Amazon is best site for forest carbon investments: Nature Newsamazon nations will be the early winners in a future market for forest carbon credits,
which could grow to US$20 billion annually by 2020, according to a new report. It is estimated that deforestation accounts for around 12%of the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change1
and there is general agreement that the next global climate deal-under negotiation next week in Copenhagen-should include a forest protection plan.
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, which may one day go on to make new solar systems.
The explosion dubbed SN2007BI was spotted as part of a digital survey to hunt for supernovae at the Palomar Observatory near San diego, California.
One supernova in particular was very unusual, recalls Avishay Gal-Yam, an astronomer at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel
a member of the survey team. The blast was seen first on 6 april 2007, but unlike most supernovae, which fade over a matter of weeks,
and the Paranal Observatory in Chile revealed a supernova unlike any other. This week in Nature
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 type of supernova that it produced a'pair-instability'supernovae had been predicted by theory, they say,
The explosion generated several Suns'worth of radioactive nickel-56 and vast quantities of other lighter elements, such as carbon and silicon.
There are no such stars seen in our galaxy or other nearby galaxies. It's a rather spectacular star.
Some astronomers have suggested that stars might not be able to grow larger than about 150 solar masses,
in part because powerful solar winds might blow off any additional material. A survey of the stars in our own Milky way galaxy seemed to support the idea of this stellar size limit (see'Stars can only grow so big'.
'Stars in the Milky way are made mostly of the hydrogen and helium, with a few percent of their mass made up of heavier elements.
But the Universe's most massive stars are thought to have much smaller proportions of heavy elements,
allowing them to grow bigger and burn far brighter, before dying in a spectacular pair-instability supernova.
Photons generated within the star exert an outward pressure that keeps these giants from collapsing at least until the star fades as it ages.
Once the star contracts the temperature inside rises, making photons convert into pairs of electrons and positrons (the antiparticles of electrons.
These new particles don't exert the same outward pressure on the star as their photon parents,
followed by a massive explosion of the star's core. Pair-instability supernovae have been predicted for decades,
the new supernova could provide insight into the early Universe. Astronomers think that the Universe was composed almost entirely of hydrogen
and helium shortly after the Big bang. Those elements are thought to have formed giant stars that burned briefly and brightly before exploding,
creating heavier elements that eventually went on to form planets and people. There's a long interest in how these first stars evolved
and died, Langer says. This star's death could provide some clues. It has raised also some questions,
Langer adds. In particular, the supernova seemed to contain no hydrogen. Given that light elements are thought to be important in such a star,
it is a strange thing that the hydrogen is not there, says Langer. Gal-Yam agrees:
We should have detected it rather easily, he says. I think it was removed, very efficiently, by some unknown mechanism.
Deadliest animal disease on the brink of eradication: Nature Newsrinderpest, the world's most devastating cattle disease, will be declared eradicated within 18 months, according to world health bodies.
Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO), to detect extrasolar planets when they pass in front of their stars;
and Solar Orbiter, which would sidle up to within 62 solar radii of the Sun. A decision on the two winners is expected in mid-2011.
Pebble-bed dashed: The company developing South africa's pebble-bed nuclear reactor said on 18 february that it is contemplating shedding three-quarters of its 800-strong staff after losing government funding.
The European space agency has postponed the planned 25 february launch of its satellite for monitoring variations in the extent and thickness of polar ice.
since its 14 december launch, including these colour-altered images of the comet Siding Spring (right) and the Andromeda galaxy.
WISE will mainly seek the cool glow of asteroids and brown dwarfs almost-stars that aren't quite massive enough to ignite.
Whereas the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope honed in on specific objects, WISE, with its huge field of view, will take an infrared census.
It should complete 1. 5 sweeps of the sky before its cryogens run out around October.
Sound bites Being able to do science live from space every day of the week is going to be spectacular.
California, gets excited by the promise of cheap spaceflight, at a space-research conference in Boulder, Colorado, last week.
See go. nature. com/Ajykoj for more on the conference.
China takes stock of environment: Nature Newschina has completed its first ever pollution census. The 4-billion yuan (US$585-million) project took 570,000 people two years to complete.
Events Saturn mission extended Cassini, the probe that has been orbiting Saturn and its moons since 2004, will get to fly until 2017,
NASA announced on 3 february. The mission was slated originally to come to end in 2008, and had already been extended to 2010.
The US$60-million-a-year Solstice Mission will allow Cassini to study Saturn (pictured in July 2008)
when it is summer in the planet's northern hemisphere. The new schedule calls for 155 orbits around the planet, 54 fly-bys of the methane-shrouded Titan and 11 fly-bys of the icy moon Enceladus.
Awards Wolf winners: Physicists Anton Zeilinger, John Clauser and Alain Aspect share the prestigious 2010 Wolf Prize in Physics for their work on quantum entanglement.
In one, a single country unilaterally pumps aerosols into the stratosphere to block the Sun's rays
they are talking about apples and oranges and Porsches and whales and moons, he says.
take up lots of space and have large genomes. By studying thousands of plants in a single greenhouse, scientists can conduct experiments in a fraction of the time
and space required for crop species . But sequencing technology is improving so quickly that genome size is no longer the barrier it once was.
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.
what stars and planets really are made of, and also offer a way of charting the chemical evolution of the Milky way.
The Stardust mission was sent on a path through the Solar system that crossed the route of comet Wild 2. Westphal
because they thought at the time that comets were frozen samples of primordial interstellar matter, essentially unchanged since they formed billions of years ago outside the Solar system.
But analyses of these comet grains several years ago showed that they were forged in hot environments near the Sun
and had been altered substantially during the Solar system's formation (see'Comet Born Of our own Sun').However, Stardust also captured some non-cometary grains.
Before the encounter with Wild 2, Stardust opened another collecting tray to space. The researchers hoped to catch 100 or so interstellar grains from the weak but continuous flux in open space.
The elements in these grains were forged in stars but coalesced into grains in the empty space between stars,
where they were mixed and rocked by supernova shock waves and cosmic rays. The grains were far harder to catch than the comet particles.
Not only was the flux much lower, but the interstellar particles were smaller than the comet grains
and were moving several times faster up to 30 kilometres per second. The Stardust researchers say that the interstellar grains nabbed by their spacecraft may provide a unique way to study the matter between stars.
It's kind of a grand thing, says Don Brownlee of the University of Washington in Seattle,
who was principal investigator for the mission. We're catching a piece of the galaxy. I'm cautiously excited,
says Westphal, who adds that the researchers must conduct more tests to ensure that their particles are truly interstellar grains,
rather than micrometeorites or even pieces of the spacecraft knocked loose by debris. It took four years of searching to identify the two potential interstellar dust particles,
stuck at the ends of tunnels they had bored in the Stardust collector, which consists of a wispy material called an aerogel.
using satellite and wind-speed data. The emissions are so small, however, that climate experts don't anticipate any climate effects.
The week ahead 24 april The Hubble Space Telescope was launched 20 years ago on this day.
US President Barack Obama tells Florida's Kennedy space center on 15 april that sending astronauts to the Moon is so last century (see go. nature. com/zwdf2w for more.
We already have enough food to feed everyone on the planet at 3, 000 kilocalories per day,
US President Barack Obama's proposed 2011 budget for the agency would rectify some problems by transferring money from the cancelled Constellation moon-rocket programme to long-term technology-development and research.
computer models and satellites to assess the origin and amount of greenhouse-gas emissions. She sees the California programme as a model
Such detailed monitoring should help scientists calibrate measurements from carbon-monitoring satellites. At present US and Japanese scientists are busy interpreting initial data from a Japanese satellite,
and NASA is planning to launch a second version of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory by 2013 (a rocket failure sent the first one hurtling into the Pacific ocean in February 2009).
The french are currently developing another satellite. Many see satellite measurements as a more reliable way to verify greenhouse-gas emissions.
snapping this image of Jupiter (inset, right, shown next to a visible-light image) on 25 may.
The debate began with a 2007 study1 that used data gathered by NASA's Terra satellite to argue that the canopy of the Amazon rainforest grew
These uncertainties are exposing the limits of space-based sensors that were designed 20 years ago
says Carlos Nobre, a scientist at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research in S £o Josã Dos Campos,
The uncertainties in understanding drought in the Amazon won't be reduced without better sensors in space, says Asner.
although it was among the largest in the planet's history. But the effects were soon apparent.
They rely on relatively coarse data from sources including the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration's Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer satellites,
But the Indian Remote Sensing satellites used by the FSI have a much higher resolution up to 23.5 square metres per pixel so the agency has the means to distinguish native forests from plantations of nonnative trees.
Because the authors subtracted the FAO figures for the total area covered by plantations from a satellite-based estimate of total forest cover
says that a space telescope that could search for clues to dark energy and for exoplanets should be top priority for large space activities (projects exceeding US$1 billion).
See page 910 for more. Pandemic over: The World health organization (WHO) announced on 10 august that the world is no longer experiencing an H1n1 influenza virus pandemic.
It could also give us an idea about life on other planets what is the trigger,
and satellites, says that the drought appears to be broader in scope but slightly less intense than 2005.
much work remains to be done to explain why satellites see green if in fact they do
In 3-5 years we will be able to use remote-sensing technologies such as satellites to measure
Telescope woes The James Webb Space Telescope will cost at least US$6. 5 billion 墉 well over a previous $5-billion estimate 墉 according to an independent review released on 10 november.
and found that nearly 80%of them mentioned climate science in less than 10%of their space.
Just 9%of stories mentioned climate science in more than 50%of their space. Research Milky way's double bubble Using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope,
a team of astronomers declared last week that they had discovered two gargantuan'bubbles'of ray-emitting particles extending north and south of our Galaxy's centre (M. Su et al.
The source might have been the birth and death of short-lived, massive stars, or a jet of energetic particles from the black hole at the Galactic Centre.
First asteroid dust The Hayabusa space explorer has picked up dust from the Itokawa asteroid, from
which it returned in June after a seven-year mission. Researchers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced on 16 november that analysis of the mineral compositions of some 1
This is the first material ever returned to Earth from an asteroid. Dengue control The release of male mosquitoes genetically engineered to be sterile can control dengue fever by suppressing the population of the insects that carry the disease, scientists at Oxitec,
she still has no doubt that the planet is warming, that human-generated greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide,
Says Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New york city and proprietor of the Realclimate blog:
Earlier this year, a team backed by food giant Mars unveiled a preliminary sequence of the cacao tree Theobroma cacao.
In contrast to The french-led team, the Mars-backed researchers, who were supported also by the US Department of agriculture,
as the Mars-sequence appears to have a number of fragments that were inverted when the genome was assembled.
The authors of the new paper on its genome note that it takes up very little space
Venus probe flop In a bitter disappointment for Japan's space agency, its Akatsuki spacecraft failed to enter orbit around Venus on 6 december.
The probe was intended to monitor the hot planet's atmosphere but must now wait six years for another chance to reach orbit.
See page 882 for more. Policy NIH access A key panel of advisers to the US National institutes of health (NIH) voted last week to open the Clinical Center 墉 the agency's huge research hospital in Bethesda, Maryland
Events Private spaceflight success Spacex (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation) has become the first private firm to launch a spacecraft into orbit and return it to Earth.
and food security in response to climate change in the region. go. nature. com/b4gqxb 2 december Commercial spaceflight company Spacex, of Hawthorne, California,
NASA waste NASA could end up spending US$575 million on a space programme that has already been cancelled,
This means that NASA has to fund Constellation former president George w bush's programme to return to the Moon and reach Mars, at $200 million a month until 4 march.
Congress passed legislation to cancel the programme last October. See go. nature. com/pshdef for more.
Satellite sacking The chief executive of a leading German space company has been suspended as from 17 january for allegedly criticizing the European satellite navigation system Galileo,
Earth-observing satellites lack the ability to look into turbid waters and cannot tell the difference between the desirable grasses that store carbon,
Data from Landsat satellites revealed the true extent of mangroves only last year. The survey found that in 2000,
Research Comet flyby NASA's Stardust spacecraft sped past comet Tempel 1 on 14 february. The probe,
which had collected previously dust from the Wild 2 comet, snapped images of Tempel 1 five
and shot a projectile into the same comet. Researchers hope to spot differences that will reveal how comets change with each orbit round the Sun
and will zero in on the Deep Impact crater to determine more about the strength and stability of Tempel 1's upper layers.
Trip to virtual Mars Humans have walked on the surface of Mars 墉 in a simulated expedition (pictured.
simulating the isolation of a journey to Mars and back. Eight months after'launch',the expedition reached orbit
Four days later, they walked on reddish sand resembling that of Mars's Gusev crater.
and the Sun's radiation output. go. nature. com/z3cke6 Â
Livestock plagues are spreading: Nature Newslivestock plagues are on the rise globally, owing to increasingly intensive farming practices and the world's growing taste for meat and other animal products.
Coming up 14 february NASA's Stardust mission 墉 rebranded NEXT 墉 is due to fly by the comet Tempel 1. It is the first follow-up mission to a comet:
while atomic energy and space also saw double-digit percentage increases. But with the economy booming and inflation running above 8%,
and cancer. go. nature. com/5lwqim 7 11 march Preliminary analysis of dust picked up from a distant asteroid last year by the Hayabusa spacecraft will be among highlights of the 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science
which is part of the National Air and Space Museum in WASHINGTON DC. A flight test vehicle, Enterprise, will travel to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New york city.
See go. nature. com/tiilci for more. Virus sharing In the event of a future flu pandemic,
On 18 may, Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) released satellite data recording that 593 square kilometres of forest had been cleared in March and April,
So far, no detectors have spotted directly gravitational waves 墉 ripples in space-time thought to be produced by dramatic events such as the merger of black holes or neutron stars.
The US$750-million satellite flew from 2004 to 2005, but it took researchers six years to unpick systematic errors from the data it had collected.
Iran in orbit again Iran has placed its second satellite into orbit, according to state media. The 15.3-kilogram'Rasad'(Observation) satellite was launched on 15 june into an orbit 260 kilometres above Earth,
and is transmitting images and telemetry data to tracking stations. Iran's first successful satellite launch was in February 2009.
The country hopes to launch more satellites in the coming years, and to achieve human space flight by the end of the decade.
Research Watching neutrinos change flavour Some muon neutrinos that had been fired as a beam across the width of Japan changed into electron neutrinos on the way,
physicists with the T2k (Tokai to Kamioka) multinational collaboration reported on 15 june (T2k Collaboration http://arxiv. org/abs/1106.2822;
and the compounds that plants use to protect themselves against the Sun and predators. In specimens from one region of the Amazon rainforest in southern Peru, Asner and his wife, Robin Martin, identified 21 spectral traits that provided identifying signals for 90%of the species. A lot of people look at trees
but suggests that cleaning up the more radioactive public spaces in Fukushima prefecture will not be easy.
Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) began reporting spikes in deforestation in March,
Human agriculture has transformed the face of the planet, changing the flow of fundamental nutrients like nitrogen,
The invertebrate, named Eoandromeda octobrachiata because its body plan resembles the spiral galaxy Andromeda, suggests that the earliest branches in the tree need to be reordered,
) Degraded lands A rapid expansion of agricultural production over the past 50 years has left 25%of the planet's land resources'highly degraded',according to a United nations assessment of resources for food and agriculture.
NASA/JPL-CALTECHEVENTSCURIOSITY bound for Mars NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, also known as Curiosity, is on its way to Gale crater on Mars. The 900-kilogram rover (pictured,
It will spend the next nine months travelling to Mars and is scheduled to land in August 2012.
Russia's Mars mission, Phobos-Grunt, is not faring so well: stuck in low-Earth orbit,
As well as Beddington and Mamo, they include Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research in S £o Paulo,
After completing what state media referred to as a'kiss'in space, both craft are now orbiting Earth together.
Back from'Mars'Six men have survived 520 days cooped up in 3 small rooms at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow
where they were simulating the isolation of a journey to Mars and back. On 4 november, the crewmen 墉 three of whom were Russian, one Chinese,
true danger or the pressure and motivation of a real journey to Mars. See go. nature. com/1zquiu for more.
astronomers geared up this week for a fantastic view of an asteroid called 2005 YU55.
or 0. 85 of the distance between Earth and the Moon. It is the closest pass by an asteroid this big since 1976,
and there won't be another until 2028. See go. nature. com/ohn6zt for more. How icebergs begin A seasonal ice-survey flight has spotted the birth signs of a large iceberg in West Antarctica:
Fifty thousand years ago, no fewer than 150 genera of large animals roamed the planet,
NASA science head John Grunsfeld, an astrophysicist and astronaut who carried out repairs on the Hubble Space Telescope
discovering another Earth-sized planet. It has spotted also a Venus-sized planet in the same star system,
which is about 290 parsecs (946 light years) away from us, researchers reported on 20 december at a press conference and in Nature (F. Fressin et al.
both planets orbit far too close to their parent star to be habitable. See go. nature. com/i372nd for more.
NASA's twin GRAIL spacecraft are due to ease into orbit around the Moon from where they will start to map lunar gravity in March 2012. go. nature. com/msewftregulation of aviation's greenhouse-gas emissions is set to start in the European union.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASUEVENTS Fresh clue to ancient Mars water NASA's Opportunity rover has discovered veins of hydrothermally deposited minerals at the edge of Endeavour crater on Mars. The bright
Gypsum deposits can form in water that is much less acidic than required by the water-altered sulphate minerals previously discovered on Mars meaning that the site could have been more habitable than others explored by the rover.
Chaired by Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New york, the assessment ranked hundreds of  options for reducing black carbon and ozone pollution according to their potential to reduce warming.
that could see it removed from the list of countries where the disease is still endemic. 14-16 january Russia's failed Mars mission,
The NBAF will be the shining star in these types of labs. Soren Alexandersen, director of a BSL-4 facility in Winnipeg, Canada,
and 21%to planetary science leading the agency's administrator Charles Bolden to cancel plans for joint Mars missions with the European space agency.
ESA, CNES, ARIANESPACE, OPTIQUE VIDEO DU CSG, L. MIRARESEARCH Vega launches Europe's Vega rocket, a low-cost launcher intended to get small scientific satellites into low-Earth orbit,
The inaugural launch, from the European space agency's spaceport in Kourou, French guiana, carried nine satellites; its main research payload was the Italian Space agency's Laser Relativity Satellite (LARES, pictured:
A whiff of interstellar clouda NASA spacecraft has detected directly atoms from outside the boundary of the Solar system
and ice that populate the mostly empty space between stars, says David Mccomas, a heliophysicist at Southwest Research Institute in San antonio, Texas,
"This is the stuff that stars, planets and people are made of, he says.""It s important to measure.
Mccomas presented the results today at NASA s headquarters in WASHINGTON DC, to coincide with the publication of a suite of papers detailing the results in the Astrophysical Journal.
which our Solar system is situated. The US$100-million IBEX mission was launched in October 2008 with the goal of mapping the heliosphere,
the volume of space that is influenced by the Sun. Within this volume, a solar wind of charged particles pushes outward
and creates a bubble that extends well beyond the orbit of Pluto. As the Sun travels through the Galaxy
the bubble stops electrically charged atoms in their tracks and keeps them from crossing into the Solar system.
The IBEX spacecraft is far from this boundary, in orbit around the Earth, but it has detectors that are sensitive to neutral atoms that can enter the heliosphere.
these atoms are unaffected by the Sun's magnetic field. Mccomas says that it takes about 30 years for particles to cross the bubble wall at the heliosphere s edge
and travel to the inner Solar system, where they are caught by  IBEX.""I call it the 15-billion-mile hole-in-one,
that formed in the nuclear cores of stars and were scattered later into space as those stars expired.
IBEX found the ratio of oxygen atoms to neon atoms to be lower in the Local Cloud than the average ratios for both the Solar system and the Galaxy as a whole
(which astronomers can measure by looking at the absorption features of the light from distant stars).
since the Sun was born.""It tells us what the present state is of the interstellar medium,
says Gloeckler, who was a member of the Ulysses mission, which ended in 2009. Based on the speeds and directions of the neutral atoms, the IBEX team was also able to refine its picture of the shape of the heliosphere.
The team was also able to pinpoint the Sun s location at the edge of the Local Cloud.
the Sun is about to leave the Local Cloud for a neighbour, says Priscilla Frisch, an IBEX investigator at the University of Chicago."
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