showing that it also reduced the risk of stroke and heart attack.
and is being tested at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New york city to help physicians decide how to diagnose
and treat patients. Daniel Lynch/Rex Featuresengineering leader The Royal Academy of Engineering in London announced the nomination of Ann Dowling (pictured) as its first female president on 9 Â January.
AIDS chief On 9 january, US President Barack Obama nominated physician Deborah Birx to coordinate the country s global AIDS efforts
and administer the US President s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Birx currently heads the AIDS programme at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. The PEPFAR programme,
which receives about US$6 Â billion per year to distribute antiretroviral drugs and medical care in countries affected by AIDS (see Nature 457,254-256;
2009), received a five-year reauthorization in December 2013. USGS chief US President Barack Obama announced on 9 Â January that he had nominated Suzette Kimball to lead the US Geological Survey.
Kimball, a former deputy-director for the agency, has served as acting director since February 2013,
Smithsonian head Plant pathologist Eva Pell announced on 8 Â January that she will step down as undersecretary for science at the Smithsonian Institution in WASHINGTON DC,
Clinical data A lack of access to clinical-trial data is hindering research and medical care,
which also examined the United kingdom s stockpiling programme for the influenza drug Tamiflu (oseltamivir), the authors say that evaluation of the efficacy of Tamiflu
and other medicines has been hampered by drug manufacturers withholding data. The report follows recent European and US initiatives to increase data sharing and transparency in clinical trials.
See page 131 and go. nature. com/9lgbd6 for more. Gun controls The US Department of health and human services proposed on 3 Â January that patient-privacy exemptions should be created
so that relevant mental-health records can be submitted to the national databases used to screen potential gun buyers.
So far, background checks have prevented the sale of more than 2 Â million firearms, according to the White house.
But some researchers who study firearms violence have called for better safeguards against gun ownership by those who are mentally ill (see Nature 496,412-415;
) Cannabis commerce The world s first legal market for recreational marijuana opened in Colorado on 1 Â January.
Colorado is one of only two US states to have approved nonmedicinal use of marijuana by adults (see go. nature. com/rtr3ou.
Although the drug remains illegal under national laws, the US government has said that it will not interfere with state industries kept under strict local controls.
Last month, Uruguay became the first country to approve a national market for legal marijuana,
New drug approvals The US Food and Drug Administration approved 27 Â new drugs in 2013, down from a 15-year high of 39 Â drugs the year before,
which some analysts had taken as a signal of revived fortunes in the pharmaceutical industry. The agency told reporters that it had received fewer drug applications for review in 2013
and that the number of approvals was in line with the average of 28 new drugs approved annually over the past five years.
US ICEFOSSIL felony A fossil retailer from Eagle, Colorado, pleaded guilty on 2 january to conspiracy to smuggle dinosaur bones and other fossils into the United states from China and Mongolia.
) Falsified research The US Office of Research Integrity has sanctioned two biomedical researchers in seven days.
On 30 december, the agency reported that Baoyan Xu, a former postdoctoral fellow at the US National institutes of health (NIH) in Bethesda,
Maryland, had published falsified data on the immune responses of patients with hepatitis to a newly discovered virus. A week earlier, Dong-Pyou Han,
when researching a vaccine against human immunodeficiency virus  1 (HIV-1) by spiking rabbit blood samples with antibodies.
and in NIH grant applications. Open access An international open-access effort kicks off this month to make all particle-physics research articles freely available to readers.
Cancer donation Six US research centres have received a combined donation of US$540 Â million from the estate of late shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig.
Harvard university, the Massachusetts institute of technology, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Stanford university and the University of Chicago. Announced on 6 Â January,
the donation brings the total contribution to cancer research by Ludwig and his estate to $2. 5 Â billion.
J. Med. Recent years have seen a declining share of the US economy spent on biomedical research and development (R&d),
) The shifting trends mark changes in spending by the biomedical industry, perhaps reflecting lower labour costs and more government subsidies for commercial R&d in Asia,
and cancer progression. go. nature. com/rs9oyb15-17 january The 8th Human Amyloid Imaging meeting in Miami,
as well as other biomarkers linked to Alzheimer s disease. go. nature. com/oi5wkp
Many eyes on Earthimagine using Google earth or other online mapping tools to zoom in on high-resolution satellite images of the planet taken just hours or days ago.
and health estimates down to the level of rows of plants. Such detail could inform decisions on fertilizer and irrigation use,
Anti-tobacco efforts have saved millions of lives around the globehalf a century after the US government sounded an influential alarm about the health dangers of smoking,
"Tobacco control has been an extremely successful public health achievement, says biostatistican Theodore Holford of Yale university in New haven, Connecticut,
adds global-health researcher Christopher Murray of the University of Washington in Seattle, leader of a group that is also publishing a paper today.
and control as part of a special issue the Journal of the American Medical Association that marks the 50th anniversary of a landmark report on the health effects of smoking.
which was released on 11 january 1964 by US Surgeon general Luther Terry, concluded that the evidence that smoking causes lung cancer
and other illnesses was overwhelming. The Surgeon general is a spokesperson for the US Department of health. The Surgeon general's report helped to spur measures to deter smoking,
such as US legislation in 1965 that required warning labels to be placed on cigarette packs. Since then, the movement towards stricter regulation for tobacco has gained steadily momentum.
In 2003, the World health organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control recommended that countries should take measures to regulate the tobacco industry by, for example,
banning tobacco advertising and smoking in public places, and imposing steep taxes on tobacco products. These and other tobacco-control efforts, such as education campaigns, lawsuits against cigarette makers and smoking-cessation programmes, have averted 8 million premature deaths in the United states alone
Physician Michele Bloch, chief of the Tobacco Control Research Branch at the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland, calls the study by Levy and colleagues"powerful
and could offset health gains if these forms of tobacco are used alongside cigarettes. Murray s study also points out that because of population growth,
because it shows that smoking is not more intractable than other public-health priorities, such as infectious disease."
and to treat reproductive disorders.""To control reproductive problems, it is important to regulate not only inhibitory factors such as infection or stress,
but also accelerative factors such as pheromones, she says. The group is now looking to find similar pheromones and pathways in other economically important livestock animals, such as sheep and cows
Drug buyout The biggest pharmaceutical deal since 2009 was announced on 18 Â February with the US$25-billion purchase of Forest Laboratories in New york. Forest is being acquired by Actavis,
and is known for producing generic pharmaceuticals. The buyout will create a company with annual sales of $15 billion from drugs targeting disorders of the heart, digestive system and central nervous system, among other areas.
The expanded company will have combined a investment in new drug development of $1 billion per year. Holt retires Physicist and congressman Rush Holt (Democrat,
New jersey) announced on 18 Â February that he will retire from the House of representatives at the end of this year.
New medical chief Cardiologist Victor Dzau will be the next president of the US Â Institute of Medicine,
provides the government and the public with health advice. Dzau will start on 1 Â July, taking over from Harvey Fineberg,
Dzau is president and chief executive of the Duke university Health System. His research contributed to the development of enzyme inhibitors used to treat heart disease.
ESAPLANET hunter The European space agency announced on 19  February that it will launch a space-based observatory to hunt for planets around nearly one  million stars outside the Solar system.
Military psychology Many mental-health programmes designed for the military and their families are not based on good science,
finds the US Institute of Medicine in a report released on 20 Â February. The US Department of defense needs to evaluate the psychological help it provides to veterans to ensure that its services are effective
such as depression and anxiety, plaguing veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sea sickness Europe s seas are in poor health.
This is the conclusion of two reports published on 20 Â February detailing the state of the continent s marine ecosystems.
By contrast, investment in companies working on medical devices, energy or clean technologies all fell in 2013,
It is expected to include a request for a US$1 â billion fund to fight climate change. 5-7 march The Wellcome Trust biomedical charity hosts the Genomic Disorders 2014 conference in Cambridge, UK.
Researchers will look at the latest findings on the genomic basis of rare disorders and discuss how genome analysis can aid clinical practice
and patient care. go. nature. com/dqzhpa
Vietnam on high alert over flu riskthe H7n9 avian-influenza virus that has killed more than 100 people in China in the past year has for the first time been detected in a province bordering Vietnam,
raising the prospect that the disease may take hold across Asia and beyond. It was found in poultry in the live-bird markets of southern China s Guangxi province in late January,
and has caused three known human cases in the region. The news comes as a surge in human H7n9 flu cases in China
since the start of the year shows signs of abating, possibly because of the re  introduction of control measures.
Vietnam, which had prepared already response plans for such an H7n9 outbreak, has placed itself on high alert."
says Peter Horby, a researcher at the Oxford university Clinical Research Unit in Hanoi. H7n9 flu was detected first in China in March last year,
and almost all of the human cases were reported the following month. They subsequently dropped off sharply after the prompt, temporary closure of live-bird markets,
which were identified quickly as the places where most human infections occurred. Researchers say that the surge in cases
more than 200 human cases of H7n9 flu have been registered in China this year, compared with around 160 recorded in 2013 (see Ups and downs).
although with a coastal and southerly shift (see The flu front line). Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces are affected the worst.
Last week, the first human case of H7n9 flu was detected in Jilin province in the far north of the country, raising a further risk of spread to North korea and Russia,
The country was hit hard by another avian-flu virus, H5n1, a decade ago, and suffered enormous economic losses and more than 60 Â human deaths.
and mitigate avian-flu outbreaks, including boosting the number of veterinary surgeons and improving diagnostic facilities. To specifically address the risk of H7n9 flu,
Vietnam has banned the importation of poultry from China. It has introduced also twice-weekly monitoring for H7n9 in markets in the north of the country,
and ordered their weekly disinfection. In addition the country s health and agriculture ministries have developed contingency plans should H7n9 arrive,
including closing markets and shutting down trade routes.""Vietnam s preparedness and response actions should be seen as a model for the region,
says Ben Cowling, a flu epidemiologist at the University of Hong kong.""My impression is that financial concerns had a greater influence this winter compared to last spring.
But the surge in H7n9 flu cases highlights the continuing public-health and possibly pandemic threat that it poses.
The virus s epidemiology remains largely unchanged from last year: it is still, essentially, an avian virus that is sporadically infecting humans from a reservoir in poultry,
in part because the virus causes only mild disease in poultry and thus spreads silently, with human cases typically the first warning of a poultry outbreak.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011