After a drive to the end of a road at an old mine site, he and his team then had to hike for 45 minutes to reach the cave's mouth.
Mercader says that he has taken always precautions not to wash or touch the excavated tools to ensure that he leaves pollens,
Loren Cordain, an exercise physiologist at Colorado State university in Fort Collins and an expert on the Palaeolithic diet, agrees that the evidence is too thin to support the consumption of grains as food.
Climate security breach: Three weeks after the theft of e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, unsuccessful hacking was reported at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis
Anthropologists in conflict: A panel of anthropologists has criticized again the Human Terrain System, a controversial US Department of defense project to embed social scientists in military units in Iraq
and Afghanistan to gain cultural understanding (see Nature 455,583-588; 2008). ) In a report presented by the American Anthropological Association at its annual meeting on 3 december,
an internal committee said the programme had uneasy ethical tensions such as being aligned too closely with military intelligence gathering
and surveillance needed to ensure that the virus is gone. It's a huge task when you have the virus in developing countries and war zones, such as Somalia,
to carry out monitoring and surveillance, he says. By the 1970s, smallpox, too, was found only in the war-torn Horn of Africa,
where the last case was isolated in Somalia in 1977. Although the rinderpest vaccine can provide lifelong protection,
it also poses a challenge. Because it contains the live virus diagnostic tests can't differentiate between infected and vaccinated animals,
director-general of the OIE, says that the holdup is because 12 countries are yet to submit their final test and surveillance results to the organization.
Even after the disease is declared extinct in the wild, it will live on in the lab. Over the next year and a half,
The dispute over the VB10 planet says Boss, is another example of how hard it is to detect extrasolar planets using astrometry from the ground.
and there is general agreement that the next global climate deal-under negotiation next week in Copenhagen-should include a forest protection plan.
and the local opportunity costs of protecting forests rather than cutting them down for timber, or to clear land for agriculture and grazing.
Brazil, for example, has said that it won't sell its emissions savings on the offset market because it wants developed nations to concentrate on reducing their own carbon emissions
Astronomers witness biggest star explosion: Nature Newsastronomers have watched the violent death of what was probably the most massive star ever detected.
The supernova explosion, which lasted for months, is thought to have generated more than 50 Suns'worth (1032 kilograms) of different elements,
The explosion dubbed SN2007BI was spotted as part of a digital survey to hunt for supernovae at the Palomar Observatory near San diego, California.
The blast was seen first on 6 april 2007, but unlike most supernovae, which fade over a matter of weeks,
Gal-Yam and his colleagues report that the explosion was probably that of a supermassive star, at least two hundred times the mass of the Sun1.
The explosion generated several Suns'worth of radioactive nickel-56 and vast quantities of other lighter elements, such as carbon and silicon.
Gal-Yam says that it is the radioactive decay of the nickel that kept the explosion glowing for months.
followed by a massive explosion of the star's core. Pair-instability supernovae have been predicted for decades,
and surveillance needed to ensure that the virus is gone. It's a huge task when you have the virus in developing countries and war zones, such as Somalia,
to carry out monitoring and surveillance, he says. Although the vaccine can provide lifelong protection, it has caused also some problems.
Because it contains the live virus diagnostic tests can't differentiate between infected and vaccinated animals,
as both will test positive for antibodies against the virus. Cows also pass on antibodies to their offspring through their milk.
director-general of the OIE, says that the holdup is because 12 countries have not yet submitted their final test and surveillance results to the organization.
He adds that over the next year and a half, the OIE will be drawing up an inventory
The language states that Congress disapproves of the EPA's December 2009 assessment that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health.
By declaring greenhouse gases a public health threat, the EPA is now legally bound to regulate emissions.
Environmentalists and major industry supporters are taking the Murkowski threat seriously, recognizing that even a symbolic vote against climate regulation would qualify as a major setback.
In November 2009, a staff member at the Foping Nature Reserve in China's Qinling Mountains one of the panda's last remaining strongholds spotted a panda with the unusual colouring.
Conservationists worry about such inbreeding because it means that more animals rely on the same set of genetic defences to overcome environmental threats,
increasing their risk of extinction. According to Wang, brown-and-white pandas have only been seen in the Qinling population,
Avandia risks: Drug-maker Glaxosmithkline (GSK) was aware of cardiac risks associated with its diabetes drug Avandia (rosiglitazone) years before they became public
but sought to minimize the findings, said the US Senate finance committee in a report released last week.
and communicate the risks of Avandia. Biomedical priorities: The Wellcome Trust, Britain's biggest charitable funder of biomedical research, has for the first time explicitly set out five priority areas it wants to fund,
Federal authorities in the United states announced on 19 february the conclusion of their investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks,
such as analysis tracing mailed Bacillus anthracis spores back to a single-spore batch in Ivins's lab at the US ARMY Medical Research Institute of Infectious diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland.
on the fifth anniversary of the treaty's entry into force. go. nature. com/RMWXIO 1-5 march The 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference takes place at the Woodlands,
The broad survey will provide the basis for setting environmental protection targets in the next five-year plan of economic initiatives that begins in 2011,
says Zhang Lijun, China's vice-minister of environmental protection. The census found that agriculture was more damaging to China's waterways than manufacturing.
Vice-minister Zhang Lijun says that the environmental protection targets for the next five-year plan are being deliberated,
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has denied endangered-species protection to the American pika (Ochotona princeps.
It would have been only the second mammal other than the polar bear to be afforded such protection explicitly because of climate change.
I think this maple syrup study demonstrates the danger of tissue testing. If we are making serious decisions about peoples'lives with isotope analysis,
The case involves a series of applications made by the state-owned science company Agresearch to the Environmental Risk Management Authority (ERMA), a government regulatory agency.
issues brought up during the legal battle remain relevant. Much of the argument centred on the generic nature of the documents
and whether they contain enough information to evaluate risks and benefits. Indeed, some opponents of genetic modification believe Agresearch is testing the system to see how broad their applications can be.
Many of the risks and controls associated with genetically modifying animals will be the same he says.
Support for forest protection programmes was one of the few successes during last December's climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark,
During the meetings, countries agreed that developed countries would financially support poor nations in protecting their forests through an initiative called REDD-plus Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, with added benefits for local
Despite the two nations'poor track records in elephant protection, conservationists are worried that the proposals could be accepted because of an ongoing CITES debate over how best to manage elephant populations.
which is needed to sustain protection programmes. Others worry that one-off sales risk stimulating the illegal ivory trade,
but there is a quite serious risk that some of the advances made in Arabidopsis research in the past ten years may not be sustained.
At the moment, six countries Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary and Luxembourg have GMO bans in place through the use of'safeguard clauses'.
if they claim to have some evidence that the crops might pose a risk to human health or the environment.
But some reports suggest that the commission could continue to approve GMOS across the EU on the basis of scientific advice from the European Food safety Authority (EFSA), its independent risk-assessment body in Parma,
Environmental groups and some countries have had longstanding concerns about the risk of genes spreading from crops to bacteria and increasing bacterial antibiotic resistance.
What does the science say about that risk? The EFSA considered this in the context of the Amflora application in 2005,
and concluded that the risk of transfer of antibiotic resistance from plants to bacteria was remote,
They argued that the risk of gene transfer might be less than remote and that introducing genes that confer resistance to antibiotics that are used, for example,
Indeed, although the EU, the World health organization and many health bodies accept that the risk of transfer of antibiotic resistance seems low
More broadly, other experts say that much more publicly funded research on GMOS would lead to greater public confidence in risk assessments,
Volunteer army catches interstellar dust grains: Nature Newsscientists say they have caught the first pieces of interstellar dust the fundamental building blocks of the Sun, Earth and the rest of the Solar system.
The discovery required an army of volunteers, including a Canadian man who spent 15 hours a day studying images online
One of the most powerful aspects of the project was distributed the army of volunteers who have searched for the tiny tracks in the aerogel.
The problem, says Cook who is director of the Tree-Ring Laboratory at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New york,
The recent ruling meant that Singh would have been able to use a defence commonly referred to as'fair comment
But the report warns that the risks of genetic engineering may multiply as the technology is applied to more crops
says ICOMM leader Mitch Sogin of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. See go. nature. com/Pnstez for more.
Once intended to become ammunition for Roman soldiers'slingshots, the ingots, discovered by a diver in 1988 (see picture,
Remember the food riots in several countries in 2008? We are still trying to understand what happened,
Are these the silver bullets they are made often out to be? It's clear that genetic progress in the past in France
because it avoids the spraying of dangerous pesticides the risk-benefit equation is clearly in favour of its use.
Marine protection: The british government has announced that it will create a huge marine reserve around the Chagos islands, an archipelago of more than 50 islands in The british Indian ocean Territory.
The protected biodiversity hot spot covers more than half a million square kilometres of ocean, and will include a'no-take'reserve where all commercial fishing is banned.
Wind-energy companies have struck a compromise with the UK Ministry of Defence, which was blocking the development of five wind farms on England's east coast.
because spinning turbine blades can confuse air-defence radar (see Nature 451,746; 2008). ) But under an agreement announced on 31 march,
The 1 april ruling is of wider significance as it could establish greater legal protection for others wanting to debate scientific or medical issues.
the appeal judgment means that he is able to use the defence of'fair comment'under British libel law.
which in January forced out director Susan Greenfield. 12-13 april US President Barack Obama hosts a global summit on nuclear security in WASHINGTON DC.
The argument isn't an esoteric dispute among palaeontologists, but speaks to a fundamental theory of human evolution:
which dates to Raymond Dart's theories in the 1920s. The papers from White and colleagues showed a bipedal species with apelike feet
These strains pose an even greater threat to wheat than other types of Ug99 because they are more virulent
and the wheat plants have fewer defences against infection, says Pretorius. Pretorius and his team analysed the genomes of the new stem rust variants
But the political fallout intensified as Congress sought answers about the explosion of the Deepwater horizon rig.
There is no clear link between mobile-phone use and the risk of brain cancer, according to a major study published this week (The INTERPHONE Study Group Int. J. Epidemiol. doi:
India defence research: India's largest military technology research body is set for a management revamp under government measures announced on 13 may.
The 52-year-old state-owned Defence Research & development Organisation currently employs more than 5, 000 scientists in 51 laboratories.
It will be split into seven separately directed centres, such as life sciences and materials science, and projects will be monitored by a new oversight committee.
A 2007 review had recommended restructuring the organization after criticisms that projects such as combat aircraft and guided missiles encountered huge time and cost overruns.
Business Genome shopping: The US pharmacy chain Walgreens postponed plans to start selling a personal genome-testing kit in thousands of its shops last week,
which incorporates eight genes conferring herbicide tolerance and insect protection. If farmers don't switch to Roundup Ready 2,
The finer details of areas to be preserved (see'Protection plan')will be chosen by biologists and logging companies.
which includes most of the boreal forests earmarked for protection, contains approximately 50%of the estimated global belowground organic carbon pool,
The insects are also emerging as a threat to crops such as green beans, cereals, vegetables and various fruits.
For example, the boll weevil was once the main worldwide threat to cotton. As farmers sprayed pesticides against the weevils,
Nature Newschemists and activists encountered another setback in their battle to see methyl iodide banned from agricultural use last week,
But a report by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) concluded in 2009 that the compound posed significant health risks.
saying in its 5 february reviewreport. pdf>report that in every instance where the DPR findings differed from the US EPA risk assessment for methyl iodide,
The extra, health-protective use restrictions we are proposing â Â are much stricter than those imposed anywhere else in the United states
The review members are experts in assessing pesticide risks not in regulatory risk management that leads to decisions on registration, the DPR said in a statement to Nature.
Risk management is a distinct process of weighing scientific and other factors. The EPA is due to review its approval of methyl iodide in 2013.
The chemical is registered already for use in 48 states. The agency does not have figures on how much methyl iodide is being used at present,
or whether there is an equal distribution of numbers between species. The team looked at the bugs, nematodes and fungi that attack the hated Colorado potato beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata).
whether the carbon savings from land use would outweigh the increased agricultural emissions, says David Lobell,
and the carbon savings are quite large. All other things being equal, the researchers found that agricultural advances between 1961 and 2005 spared a portion of land larger than Russia from development
Both methods put people at risk of exposure to the viruses. Andrew van den Hurk of the Queensland Health Forensic and Scientific Services in Coopers Plains, Australia,
As a result, it would be nearly impossible to quantify the risk of infection on the basis of the amount of VIRAL RNA on the cards
and assess the potential threat. Next, van den Hurk will compare the sensitivity of the approach with those of other standard methods,
and that larger groups even those filled with dallying birds may have a lower risk of predation
and halting the spread of weapons technology. On 28 may, after almost a month of negotiations, 189 nations, including Iran,
reported that Iran now has enough low-enriched uranium to convert into weapons-grade material for two nuclear weapons.
The fellows complained that the 2007 document was too dismissive of attacks on the understanding of climate change.
on 25 may, after years of struggle, Genzyme won FDA approval to market Lumizyme (alglucosidase-Ã Â) for patients with late-onset Pompe disease, a muscle-weakening illness.
the California-based drug company's treatment for osteoporosis. The monoclonal antibody will be used to treat postmenopausal women who have increased an risk of fractures,
which conducts a risk assessment of each GM organism. The Council of ministers then makes a decision on the crop that applies to farmers and agribusinesses throughout Europe.
regardless of whether the EFSA has determined they pose no risk to human health or the environment and whether they have been approved by the European commission.
The very real danger is that it risks discouraging technology companies investing in Europe. Meanwhile, environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace are concerned that devolving decision-making on GM CROPS will make it more difficult to block their development.
This is obviously just the opening gun for the model, says Oppenheimer. We want people to be looking at other border regions to build up a global picture.
Report maps perils of warming: Nature Newsas the US Senate gears up to debate the latest incarnation of proposed climate legislation next week, a blue-ribbon panel has released
The debate over the climate bill is caught up in the mid-term elections and the struggle for power.
the London-based think tank. The report's authors suggest that fighting illegal logging is a cheap way to prevent carbon emissions produced
Steve Murawski, chief science adviser for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration's National Marine Fisheries Service, says that he
with concerns that the ruling could limit the protection companies enjoy on their European patents. Nature explains more.
claiming that the imported soya meal contained the DNA sequence that it had patent protection for in Europe.
which Monsanto had gained patent protection in the first place. Why does it matter? The decision reflects a wider question about the scope and strength of DNA patents:
which it was patented originally known as purpose-bound protection. The ruling is being viewed as the first test of the European union's biotechnology directive,
and on what protection that patent enjoyed. Lawyers disagree about the wider impact of the court ruling,
The protection conferred by a patent on a product containing or consisting of genetic information shall extend to all material...
in order to clarify and harmonize decisions on purpose-bound patent protection across the European union and to remove any doubts within the biotech industry.
There will be a number of patentees nervously casting an eye over the other independent claims of their patents in order to gauge the degree of protection that remains for their invention
However, most patents incorporate other legal claims that could be used to enforce protection on products containing genetic material without resorting solely to claims over DNA sequences as Monsanto had to do, notes Martin Maclean of intellectual-property lawyers
As for the wider impacts on Monsanto, the company stated that overall patent protection of the company's Roundup Ready soya bean was not at issue,
Then there were the trips on horseback in 1947 into the roadless Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey where she was the co-discoverer of the Hittite fortress at Karatepe.
Her research career began in earnest at Karatepe after the Second world war. In the early 1950s, when the government sought to move artefacts from Karatepe to a museum,¡
and an outdoor museum with some shelters designed by her husband was completed in 1960. She fought again
The Pakistan Irrigation and Power Department has declared many embankments along a 160-mile stretch of the Indus in the Sindh province to be in danger of breaking.
An emergency committee, which convened that day, said that countries were generally not reporting out-of-season outbreaks of the flu strain,
Weapons lab lawsuit: A nonprofit watchdog filed a lawsuit on 16 august to stop the construction of a US$4-billion weapons facility at Los alamos National Laboratory in New mexico.
The Los alamos Study Group says that the nuclear facility, the core of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR) project, has violated federal law by failing to produce an environmental-impact statement.
and environmental disasters including the risk of radioactive particles being released from contaminated land around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
and the dangers the fires still pose. How bad is the situation? More than 300,000 hectares of forest, vegetation and peat land have burned
Is there a radiation risk? Not really. Jim Smith, who researches the fate of radioactivity in the environment at the University of Portsmouth,
I wouldn't underestimate the exposure risk, as we know little about the health effects of a carbon monoxide
With a limited labour force but ample subsidized chemical fertilizer available in most of rural China, dumping this phosphate-rich animal manure into waterways has become an easier and cheaper option than using it to fertilize cropland.
scientific methods of assessing risks and benefits of GM CROPS, says Monkombu Swaminathan, an agricultural scientist often referred to as the father of India's green revolution for his role in developing high-yield varieties of wheat.
Threats to the world's plants assessed: Nature Newsmore than 20%of the world's 380,000 plant species are at risk of extinction,
making plants more threatened than birds, according to the first global analysis of the status of plant biodiversity.
The risk assessment, called the Sampled Red List Index for Plants, was conducted by plant scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK,
is the biggest threat to plants'survival, the study concludes. Existing indicators of biodiversity such as the Red List of Threatened Species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) focus mainly on vertebrates,
says Eimear Nic Lughadha, a plant scientist at Kew and a lead researcher on the plant risk assessment.
whether the areas inhabited by particular species are under threat. The study uses IUCN criteria to classify species as threatened.
The researchers plan to reassess the threat status to plants in 2015. Using the data published today as a baseline
whether the risk to plants is growing with time. Stephen Hopper, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, says that the assessment will help countries to measure progress towards new targets to halt loss of the world's biodiversity by 2020,
To separate out the possible effects refuge-seeking Hawlena also studied grasshoppers and muzzled spiders in indoor terrariums.
Like Hawlena's grasshoppers, the elk of Yellowstone national park in Wyoming were thought to eat differently because of the threat of predation.
because elk that are near starvation as many often are in the winter are willing to take any risk to eat.
like a mortar and pestle. The stones were coated also with several kinds of microscopic starch grains.
Nature News TEL MEGIDDO Fabled as a site of biblical battles and spectacular palaces, Tel Megiddo today is a dusty mound overlooking Israel's Jezreel valley.
Ancient Megiddo is said to have been a key administrative and military centre in the kingdom ruled by King David and his son Solomon during the eleventh and tenth centuries BC.
and tests could determine additional species at risk of a future die off. Attendees also agreed on a proposal to create an IUCN bumblebee specialist group that can coordinate the necessary research that will help policy-makers counteract the population loss.
Rice research The world's leading rice-research institutions are joining forces to improve rice yields
Nature Newsthe world's leading rice research institutions are joining forces to improve rice yields
says Marco Wopereis, director of Africarice, a research centre with temporary headquarters in Cotonou, Benin, that is also part of the CGIAR and of the global partnership.
would put an end to farmers'costly struggle against the caterpillars. The strategy was intended to restrict the spread of toxin-resistant pink bollworms by flooding the population with sterile moths.
the risk seems to have paid off: four years into the programme and almost a century after pinkies were first found in the United states, in 1917,
farmers are required to plant nearby'refuges'of conventional crops. The idea behind the refuges is to keep a population of non-resistant moths close at hand as potential mates for any resistant moths that arise.
Unfortunately, however, refuges also guarantee a steady local population of pink bollworms. After a while, farmers came to resent the refuges that allowed the bollworm to persist year after year,
costing them millions of dollars annually in crop losses and insecticide sprays. They asked the US Environmental protection agency for permission to dispense with the refuges
and instead begin releasing sterile moths. Still sceptical Tabashnik and his colleagues developed computer simulations to predict the consequences of the farmers'proposed strategy.
To his surprise, the models suggested that the combination of Bt cotton and sterile-moth releases could wipe out pest populations
Ideally, the same approach could be used in regions where poor farmer compliance with the refuge rule has contributed to widespread Bt resistance.
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