While orange peels are edible they are not nearly as sweet or juicy as the pulp.
NASA's Terra satellite went leaf peeping last week from its perch about 438 miles (705 kilometers) above the planet.
Fall Foliage Seen from Space As the Earth Observatory notes the brown and orange hues are currently most prominent in Michigan's Upper Peninsula northern Wisconsin upstate New york New hampshire Vermont Maine and southern
The images also show traces of phytoplankton blooms in the Great lakes and off the North Atlantic coast.
Meanwhile fiery reds and deep purple leaf colors come from anthocyanins which are produced exclusively in the fall in response to stress.
Climate change might affect the way leaf-peeping season shakes out in the future. Simulations featured in the Climate Change Tree Atlas show how some populations of fall favorites might shift.
Climate change might also postpone the onset of leaf-color changes and leave fall hues lingering later into the year.
or Worcestershire sauce that were made for dipping asparagus tips or cauliflower florets. By the 1950s the Lipton Company was searching for new ways to market its line of dried instant soups.
A postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Hoban helps determine how many seeds are needed
Well-planned seed collections he says are an important tool in preserving endangered species and promoting agricultural sustainability.
and storing them in botanic gardens or seed banks. I use mathematical and genetic models to determine how many seeds are needed
and where they should be collected from geographically in order to best preserve a species'diversity diversity that will be needed to adapt in the future.
Well-planned seed collections can also capture valuable traits like adaptations to drought and disease
and eventually propagate the saved seeds into a future environment. What do you like best about your work?
and pecans they're part of the legume family of plants which includes beans lentils peas and other familiar foods.
When planted peanut seeds (kernels) grow into small 18-inch plants with oval-shaped leaves. The peanut plant appears unremarkable at first glance
but unlike most other plants its flowers bloom above ground while its fruits (peanuts) develop below ground.
To start the small yellow flowers grow around the lower portion of the plant and only last for about a day.
After self-pollination the flowers lose their petals as the fertilized ovaries in the center of the flowers begin to enlarge.
The plant's pedicels stalks connecting to the ovaries curve downward pointing the budding ovaries toward the ground.
The plant consists of stocky leaves whorled around a central stem. In a healthy pineapple plant the tapered swordlike leaves can grow up to about 5 feet (1. 5 meters) long.
The pineapple fruit grows out of the top of the central stem. The fruit is actually the result of dozens of individual fruit-producing flowers that have fused into a single fruit
which is capped with a crown sporting numerous short leaves. Unlike most fruits pineapples are grown not from seeds.
Common commercial varieties of pineapples are self-incompatible meaning that the plants'pollen cannot fertilize members of the same variety.
So unless different varieties are grown next to one another and flower simultaneously the plant will produce a seedless fruit that develops without fertilization.
When removed the crown of the pineapple fruit contains small roots. If it's planted into the ground
(or a pot) a new fruit-producing plant will grow. Additionally the plant's suckers (side shoots that grow in between the leaves of the main stem)
and slips (tiny plantlets that grow out from the base of the pineapple fruit) can produce new plants
The orange-fleshed tubers are especially high in Vitamin a (also called beta-carotene which is the carotenoid that turns into Vitamin a) vitamins C E and B6 fiber and manganese.
Sweet potatoes are members of the morning glory family while yams are closely related to lilies and grasses.
Sweet potatoes are compared roots to regular potatoes which are tubers (underground stems). Sweet potatoes are native to Central
and South america and have been grown for at least 10000 years. Christopher Columbus took sweet potatoes to Europe after his first voyage to the New world in 1492.
George washington Carver developed 118 products from sweet potatoes including glue for postage stamps and starch for sizing cotton fabrics.
They typically eat seeds grass and plants. One swallow of food isn't enough for these animals.
and so eat only vegetation. Their favorite foods are grass and herbs but water buffalo will also eat aquatic plants.
Both African and Asian buffalo will eat shrubs and trees when they can't find grass
or herbs to eat. Buffalo like most mammals bear live young which are called calves. Usually they have one calf at a time
including some invasive plants such as blackberry (Rubus niveus). Control efforts are weed under way to them out.
or the number of new seedling trees. The mortality rates, which are of the order of 1,
But when they extended their search to seedlings and saplings the number rose to 90%.
%We needed to start looking at the little guys, says Chazdon. But the future is bleak for many secondary forests,
William Laurance, a conservation biologist at STRI, notes that the presence of seedlings doesn't necessarily translate into stable long-term populations.
possibly because large birds that act as seed dispersers have gone extinct in the area. And most of the regrown areas surveyed by her team are within 100 metres to two kilometres of primary forest,
in order to destroy fungi, insects and weeds, pesticides do not have to be so hazardous that they are carcinogenic,
EU grain prices would double along with the price of potatoes and brassicas like spinach and cabbage.
he says that the leaf-albedo idea is probably much easier to implement. Agriculture is already a globally coordinated undertaking
And experiments have shown that spraying kaolin on leaf canopies to increase their albedo does not reduce the yield.
Switzerland, looked at changing the albedo of Earth's grasslands by encouraging plants with particular leaf geometries3.
including thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), rice (Oryza sativa), maize (Zea mays) and a green alga (Chlamydomonas reinhardtii),
And as researchers push into other potential cash crops in the region including jatropha and palm trees for biofuels many worry that appropriate regulation and controls may come too late.
which grow farther apart than rainforest vegetation. As a result, streamflow has dropped and wells have dried up in many villages in Xishuangbanna.
They use a bamboo frame and load it with water hyacinth, which rots and makes a bed for vegetables to grow.
Nature Newsas farmers around the world anxiously monitor the march of a deadly orange fungus across their wheat fields,
the cloning of two fungus-fighting genes. Both genes fend of a wide range of'rust'fungi, including several types of stripe rust (Puccinia striiformis) and leaf rust (P. triticina.
The genes are found in some wild wheat, and can be bred into commercial varieties but that can be an arduous process taking several years to complete.
The results are welcome news as plant pathologists race to arm themselves against an ongoing epidemic of stem rust (P. graminis) caused by a recently emerged fungus called Ug99 (see'Wheat fungus spreads out of Africa'.
From there, pathologists believe wind currents may sweep Ug99 spores into India and, eventually, China. Meanwhile, new types of stripe rust that can overcome the defences bred into commercial varieties have sparked a separate epidemic in the United states. It is amazing that we are still fighting this battle,
but only against a narrow range of rust fungi. These defences target a specific molecule produced by the fungus,
and in time, the fungus often evolves a way to modify the molecule, or to go without it entirely.
Increasingly, breeders are turning to a class of defence gene with a broader spectrum of resistance.
One such gene, called Lr34, has been fending off leaf and stripe rusts in some agricultural wheat for the past century.
It has been exposed to so many rusts in many different environments for a long period of time, and we haven't seen any sign of selection for virulence against that gene.
leaving the fungus which requires a live host less time to establish an infection, the researchers say.
Dubcovsky discovered the second fungi-fighting gene several years ago as a result of work on a wild wheat that has yields with an unusually high protein content2.
perhaps produced by the fungus itself, or by the plant soon after it becomes infected3.
In one study, infected wheat carrying only Lr34 had stripe rust covering 60%of its uppermost leaf
90%of the leaf was covered in rust. But in plants with both genes, only 5%of the leaf bore the fungus.
Dubcovsky has bred already lines that carry both genes and has begun to distribute them to farmers.
Although Lr34 alone does not render plants resistant to the fungus, researchers have found that the gene can enhance the resistance found in some varieties4.
when the majority of fertilizer was applied later to seedlings, when growth is fastest. Each year, Chinese farmers apply around 600 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare,
The vegetation in the region, dominated by bushes and tall eucalyptus trees, burns extremely well when dry.
Most trees and tall vegetation can survive normal bushfires, and smaller, more frequent fires reduce the risk of a catastrophic blaze.
Increased fire frequency could lead to vegetation changes that would reduce plant growth, decreasing the amount of carbon that plants remove from the atmosphere further exacerbating greenhouse warming by carbon dioxide.
The idea is to deliberately set the vegetation on fire from time to time, without letting fires get too large.
Ecologists are still assessing the best time of year for setting different types of vegetation on fire, to find the best strategy that causes the least damage to plants.
and the vast Siberian forest fires of 2003.
Hybrid embryos fail to live up to stem-cell hopes: Nature Newsthe creation of human-animal hybrid embryos proposed as a way to generate embryonic stem cells without relying on scarce human eggs has met with legislative hurdles and public outcry.
But a paper published this week suggests that the approach has another, more fundamental problem:
it may simply not work. Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology, a stem-cell company based in Los angeles, California,
and his colleagues show that in their labs, early-stage human-cow, human-mouse and human-rabbit hybrid embryos fail to grow beyond 16 cells (Y. Chung et al.
Cloning Stem Cells doi: 10.1089/clo. 2009.0004; 2009). ) The hybrid embryos also failed to properly express genes thought to be critical for pluripotency the ability to develop into a wide variety of cell types.
the fast-growing weed with a small genome favoured by many plant biologists as a model system,
Brazilian sugarcane ethanol despite having an even higher indirect effect and being transported abroad, still performs better than any other biofuel.
or it might be wheat that's resistant to rust, it might be cassava that's able to tolerate change in temperature,
and climate change. With climate change there are many things we'd like to see: new technologies or new ways of doing things that take account of changing climate patterns,
To date, fire-prevention policies in regions such as western North america have sought to suppress forest fires altogether leaving forests more susceptible to large-scale fires and insect attack.
The results, published today in PLOS Biology could bring plant breeders a step closer to generating crops that produce their seeds completely asexually a process called apomixis1.
The hybrid offspring of crosses between two different cultivars of a crop plant often tend to produce higher yields.
But when hybrids are allowed to self-fertilize to produce the next generation of seeds, the intricate genetic networks that brought about this'hybrid vigor'are shuffled,
Some plants, such as grape vines, can be propagated asexually using cuttings but not crops such as corn or wheat.
Unfortunately, of the more than 400 flowering plants known to reproduce by apomixis which include dandelions and blackberries few are crops.
The concept of engineering apomixis in crops is so enticing that it was featured in a 2007 mystery novel called Day of the Dandelion by Peter Pringle,
in which a secret agent-cum-botanist hunts for a missing researcher believed to have discovered an apomixis'supergene'.
and only rarely produced viable seeds after fertilization. In contrast, the triple mutants created by Mercier
and fertilization produced viable triploid and tetraploid seeds. The results are encouraging, says Ueli Grossniklaus, a plant developmental biologist at the University of Zurich,
Researchers must first find out how to engineer crop plants to produce viable seeds from diploid reproductive cells without fertilization a process called parthenogenesis.
mutants that produced endosperm the nutritive tissue that surrounds the plant embryo in the seed without first being fertilized3.
Seed Vault in Norway an underground cavern containing a stock of plant seeds from around the world.
For now, the technology available limits such projects to seedlings and young trees on relatively small plots of land.
Measurements on 1, 500 of the 10,000 seedlings his team has planted suggests that a rise of 2-4 °C causes seedlings to put out shoots
He thinks this stems in part from delays to the climate agenda caused by unrelated distractions,
Pests could overcome GM cotton toxins: Nature Newslaboratory studies suggest that it may be possible for insects to overcome two disparate toxins produced by genetically modified cotton.
The results strike a cautionary note at a time when developers are racing to create crops that produce many different pesticides.
One of the most common'pyramided'crops on the market is cotton that produces two different'Bt'toxins made naturally by the bacterium Bacillus thuringensis.
The researchers were studying pink bollworm (Pectinophora gossypiella) a particular nuisance in the cotton fields of the southern United states. Crops expressing Cry1ac have held thus far largely the pest at bay,
But this does not pose a threat for control by the current pyramided Bt cotton of this insect Tabashnik says.
but they were not able to survive the higher concentrations of Cry2ab found on cotton bolls produced by the pyramided transgenic cotton.
Nature Newspolicy Events Business Facilities Environment<br></br>The week ahead Sound bites Number crunch<br></br>Policy Stem cells:
Restrictions on human embryonic stem-cell research in Japan were relaxed on 21 august, after updated government guidelines came into effect.
After almost three-and-a-half years, the trial of Korean stem-cell researcher Woo Suk Hwang may be drawing to a close.
His papers claiming that he had created cloned human embryonic stem cells were shown to be fabrications in January 2006.
A second rocket launch from South korean territory is planned for spring 2010. Research voyage: A US research vessel left Oregon on 22 august for Canadian waters to conduct seismic studies imaging seafloor structures, after a Canadian court declined to halt the cruise.
Business Stem cells: Six months after giving it the green light, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) halted plans for the world's first clinical trial of a therapy generated from human embryonic stem cells.
The product's manufacturer, Geron in Menlo Park, California, had hoped to start human testing of its potential treatment for spinal-cord injury this summer (see Nature 457,516;
Some rice plants are resistant to the pernicious fungus responsible the disease, but the rice from these plants often has undesirable qualities,
Once these new cultivars are made, however, they still need to be tested both in the paddy and on the plate.
In a case study of an evergreen forest in Cambodia, Sasaki and his co-author Francis Putz from the University of Florida in Gainsville use inventory data for plots of trees with trunks wider than 5 centimetres to estimate that the forest
Of this, 71.4 tonnes is in trees that have trunks wider than 45 centimetres the trees that loggers are most likely to target.
when maize roots are damaged by pests2. Identifying more compounds that act as chemical signals is crucial,
Guy Poppy, a chemical ecologist from the University of Southampton, UK, agrees that the method should allow farmers to reduce crop damage without eradicating the entire population of pests in a field's ecosystem-allowing biodiversity to remain mostly unchanged.
which has promised a liberal approach to contentious research issues such as human embryonic stem cells and genetically modified crops (see Nature 461,456-457;
Stem-cell oversight: The International Society for Stem Cell Research has created a committee to weed out companies that offer unapproved stem-cell'therapies'.
'The society's president, Irving Weissman of Stanford university in Palo alto, California, launched the committee on 22 september at the World Stem Cell Summit in Baltimore, Maryland.
The 18-member panel plans to create a blacklist of companies that don't provide documentation showing that their treatments have been reported in peer-reviewed literature,
carried on a Russian rocket, but Russian space agency Roscosmos said last week that Phobos testing couldn't be completed in time to meet this year's launch window.
The week ahead 5-7 october The 2009 Nobel prizes for physiology or medicine, physics and chemistry are announced. http://nobelprize. org 5-7 october Singapore hosts the Stem Cells
and oil refiner Sinopec in Beijing to develop a process that uses maize stalks and leaves,
and it opened a research unit in Brazil this year to study the conversion of sugarcane residues to ethanol.
the leading producer of genetically engineered seed, on transgenic crops. The Danforth Center was founded with grants from Monsanto's philanthropic arm among others,
Fungus genome boosts fight to save North american forests: Nature Newscanadian researchers have decoded the DNA of the tree-killing fungus found in the mouths of mountain pine beetles,
the destructive bugs that wipe out entire North american forests. Further genome sequencing of the beetle and pine tree species should help forest managers design better pest-control tactics,
As the burrowing beetles tunnel under the bark to feed and lay eggs, they release spores of the blue-stain fungus (Grosmannia clavigera),
which stops the production of a protective toxic resin released by the tree and allows the beetles to continue to infest.
Bohlmann and his colleagues assembled the fungus's 32.5-million-base-pair genome which is around a hundredth the size of the human genome,
using a combination of next-generation and traditional sequencing technologies the first time that a complex eukaryotic organism has been sequenced from scratch using such a hybrid approach
and say which population of trees is interacting with which population of fungus and which population of beetles,
have taken the fungus genome, pinpointed the gene responsible for staining the pine wood blue and created a knockout strain that does not produce any pigment.
But the full utility of the fungus genome might only be realized after other related species are sequenced also,
who studies the interaction between bark beetles and fungi at the University of Montana in Missoula.
Comparing the blue-stain fungus with free-living or pathogenic fungi will shed light on how the beneficial fungus helps the beetles thrive,
Nature News The business of biofuels The promise of green gold is fading from Jatropha curcas,
a shrub that thrives in arid conditions and whose seeds yield a diesel-like oil.
Just last year, some analysts were predicting that the area planted with jatropha worldwide at the time,
The Jatropha Alliance, an advocacy group based in Berlin was estimating that investments of up to US$1 billion could be expected annually.
only four or five have been in jatropha projects. Jatropha has gone very quiet, he says. What happened?
It's difficult to untangle the impacts of the global financial downturn from disappointment with jatropha in particular,
says Rob Bailis, an environmental scientist at Yale university. But over the past three years, the investment got way ahead of the plant science,
Jatropha can live in very dry conditions, but doesn't necessarily yield a lot of seeds. The plant takes three years
or more to reach maturity, requiring care along the way. And jatropha seedlings are often not well-suited to the climate in which they are planted.
Even supporters acknowledge that the allure of jatropha is fading somewhat. This year a lot of projects did not continue,
admits Thilo Zelt, director of the Jatropha Alliance. One blow came with the publication of a controversial paper in June, in
which a team led by Arjen Hoekstra at the University of Twente in The netherlands suggested that jatropha needs more water than other bioenergy crops, such as maize (corn),
to produce the same amount of oil (W. Gerbens-Leenes et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci.
) Jatropha had nearly four times the water footprint of sugar-cane ethanol, for instance. Critics point out what they see as flaws in that analysis,
including the fact that it is difficult to compare jatropha, which is wild, with crops such as maize that were domesticated for optimal use thousands of years ago.
But Hoekstra says that more thought needs to be given to variables such as where jatropha is planted
Jatropha was the hallelujah crop he says, but in reality it is just another crop with its own characteristics.
The split between D1 Oils and BP has hurt jatropha's reputation as a good business investment,
and a decision to focus on key strategic areas, such as sugar-cane ethanol from Brazil, cellulosic ethanol from the United states and biobutanol.
In the meantime, D1 Oils has shifted from planting jatropha to focusing on basic research including starting a breeding programme to develop seeds with high oil yields
It has collected samples from jatropha plants growing wild in different environments and is creating a library of genetic material from
which it intends to develop enhanced seed strains to test, says chief executive Kirk Haney. Eventually, jatropha might prove more useful on a local scale.
For instance, Diligent Energy Systems, a company based in Eindhoven, The netherlands, has set up small-scale operations in Tanzania,
where it provides jatropha seeds for farmers to plant among other crops or on spare land that is unsuitable for food crops.
500 hectares of jatropha planted between them. The idea is to grow to 10,000 by the end of this year,
In other countries, jatropha has yet to capture local support. In the Lao People's Democratic Republic, farmers have been bombarded with seeds
and promotional material from companies but received little to no support, says Jakob Rietzler of the Lao Institute for Renewable Energy in Vientiane.
the jatropha they planted reached harvest at the same time as the rice crops. Farmers neglect their jatropha seeds
because they have to harvest their rice, he says. In India, where much of the jatropha hype originated,
success will come only if a conservative, realistic approach is adopted at the beginning, says Pushpito Ghosh, director of the Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute in Bhavnagar.
Biodiesel from his institute's jatropha project (see Nature 449,652-655; 2007) has been used in test cars belonging to the project
and in collaboration with General motors. Ghosh's team has been working to improve the genetic stock of their jatropha,
and is about to embark on a life-cycle analysis of how much biodiesel jatropha can generate from a 50-hectare plot.
Even so, it would be premature to call jatropha a success in India, says Ghosh. It is still in the take-off stage.
and subsequent disappointment surrounding jatropha as a weeding-out process, leaving behind smaller, more professional players.
The deal is expected to give Jatoil between 1, 000 and 2, 000 hectares of established jatropha-bearing land in Java.
And China, one of the world's leading biofuel manufacturers, is also taking an interest in jatropha,
and developed a high-resolution map to show where jatropha might grow best; Madagascar, Tanzania and Ethiopia are likely candidates.
Meanwhile, Bailis is conducting jatropha life-cycle analyses to account for land-use change in India and Brazil.
Zelt says that seeds optimized to produce more oil will be entering the market in the coming months,
So although jatropha may not be a saviour plant, transforming vast quantities of desert land into biofuel-producing moneymakers,
And jatropha can play a big part in that. Â NEXT WEEK:
Obama proposes greenhouse-gas standards for vehicles: Nature Newsthe Obama administration released new automobile standards on Tuesday, proposing regulations that would curb greenhouse-gas emissions and ratchet up fuel-efficiency standards beginning in 2012.
Potato blight's gene weaponry revealed: Nature Newsthe blight that caused the infamous Irish potato famine of the 1840s has yielded its genetic secrets.
Phytophthora infestans, the water mould that causes late blight in potatoes, consumes and rots the leaves and tubers of the plant.
The mould still afflicts potatoes, tomatoes and related plants, and costs farmers around the world an estimated $6. 7 billion a year1.
What has happened is after taking 15 years to incorporate this resistance in a cultivar it would take Phytophthora infestans only a couple of years to defeat it.
But now that the sequence is complete, he says, plant pathologists will be working flat out on new strategies for breeders based on how the blight operates and its potential weaknesses.
-I rocket in favour of commercial space flights, had already been aired in public meetings (see Nature 460,791;
However, Bush's work-around was deemed later illegal in federal court. Polar-bear protection: The US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed on 22 october to designate around 500,000 square kilometres of critical habitat 96%of which is sea ice for the polar bear.
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