All told, the project would reduce the otherwise expected greenhouse-gas emissions by 3. 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent to taking more than half a million vehicles off the road for one year at a cost of just more than $5 per tonne.
instead of on particular projects that might save one patch of forest while pushing loggers, developers and landowners down the road to another patch.
The team presented their results on 13 august at a meeting on climate science convened at a Beijing hotel by the US Department of energy and China's Ministry of Science and Technology.
and for investment in programmes to cut the overall need for water such as building better roads
Blaire Van Valkenburgh, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Los angeles, who specializes on the evolution of feeding,
Van Valkenburgh says.
Mystery of missing carbon cracked: Nature Newsmysteriously, Earth has much less carbon in its rocks than would be expected from the amounts of carbon available in the planet-forming regions of our Galaxy.
But a new model suggests that chemical reactions between carbon grains and oxygen could be the explanation.
The gas and dust in these disks make up the interstellar medium that forms the space between stars in galaxies,
but Russian space agency Roscosmos said last week that Phobos testing couldn't be completed in time to meet this year's launch window.
and has signed a deal with US car manufacturer Chrysler. The company, based in Waterford, Massachusetts, was founded in 2001 by materials scientist Yet-Ming Chiang and his colleagues from the Massachusetts institute of technology in Cambridge.
And later that year, Congress issued a federal mandate to produce 61 billion litres of cellulosic biofuels annually for transportation by 2022.
'which says that petrol for conventional automobiles can contain no more than 10%ethanol by volume.
which requires that 10%of transport energy come from renewable sources by 2020, has not set a specific goal for cellulosic fuel.
and General motors estimated that cellulosic ethanol could compete with petrol in 2030 only if oil was $90 a barrel or higher.
which General motors has undisclosed an stake, relies on gasification to turn biomass into hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
and harvest it carefully, says company founder Ruud van Eck. Some 5, 000 farmers are involved,
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.
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.
Released jointly by the US Environmental protection agency (EPA) and Department of transportation, the regulations would effectively increase fuel efficiency standards by nearly 40 percent, to more than 35.5 miles per gallon (about 15 kilometres per litre) in 2016.
Greenhouse-gas emissions for an automobile company's entire fleet would be limited to an average of 250 grams of carbon dioxide per mile,
which is nearly 30 percent less than the current average. EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said the move marks a significant advance in our work to protect health in the environment and move our nation into the sustainable, energy-efficient economy of the future.
000 over the lifetime of a vehicle produced in 2016. The proposal would create a single national standard that is consistent with earlier regulations that were proposed by the state of California but blocked by the administration of former president George w bush.
Administration officials announced the broad outlines of the deal with automakers in May, at a time when the industry was seeking government aid to stay afloat.
Both General motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC ended up filing for bankruptcy leaving Ford motor Co. as the only major US automaker standing.
Speaking at a General motors Co. plant in Lordstown, Ohio, on Tuesday, President Barack Obama asserted that the regulations will give companies long-overdue clarity,
stability and predictability as they struggle to pull out of a financial tailspin. Michael Stanton, president of the Association of International Automobile manufacturers, called the new regulations a welcome step toward a single, national programme.
The regulations are rooted in a 2007 Supreme court finding that the EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.
The Bush administration analyzed the issue in its waning days but eventually elected to defer a final decision.
The fuel efficiency standards, issued under the Department of transportation, are slightly less stringent and retain loopholes in the current regulatory system.
and to take extra credit for reduced gasoline consumption by'flex-fuel'vehicles, even though those vehicles seldom run on high-ethanol blends.
But by 2016, automakers will have to comply with the more stringent of the two, which effectively means that the greenhouse gas standards take over,
says Jim Kliesch, a senior engineer in the Union of Concerned Scientists'clean vehicles programme in WASHINGTON DC.
He credits the administration with eliminating both loopholes under the EPA regulations. In addition to increasing overall fuel efficiency, automakers could improve their air-conditioning systems
and opt for new chemical refrigerants that contribute less to global warming. Other improvements will focus on a host of technologies for improving engines and transmissions
many of which are available on various vehicles today. I think we are going to see more of these technologies on the showroom floors as a result of this policy,
The US panel charged with reviewing NASA's human spaceflight programme issued its final report last week,
Present funding doesn't match the space agency's targets, says the commission, which is chaired by ex-aerospace executive Norman Augustine.
Many of its suggestions, such as bypassing human exploration of the Moon and scrapping the Ares
-I rocket in favour of commercial space flights, had already been aired in public meetings (see Nature 460,791;
$286 million to Solyndra of Fremont (photovoltaics), $82. 5 million to Tesla Motors of San Carlos (electric vehicles) and $60 million to Serious Materials in Sunnyvale (energy-efficient building materials.
A European council summit meeting in Brussels may firm up European promises to finance climate-change action in developing countries. go. nature. com/1kwxls 2 november The European space agency is scheduled to launch its Soil Moisture
Despite the materials'present reliance on the mixed fortunes of the automobile industry, the market for carbon nanotubes as raw materials looks set to grow rapidly.
The week ahead 9 october NASA's Lunar crater Remote Observation and Sensing Satellite will crash into a crater near the Moon's south pole,
and detecting ice. http://lcross. arc. nasa. gov 15-16 october'The ambitions of Europe in space'European policy-makers,
and the administration formally proposed the first greenhouse-gas regulations for vehicles earlier this month.
The team also assessed scenarios in the transportation and electricity generation sectors, including increased cycling and walking in London and Delhi, India2,
3. The greatest health gains would result from fewer cars and increased walking in Delhi, reducing DALYS by 13,000
Under the changes, bodies such as the National Research Council, the National Institute of Nuclear physics and the space agency, will be able to write their own statutes and regulations.
A NASA probe sent crashing into the Cabeus crater near the Moon's north pole on 9 october ploughed up a plume containing water, hydrocarbons and, unexpectedly, mercury,
at a workshop at the European space agency's centre for Earth observation in Frascati, Italy. www. congrex. nl/09c26 21 NOVEMBER Part of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act takes effect in the United states. The act,
and formulations that are sprayed from planes and in the field. Of eight species of South american frogs studied, four showed some sensitivity to the herbicide mixture at concentrations below the application rate used in Plan Colombia,
such as a rut in the road or a ditch beside a field, where some frog species live
and travel through the rocks. Jobb ¡gy presented his team's results last month at the World Forestry Congress in Buenos aires. A second study presented at the conference,
However, The british government was bringing in workers to construct a railway. The lions dragged people from tents at night, killing 28 labourers and an unknown number of native Taita estimates range from none to 107.
The collision sent hundreds of pieces of debris flying at high speed across low-Earth orbit, threatening other satellites and increasing the risk to a NASA shuttle mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope
To that end, NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency hosted a conference this month to look at strategies for removing debris. The solutions floated include space tugs and Earth-based lasers.
a payload shroud stayed stuck to a Taurus booster rocket, and NASA's US$280 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) crashed into the sea,
dashing the hopes of scientists who wanted to use the satellite to measure sources and sinks of atmospheric carbon dioxide (see'Climate researchers in a spin after satellite loss').
'However, only about half of the money from Congress is new the rest must be gleaned from other NASA Earth science accounts.
Moreover, NASA's budget is likely to be trimmed flat or in the coming years and demands for the agency to launch other Earth-monitoring satellites continue undiminished.
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.
In 2007, the team made this trip every day as they excavated in a dark chamber 20 metres from the cave entrance, identifying animal bones along with more than 500 quartz artefacts.
Sassan Saatchi, an environmental scientist at NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, worked on one study with researchers at the carbon consulting firm Winrock International in Arlington, Virginia.
Like the Winrock study, it includes spectral data from NASA satellites as well as laser measurements of forest canopy height from an instrument on NASA's Ice, Cloud,
Automobile emissions are likely to be the first to be regulated. Appeal lost: Italian scientists have lost a final appeal against a government research call that explicitly excludes human embryonic stem cells,
Events Space tourism's new era: Enthusiastic space tourists got their first public viewing of the commercial passenger vehicle Spaceshiptwo (pictured,
centre: mounted under its carrier aeroplane Whiteknighttwo) on 7 december at Mojave Air and Space Port, California.
The rocket ship, developed by aviation designer Burt Rutan and bankrolled by British billionaire Richard Branson,
will carry passengers to the edge of outer space for US$200, 000 a ticket. Virgin Galactic,
which Branson hopes will become the world's first commercial spaceline, says it has signed already up more than 300 passengers for flights from a yet-to-be built spaceport in New mexico.
They are unlikely to get space-borne until 2011 at least even if all flight testing goes smoothly.
Research London medical hub: Details of a new £520-million (US$850-million) biomedical research centre in central London were outlined on 7 december.
which will recommend ways to manage ship-borne tourism to Antarctica. go. nature. com/cujgwi 10 december This year's Nobel science laureates receive their awards in Stockholm,
Sweden. go. nature. com/PUFASN 11 december NASA's orbiting infrared telescope, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, is scheduled to launch. http://wise. ssl. berkeley. edu 14-18 december The American Geophysical Union meets in San francisco,
California. www. agu. org/meetings/fm09 Number crunch 221 The number of days unmanned underwater glider Scarlet Knight took to cross the Atlantic ocean, gathering water data.
In May, Steven Pravdo of the Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, and his colleagues raised fresh hopes for the technique
when Dutch astronomer Piet van de Kamp used astrometry to claim that two planets were orbiting Barnard's Star a finding disproved a decade later.
Two space missions in the works the European space agency's GAIA, due to launch in 2012, and NASA's Space Interferometry Mission, the launch date for
which is yet to be set will use the technique to search for planets as small as Earth around Sun-like stars,
Leo Bottrill, who is mapping drivers of deforestation in the region for the conservation group WWF in WASHINGTON DC (see'Model predicts future deforestation),
or in the path of future transportation routes, says Bottrill. It will be important to complement the index's information with finer on-the-ground data of planned developments.
There are no such stars seen in our galaxy or other nearby galaxies. It's a rather spectacular star.
which is harder to transport than petrol and is made from crop plants such as maize (corn)
and sugarcane, putting vehicles in competition with hungry mouths. In this week's Nature, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley,
That'endangerment finding'was spurred by a 2007 Supreme court ruling that the EPA has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles and, by extension, from power plants and other sources.
particularly if coupled with separate greenhouse-gas regulations that the administration is developing for automobiles,
on 18 february the European space agency selected three medium-sized missions to continue development within its'Cosmic Vision 2015-2025'programme,
Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO), to detect extrasolar planets when they pass in front of their stars;
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.
Events Wise delivers infrared wisdom NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has offered up the first pictures
since its 14 december launch, including these colour-altered images of the comet Siding Spring (right) and the Andromeda galaxy.
Jeff Greason, president of XCOR Aerospace, based in Mojave, California, gets excited by the promise of cheap spaceflight,
18 million tonnes of nitrogen oxide emissions, a third of which resulted from vehicles; and 11.7 million tonnes of soot.
NASA announced on 3 february. The mission was slated originally to come to end in 2008, and had already been extended to 2010.
and Technology. go. nature. com/YWJQIN 12 february NASA holds a public'state of the agency'meeting,
they are talking about apples and oranges and Porsches and whales and moons, he says.
Keith is developing a method to use aircraft to release fine sulphur particles that will stay aloft for years in the stratosphere.
In the meantime, other organizations, including the UK Royal Society and TWAS the academy of sciences for the developing world, based in Trieste,
says Erasmus Tarimo, the director of wildlife at Tanzania's Ministry of Natural resources and Tourism.
including a Roman-era warming period, a cold snap in the Dark ages and a subsequent period of warming, during which the Vikings discovered Iceland.
The minute specks of dust were collected by NASA's Stardust spacecraft, which launched in 1999 with the aim of catching pristine interstellar grains and bringing them back to Earth.
The Stardust researchers say that the interstellar grains nabbed by their spacecraft may provide a unique way to study the matter between stars.
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,
The new database, called the Monsoon Asia Drought Atlas, is important because the summer monsoon,
is one of the reasons his team compiled the drought atlas, the first analysis of which is published in Science1.
The drivers today are different, Caldeira warns. Wahl agrees, but notes that Cook's data still give climate modellers a wealth of new information.
Indian space agency ISRO's first test flight of a homemade cryogenic engine powered by fuels that are liquid at very low temperatures ended in failure on 15 april,
Flights across Europe have been grounded because of fears over potential engine damage caused by the silica ash cloud issuing from the fissure.
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.
Last week, the administration also finalized its greenhouse-gas standards for vehicles and announced that greenhouse-gas permits would be required for major industrial sources by January.
which can discriminate between wind turbines and aircraft. The project would supply 3 gigawatts of wind power.
Electric-vehicle companies led the charge, with Better Place a company based in Palo alto, California,
that builds infrastructure for electric-vehicle networks raising $350 million in a January funding round.
) News maker Shen Neng 1 The Chinese coal carrier slammed into Australia's Great Barrier reef on 3 april,
But the political fallout intensified as Congress sought answers about the explosion of the Deepwater horizon rig.
NASA's ageing research labs are need in dire of an overhaul, according to a report released on 11 may by the National Academies.
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.
These included projects on marine tourism mangrove restoration and agroforestry. But more often, the team found, projects had little or no economic benefit for the poorest people.
aircraft will crisscross the skies, measuring an array of greenhouse gases, aerosols and other atmospheric properties as they fly over cities, industrial facilities and agricultural areas.
while a ship monitors the air off the coast and two electric vehicles zip about collecting samples upwind and downwind of selected sites.
as part of Calnex, NOAA plans to use aircraft to sample pollution plumes downwind of cities, refineries, power plants and agricultural fields.
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).
'But the research by Crowder, an insect ecologist at Washington state University in Pullman, and his colleagues, shows the importance of'evenness'the relative abundance of different species. Evenness quantifies not just the presence of different species,
051 flights to obtain food and 14,857 prey items collected by the birds across three control sites and three treated sites.
then trapped and clipped the wings of one bird from each group and repeated the data collection.
The modified Boeing 747sp aircraft sports a hole in its fuselage for a 2. 5-metre telescope,
The US$3. 4-billion mission a collaboration between NASA and the German Aerospace Center has had its share of turmoil
when it was axed temporarily from the NASA budget. Scientific operations should begin in October with full capacity about 800 hours of observation time a year expected by 2014.
the first Howard Hughes Medical Institute research lab outside the United states. See go. nature. com/Uhiftr for more.
it is reasonable for member states to adapt scientific guidance according to their own circumstances. The European parliament and Council of ministers are expected to discuss the proposals, with a view to legal implementation, this autumn.
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
In particular, he is pushing for NASA to prioritize a mission called the Hyperspectral Infrared Imager (Hyspiri),
Illegal loggers range from small,'artisanal'groups with one truck and a couple of employees to multimillion-dollar companies who build roads and sawmills.
The basic underlying driver is the agriculture and illegal logging is associated with deforestation that is happening anyway,
Last week, during Tunnell's most recent trip, the first stop was a rocky limestone shoreline near the town of Champot  n on the Yucat ¡
After leaving Champot  n, Tunnell and his colleagues travelled about 125 kilometres north to the tiny village of Isla Arena,
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.
And a two-tonne monument where there were no roads? she says. She argued the importance of keeping the objects on the site,
As the first surge travelled south, it gave northern regions some respite from the fast-flowing floods as the ground began to absorb some of the water.
A123, meanwhile, says that it has ended a deal with Chrysler to provide batteries for the firm's electric cars
although it promised a new deal with an unnamed car manufacturer. Ranbaxy resignation: The chief executive of India's biggest drug maker, Ranbaxy, resigned unexpectedly last week,
By contrast, her research team found feral populations of herbicide-resistant canola growing along roads, near petrol stations and grocery stores, often at large distances from areas of agricultural production.
The researchers took samples of plants at 8-kilometre intervals along roads in North dakota from 4 june to 23 july 2010.
and fallen off a truck during transport. Sagers agrees that feral populations could have become established after trucks carrying cultivated GM seeds spilled some of their load during transportation.
She notes that the frequency and population density of GM canola that they found may be biased as they only sampled along roadsides.
and is also found in adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the main energy carrier in cells. As demand for food production rises,
Kumar says that the report's conclusion that Bt brinjal is safe is based largely on data analysed by the Genetic engineering Approval Committee last year suggesting that a report commissioned to supplement the committee's scientific guidance is actually based on the committee's recommendations.
The biggest impact I made was in bringing more scientists to our embassies through my own travels, the State department Jefferson fellowships and the AAAS science fellowships,
A yearlong pilot study testing whether peer review panels could judge the'impact'of research was released on 11 november
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.
Astrophys. J. 724,1044 1082; 2010). ) Researchers think the structures, which measure 15,625 parsecs (50,000 light years) from end to end, formed from a single relatively rapid release of energy equivalent to that from 100,000 supernovae.
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
Researchers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced on 16 november that analysis of the mineral compositions of some 1
which are natural carriers of the virus, with Japanese macaques. The report said the virus had never been passed to humans.
Atlas Energy of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is the latest to be snapped up; on 9 november, oil group Chevron of San ramon, California, said it would buy the firm in a US$4. 3-billion deal.
owing to increased demand for air conditioning in homes and vehicles in the developing world, and as a result of the ongoing phase out of HCFCS.
Andersen says an additional boost to the proposal to include HFCS in the Montreal Protocol has come from the global automobile industry,
and is converging on a new refrigerant for use in future vehicles. Produced by Dupont in Wilmington
Delaware, and Honeywell of Morristown, New jersey, in response to a 2006 European union law requiring car makers to reduce the greenhouse-gas potential of their refrigerants,
which travels to the liver and spurs the production and release of IGF1. The researchers found abnormally low levels of growth hormone in pituitary slices from the mutant pigs
aeroplanes crisscrossed the morning skies above Arizona's cotton fields, dropping millions of tiny moths onto the croplands below.
'However, the moths released from the planes were different from those responsible for the caterpillars munching their way through the state's cotton crops.
we have to resort to concepts like odds, rolls of the dice, roulette wheels. And because climate is complex,
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:
'The Brazilian authorities have approved a new access road, which is scheduled to be built when the dry season arrives in the middle of next year.
the doctor is travelling the world assisting scientists both in the field and when they contract life-threatening diseases (see'Profile:
and candidates will begin making trips and promises to corn-growing country, just like they always have.
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.
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.
NASA expects the craft to ferry astronauts, supplies and research materials to the International Space station when its shuttle fleet retires next year.
Spacex, based in Hawthorne, California, hopes to dock Dragon with the station during its next demonstration launch,
NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati will be NASA's chief scientist from 3 january, the agency's administrator Charles Bolden announced on 13 december.
A researcher on polar ice who worked at NASA for a decade until 2008, Abdalati is currently director of the Earth science and Observation Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
He is NASA's first chief scientist since James Garvin, who served in the post during 2004 05.
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