'a disease caused by the fungus Chalara fraxinea, but this will not stop the pathogen from killing up to 99%of the ash trees in the country,
but Ian Boyd, chief scientific adviser for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs (Defra) Â says that it is more likely that the spores arrived naturally.
the spores were blown probably on the wind from continental Europe, where the fungus has ravaged ash trees from Poland to France for more than a decade.
On the upside, ash trees reproduce and grow quickly, with a high capacity for self seeding, so reforestation may not be too arduous.
Was it a new species of fungus, or a variant of an old, endemic species of fungus?
Mycologists first attributed ash dieback to Hymenoscyphus albidus, a species endemic to Europe that they thought had developed into a new, more virulent strain.
 When the spores reached European ashes in Poland, the trees had little ability to cope with the pathogen,
says Ranga Myneni, an expert in the remote sensing of vegetation at Boston University in Massachusetts,
Maurice Leponce, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciencesa"blushing phantom butterfly, Cithaerias pireta, rests briefly on a palm leaf in San Lorenzo forest.
says Heather Paxson, a cultural anthropologist at Massachusetts institute of technology in Cambridge, who studies US artisan cheese-makers.
The US study team was led by Guangwen Tang a nutrition scientist at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts,
The CCTV programme disclosed an email sent by Yin to Tang in which the CDC official said that he had changed the wording to avoid mentioning Golden Rice
And Tang brought Golden Rice from the United states to China illegally, without due declaration to the relevant Chinese authorities,
Tang did not respond to Nature s request for comments. Tufts University spokeswoman Andrea Grossman said in an official statement that"it would be premature for Tufts University to reach any conclusions before investigations currently underway in the United states are completed.
Stem-cell ruling In a landmark decision, the German Federal court of Justice ruled on 27 Â November that patents may be granted on human embryonic stem cells
A European Court of Justice ruling had said last year that research patents depending even indirectly on human embryonic stem cells should be outlawed on moral grounds.
The European court also equated human embryonic stem-cell lines with embryos, but the German court explicitly stated that they are not equivalent.
Stem-cell reforms California s US$3-billion stem-cell agency the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) in San francisco is to reform its governance structure to minimize conflicts of interest,
The fungus Hemileia vastatrix which causes coffee rust, looks set to wipe out half the nation s 2013-14 harvest in the most affected areas.
On 22 Â January, the government signed an emergency bill to tackle the outbreak. The disease has attacked already coffee crops in South and Central america.
US$1. 7 Â million Total funding for each winner of the Tang Prize, new science prizes announced by Taiwanese billionaire Samuel Yin on 28 january.
But the long stalemate between growers and the fungus behind the devastating disease has broken with the fungus taking the advantage.
Caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix, coffee rust generally does not kill plants, but the Institute of Coffee of Costa rica estimates that the latest outbreak may halve the 2013-14 harvest in the worst affected areas of the nation.
and Mexico since the rust arrived in the region more than 40 years ago, says John Vandermeer, an ecologist at the University of Michigan in Ann arbor,
On 22 Â January, Costa rica enacted emergency legislation to speed up the flow of government money towards fighting the fungus.
The fungus first emerged as a significant problem by 1869 in Ceylon now Sri lanka before spreading around the world.
Stuart Mccook, a historian at the University of Guelph in Canada who studies the rust,
says that the wet weather in some areas of Ceylon was ideal for the spread of the fungus,
By 1970, the fungus had been detected in Brazil, and severe outbreaks were seen in Costa rica in 1989
"Coffee rust was considered a solved problem by most of the coffee growers and coffee institutes of the region,
says that rust has been causing ever-greater problems, although in Kenya, varieties resistant to the rust have held it at bay.
Colombia could be the closest to a solution. Marco Aurelio Cristancho, a researcher at Cenicafã, the National Centre for the Investigation of Coffee in Chinchin ¡
The government has supported also work on the genetics of both the fungus and the plant. Research programmes have started in other countries, too.
"Scientists need to continuously develop resistant varieties in order to keep coffee leaf rust disease at bay, Phiri says."
Stem-cell finale The US Supreme court has guaranteed that government-funded researchers will continue to be able to work with human embryonic stem cells.
which two researchers working with adult stem cells challenged the legality of the National institutes of health (NIH) funding the work,
Stem-cell transfer  Pioneering biotechnology company Geron is shedding its assets in human embryonic stem cells.
Geron funded initial academic work to isolate human embryonic stem cells in the 1990s, but current management said that the technology is a poor investment.
Being able to judge which flowers will provide the most nectar, and which have already been plundered by other pollinators,
when they land on flowers, this charge helps pollen to stick to their hairs. Daniel Robert, a biologist at the University of Bristol, UK, knew that such electrical interactions would temporarily change the electrical status of the flowers
but he did not know whether bumblebees were picking up on this. Keen to find out, he and a team of colleagues measured the net charges of individuals of Bombus terrestris, a common species of bumblebee,
Next, the team placed the insects into an arena with petunias (Petunia integrifolia) and measured the flowers'electrical potentials.
Sure enough, when the bees landed, the flowers became a little more positively charged. Finally, the team released bumblebees into an arena with artificial flowers, half of which were carried positively charged
and a sucrose reward, and the other half of which were grounded and carried a bitter solution.
Over time, the bees increasingly visited the rewarding charged flowers. But when the researchers turned off the electrical charge on the flowers
and re-released the trained bees, the insects visited rewarding flowers only about half of the time,
as they would have by random chance. That suggested that the bees were detecting the electric fields
if flowers were visited recently by other bumblebees and are therefore worth visiting, says Robert."We had no idea that this sense even existed,
causing soil acidification, fertilizing harmful algal blooms and threatening biodiversity, says Zhang. But until his study"
They found that the leaves of a range of herbaceous and woody plants across China were absorbing 33%more nitrogen than in 1980.
Similarly, nitrogen uptake by rice wheat and maize (corn) on long-term unfertilized farmland had increased by about 16%in the same period."
who used the progeny of Monsanto seeds to sow his land for eight seasons. The company says that by not buying seeds for each generation,
from seeds to microbes, prompting them to revisit terminator-like technology.""If I were at Monsanto and
but bypassed the company by purchasing seed for a late-season crop from a grain elevator known to contain Monsanto s transgenic seed.
they have little recourse to prevent someone from buying seed or a cell culture or a transgenic animal and using it to generate thousands more to sell again at a fraction of the original price."
"Once you have sold the first seed, you are done, says Hans Sauer, deputy general counsel for intellectual property at the Biotechnology industry Organization, a lobby group in WASHINGTON DC.
a seed that could be harvested for food but would not produce offspring. The controversial proposal raised concerns that it would make farmers dependent on industry for their livelihood.
There are alternatives to making sterile seeds (see Terminator, the sequel. One tactic would be to switch off the transgene of interest in seeds,
so that they could grow into new plants but would not pass on the benefits of the engineered trait.
But around the city of Gumi, about 280 kilometres south of Seoul, blighted branches still bore a shroud of brown, withered leaves reminders of the chemical accident that shook the region some three months earlier.
Fungi and roots store a surprisingly large share of the world's carbonthe largest fraction of carbon held in the soils of northern forests may derive from the living
and the decomposing roots of trees and shrubs and the fungi that live on them. By some estimates, the planet's soils contain more than twice the carbon in the atmosphere.
twigs and branches, says Bjã rn Lindahl, a fungal ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala.
The difference in carbon-sequestration rates, the researchers report in Science1, can be explained entirely by carbon derived from the roots of trees and shrubs and their symbiotic fungi.
These organisms, dubbed ectomycorrhizal fungi, 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
It is unclear why the small islands built up a larger fraction of root-and fungi-derived carbon in the past century,
Symbiotic fungi are a dominant component of a soil s microbial community, she notes in an article accompanying the team s research2."
while that trees divert carbon to their ectomycorrhizal fungi, but having 70%of soil carbon derive from them is much more than we could have expected,
a warmer climate might lead to enhanced growth of the boreal forest s trees and shrubs,
as well as their roots and fungi, causing an ovrall increase in carbon sequestration
Will we kill off today's animals if we revive extinct ones? An article by Scientific American.
Going from DNA to a stem cell of some kind that is then coaxed into becoming a sperm or egg cell,
which among other things monitored ice sheets and vegetation, and the failure of the agency s Orbiting Carbon Observatory
"It adds to a growing body of information demonstrating the complexity of humpback-whale behaviour and its apparent roots in social learning,
The rocket is the first vehicle to take off from NASA s new launch pad at the Wallops Flight Facility In virginia.
imidacloprid and thiamethoxam should not be used where they might end up in crops that attract bees, such as oilseed rape and maize.
they could play a part by making bees more susceptible to the parasitic mite Varroa destructor and the parasitic fungus Nosema apis,
clothianidin-treated or imidacloprid-treated seeds. It found"no clear consistent relationships between pesticide levels
He points to a 2012 study7 that found neonicotinoids in dandelions growing near treated crops,
but rose again after 1990s, when its use rose heavily in the Indian subcontinent. Other POPS continue to be used commonly in many developing countries.
wood and roots. The sink varies from year to year, but on average it soaks up one-quarter of the annual CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
CARBO-Extreme teams have conducted field experiments that simulated drought in different climates and vegetation types, from Atlantic pine forests to alpine meadows.
which stores carbon in leaves, roots and soil. It had a smaller effect on soil respiration,
and 40%have high levels of phosphorus. This nutrient pollution causes algal blooms (pictured; near the Iron Gate dam on the Klamath River in northern California), the breakdown of which saps water of the oxygen that aquatic life needs to survive."
where they survived by sucking fluids from tree roots. With the warm weather this month, the nymphs have been crawling out of the ground before moulting for one last time and taking wing.
After mating, the females cut slits into tree branches and lay their eggs there. By the time the eggs hatch
Phytophthora infestans, which causes potato late blight, is an oomycete a type of single-celled organism related to brown algae.
Carried by infected potatoes, the disease probably arrived at the port of Antwerp in Belgium in the summer of 1845,
it destroyed the tubers, and there was nothing for this very poor part of the population to eat
Indiana farmer Vernon Bowman argued that Monsanto s patents did not apply to seeds he purchased from a grain elevator (storage tower) that contained a mixture of surplus crops,
saying that US patent law"provides no haven for propagating crops from such seeds. See go. nature. com/uil764 for more.
Its plump, green seed pods resembled those of a family of plants known in Peru as sacha inchi,
But the pods of the new plant, later dubbed Plukenetia carolis-vegae, were bigger than those sprouted by the known sacha inchi species Plukenetia volubilis and Plukenetia huayllabambana.
Familiar with sacha inchi and impressed with his find s large seeds, he transplanted it to his garden.
he and his family had developed a taste for the roasted seeds and had sold some of their harvest.
producing bigger seeds and more leathery leaves. But he would rather focus on the two plants potential similarities.
the seeds of P. carolis-vegae will be full of an essential omega-3 fatty acid that the body cannot make itself, Ã Â-linolenic acid (ALA).
"There are only a couple dozen bushes. On his desk, Bussmann keeps a single dried seed from the plant in a plastic bag.
It is black and the size of a large cherry.""You can roast them and pound them
but that on about the ninth day of development, the nascent chicken penis called a genital tubercle stops growing
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.
but when did the country begin its love affair with the vine? A chemical analysis of archaeological artefacts finds evidence that wine was being produced in the south of France by the fifth century bc."
The analyses also revealed the characteristic fingerprints of pine resin, as well as herbs such as rosemary and basil,
which may have served as flavourings or preservatives, or added to give the wine medicinal properties. A limestone platform (see picture),
Grape seeds and skins were also found scattered nearby.""The combination of botanical and chemical evidence makes a pretty tight argument that wine was being produced at Lattara,
The french National assembly approved legislation to permit research on human embryonic stem cells and embryos. The decision,
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,
Norihisa Tamura, approved the world s first trial in humans of induced pluripotent stem (ips) cells.
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
The plant in question is Spartina alterniflora, or cordgrass, a fiercely invasive salt-marsh grass that is native to eastern North america.
because its roots can trap sediment, making it ideal for erosion control and land reclamation.
the weed has spread rapidly across the country s coastal regions, covering some 400,000 hectares (see Coastal invasion).
says reserve director Tang Chendong, so far consuming more than 10%of the wetland. It colonizes an area by forming dense bundles with deeply penetrating roots squeezing out native plants
and burrowing invertebrates, eating mudflats and drying up wetlands. At Dongtan,"this has had devastating consequences for many bird species,
says Tang, and authorities in Shanghai feared that herbicides would damage native plants, wildlife and local fisheries.
Financially,"it s an incredible, major project to get rid of some weeds says David Melville, a conservationist in Nelson, New zealand,
For example, without the ebb and flow of tides, the sea bulrush (Scirpus mariqueter), a native intertidal grass bearing fruit and stalks that are key food sources for many birds
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.
based in Bonn, Germany, in partnership with the Millennium Seed Bank at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew,
carrot and sunflower that have high numbers of relatives yet to be collected. And it identified some crops, such as sorghum and bananas,
The analysis and weed maps by the CIAT"will help us prioritize species of interest
so that they can identify weed conservation strategies in partnership
Losing a single pollinator species harms plantsremoving even a single bee species from an ecosystem has serious effects on plant reproduction,
Georgia, set out to test these models in the field with his colleague Heather Briggs from the University of California,
They also carefully caught bees as they were pollinating the flowering plant Delphinium barbeyi (a type of larkspur) and anaesthetised them
fewer flowers received their own type of pollen. As a result, each flower produced one-third fewer seeds on average."
"This is a spectacularly interesting study, says ecologist Jane Memmott of the University of Bristol, UK.
Brosi's study measured seed production only in larkspur a plant that is pollinated by several species of bumblebee.
This economy was noted in the fourth century ad by the mathematician Pappus of Alexandria, who contended that the bees had"a certain geometrical forethought.
Economy rocket The European space agency (ESA) announced the design of its next rocket Ariane  6, on 9  July.
The rocket will have less lifting capacity than the current model: taking only one satellite per launch instead of two.
ESA s choice of a more cost-effective design was influenced by competition from rockets abroad, notably the Russian Proton launcher.
No GM wheat has yet been approved to be grown commercially in the United states. The company says that all seed from the field trials conducted on more than 400 hectares in 16 states (see Sifting for GM wheat) was accounted for and either secured or destroyed.
USDA, MONSANTOMONSANTO had shipped MON71800 seed to breeders around the country for crossing with commercial varieties optimized for each region s climate, day length and disease profile.
seeds from farther afield could mean that someone had saved intentionally seed and released it. But pinning down the variety is difficult,
but Fraley argues that those who illegally enter fields to demolish crops could also break into experimental plots to collect seed.
They were found in localized patches in only one of two wheat fields that had been planted with the same non-GM seed.
the transgenic wheat would flower and drop most of its seeds before the rest of the crop was harvested.
Those seeds would fall straight down, generating a clump of herbicide-resistant offspring. No explanation is completely satisfying,
acknowledges Rene Van Acker, a weed scientist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.
Van Acker and Zemetra carried out separate field trials of the wheat over a decade ago
"We had to account for pretty much every seed in and every seed out, down to the gram, recalls Van Acker.
removing seeds with tweezers when necessary. But Carol Mallory-Smith, the OSU weed scientist who first tested the Oregon plants three months ago,
wouldn t be surprised if one of the field-test seeds had escaped. She has found transgenic crops in stranger places.
In 2009, for instance, she found transgenic sugar-beet seedlings in a bag of soil sold to gardeners."
"There are so many places in the system where errors can be made, she says.""Once we release these genes into the field,
and sugar cane in the hope of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet for more than half a decade, scientists have warned that many food-based fuels might actually be boosting emissions relative to fossil fuels.
Europe is even importing rapeseed and vegetable oil to meet demand. But the original accounting for biofuel emissions was all wrong,
The root of the different immune responses lies with the mushroom-shaped haemagglutinin protein found on the outside of influenza-virus particles
but the make-up of its cap and stem vary between strains. In the study, a vaccine for H1n2 spurred pigs to produce antibodies that bound the cap and the stem of that virus s haemagglutinin.
But some of those antibodies also targeted the stem of H1n1 s haemagglutinin protein, helping that virus fuse to cell membranes.
That made H1n1 more efficient at infecting pigs and causing disease. The finding may give some vaccine developers pause.
Much of the work to develop a universal flu vaccine has targeted the stems of haemagglutinin proteins
including those that target haemagglutinin stems, he adds.""We should be very careful. Gary Nabel, a flu-vaccine researcher and chief scientific officer at the biotechnology firm Sanofi in Cambridge, Massachusetts, agrees."
Instead, those early farmers used deep plowing, a practice that enabled grain roots to tap the moisture in the soil,
a devastating disease caused by the fungus Venturia inaequalis. In 1999, they finally produced a tasty variety that contained the Vf defence gene,
The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the branch of the agriculture department responsible for overseeing GM CROPS,
This glyphosate resistance enables farmers to wipe out most weeds from the fields without damaging their crops.
grew more shoots and flowers and produced 48-125%more seeds per plant than non-transgenic hybrids in the absence of glyphosate.
Previous work had shown that rising temperatures could make apple trees flower earlier. Fruit-tree specialist Toshihiko Sugiura of the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan,
Many studies have focused on the potential of global warming to increase vegetation in the Arctic
as trees and shrubs shift northward into previously scrubby tundra. But the current work suggests that the change in the seasonal CO2 signal is too big to be explained by ecosystem shifts that far north.
and were heavily dependent on rye and barley crops in an unfavourable growing climate. The researchers analysed data on crop yields over a 50-year period that culminated in a severe famine in the 1860s
which had expressed previously support for easing Germany s tough restrictions on stem-cell research, lost its representation in parliament.
GM-rice fallout Guangwen Tang, a nutrition scientist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, has been banned by the university from conducting human research for two years owing to ethics violations in a study
Tang tested the health benefits of Golden Rice genetically modified to produce a Vitamin a precursor on children in China s Hunan province (see Nature http://doi. org/nv9;
to get seeds onto the market in the next 3-5 Â years. Agriculture s climate problem is a nitrogen-fertilizer problem.
which washes into ponds and causes ecologically harmful algae blooms. Nitrate can also be converted to nitrous oxide (N2o) gas,
After years of hunting, they identified a nitrification inhibitor secreted by the grass s roots.
Arcadia expects commercial partners to bring seeds to market by 2017, and in December 2012, the United nations Clean Development Mechanism approved a plan for farmers to earn sellable emissions reduction credits by using the company s technology.
Karp and his colleagues covered coffee bushes on two Costa rican plantations with mesh fine enough to keep out birds.
when birds were excluded from foraging on coffee shrubs, rising from 4. 6%to 8. 5%.By analysing bird faeces for beetle DNA,
wild flowers and brush by selectively thinning the trees. It also wants to restore the original natural habitat
while a crew with chainsaws and electric weed-cutters cleared blackberry bushes, ivy vines and small eucalyptus trees near roads and buildings in
"What some people see as a weed-filled blot on the landscape, others see as something extremely valuable, worthy of managing in its own right.
Among the biggest threats are fungi and oomycetes, similar but distinct groups of microbes, 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.
Global movement of crop pests had never been analysed comprehensively. To fill this gap Bebber and his colleagues made use of historical records held by CABI (formerly known as the Centre for Agricultural Bioscience International),
the rate of shift varied significantly for different groups and among individual species. Fungi, beetles, true bugs, mites,
She highlights the worrying finding that fungi and oomycetes are moving particularly quickly, at 7 and 6 km per year respectively.
Her team's study is published today in Nature Climate Change6. Chris Thomas, a biologist at the University of York, UK, notes that the overall rate of movement is quite similar to that found in a meta-analysis he led on the movement of wild species1."
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