but says that countries missed an opportunity to spell out long-term climate funding, perhaps through a levy on international aviation and shipping.
and issue science-based guidance on how to fight them. But because the bill is argued to raise taxes,
Research Orion from a plane Nearly a decade overdue, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Observatory (SOFIA) has published its first images of the sky,
The 2. 5-metre, mid-infrared telescope is mounted on the back of a Boeing 747 that flies in the stratosphere above much of the atmospheric water vapour that absorbs infrared light.
After test flights the instrument completed its first flight to collect astronomical data on 1 december.
NASA and the German Aerospace Center, who together fund SOFIA, plan two more science flights before Christmas.
Trend watch Growth of the global AIDS epidemic seems to have stabilized, said the UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) on 23 november (see chart).
had torched his car last year. I will not feel fear in response to your increasingly desperate and puerile attempts to frighten,
is scheduled to make its first attempt to launch a spacecraft into orbit on its Falcon 9 rocket and return the craft to Earth.
Such a round-trip has only ever been performed by government agencies.
Climate change threatens Europe's living standards: Nature Newsjust a few key aspects of climate change could wipe out up to half of the annual gain in the standard of living for the average European household by 2080.
Dividing Europe into five regions, they tallied for each region how this climate regime would affect today's economy in five areas agriculture, human health, coastal flooding, river flooding and tourism.
and that the destinations tourists choose are based on the weather. Such assumptions aren't realistic,
and 25%more tourists might flock to its shores. Throughout Europe, the expected decrease in deaths thanks to warmer winters could outweigh the increase from summer heatwaves,
along with a 4%drop in tourists staying overnight. And all areas would see vast increases in the number of people affected by coastal flooding.
These range from adopting the same building standards for roads as those for the south of France,
the amoebae are seed able to a new food source at their destination. The study published today in Nature1,
because carrying your own food source means that you don't have to travel as far to find lunch.
and more like just bringing lunch along on the trip, says Purugganan. Farmers don't eat their seed.
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.
says Marc Van Ranst, a virologist at the Dutch-speaking Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
For now they only affect the fuel efficiency of new vehicles and the issuing of permits for new industrial emitters of large amounts of carbon dioxide.
and launch vehicles below limits that are lower than those agreed in a previous treaty; it also allows hands-on inspections to verify the numbers.
Stephen Crooks, climate change programme manager at the environmental consultancy ESA PWA in San francisco, California, estimates that emissions from drained mangroves and salt marshes total half a billion tonnes
Research Comet flyby NASA's Stardust spacecraft sped past comet Tempel 1 on 14 february. The probe,
Trip to virtual Mars Humans have walked on the surface of Mars 墉 in a simulated expedition (pictured.
Coming up 22 23 february In La jolla, California, leading genetics researchers gather to discuss the promise of human genomics over the next decade. go. nature. com/w8zzsx 23 february NASA's Glory
is useful to palaeontologists because of the way that it differs in shape between tree climbers and land walkers.
which funds agencies such as NASA and the National Science Foundation. Each subcommittee must now make spending recommendations,
People Developing world Romain Murenzi, a physicist and Rwanda's former science minister, was named on 7 february as the new executive director of TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world.
Murenzi is expected to take up the post at TWAS headquarters in Trieste, Italy, around April; he will replace Mohamed Hassan,
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:
and others who are tied economically to the forest, such as trappers and tourism organizations. But some forestry companies oppose that approach,
What that destination ends up looking like is still in the air.
The 8, 000-year-old climate puzzle: Nature Newsscientists have come up with new evidence in support of the controversial idea that humanity's influence on climate began not during the industrial revolution,
It offers travel to Australia and unspecified remuneration to serve on an advisory panel considering a juicy scientific question:
when it comes to conservation, according to a study by Philip Hulme, a weed specialist at Lincoln University in New Zealand1.
The clearances, a response to rising demand for food and biofuel, released as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the entire UK transport sector does in a year.
The NASA satellite MODIS (moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer) captured 490 images of the region early last year at a resolution of 250 metres.
Research Shuttle swansong NASA's space shuttle Discovery launched for its 39th and final flight on 24 february, taking six astronauts as well as supplies and additional science capabilities to the International Space station on an 11
NASA's other two shuttles are each due to fly once more this year before the agency's shuttle fleet retires.
Booking a rocket The first contracts have been signed to send researchers into suborbit using commercial spacecraft.
The Southwest Research Institute, in San antonio, Texas, said last week it had paid for six scientists to fly with XCOR Aerospace,
whose spacecraft will take off from Spaceport America in New mexico. The institute may opt to purchase a total of 17 seats with the two companies
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
Shuttles at rest The four remaining vehicles of the US Space shuttle fleet were assigned their final resting places on 12 april.
Atlantis will remain at the Kennedy space center in Merritt Island, Florida; Endeavour will head to the California Science Center in Los angeles;
A flight test vehicle, Enterprise, will travel to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New york city.
Research Brain atlas debuts A genetic and anatomical map of the human brain, bankrolled by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen,
The Seattle, Washington-based Allen Brain science Institute's human brain atlas (www. brain-map. org) logged gene expression patterns and biochemical activity at 1,
The US$55-million project follows a mouse brain atlas released in 2006, and a map of the mouse spinal cord two years later.
But Darwin eventually made peace with the peacock's train, and its plumage has become the poster child for his theory of sexual selection, in
however, a furious debate has emerged among behavioural ecologists over whether the train of the male peafowl,
Plucking feathers from a male's train ruined his chances2. Later, French scientists found that males with lots of eyespots had stronger immune systems than less showy males
We propose that the peacock's train is an obsolete signal for which female preference has already been lost
before plucking, males typically had between 165 and 170 eyespots on their trains, and on average, those with the most eyespots didn't mate any more than males with less extravagant tails.
females don't pick mates on the basis of the number of eyespots on their trains,
Other characteristics, including the colour and pattern of a train, may still entice females, she says.
Money set aside for conservation could be used to target the underlying drivers of deforestation-such as local people's need for food
you should do it in a way that addresses the drivers inherently, says Brendan Fisher, an environmental economist at Princeton university in New jersey and lead author on the study,
and other countries will almost certainly have different drivers of deforestation that need to be met.
that REDD+funds should target those drivers to achieve the programme's goals. It might be possible to increase safe carbon
but 墉 thanks largely to prevailing winds 墉 it is expected that there won't be such a large impact on European flights.
Gravity probe B NASA announced on 4 may that its Gravity Probe B mission 墉 conceived
One of the team, Anders M ¸ller from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, donned a radiation-protection suit to make four bird-watching trips between 2006 and 2009 to the Red
who developed the current method for detecting vegetation using NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer sensor
the report says that black-carbon emissions from vehicles, cooking stoves and other sources could be reduced,
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, based in Chevy Chase, Maryland, joined with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in Palo alto, California,
(or'flavour')seem to disappear as they travel. But the observations at the Super-Kamiokande detector (pictured) near Hida, Japan, are the strongest evidence yet that they reappear as neutrinos of a different flavour.
we're starting to see the bare bones of what it costs to make crystalline silicon modules 墉
travelling to urban areas when drastic action is needed to feed themselves or urgently acquire income. I was surprised that poor people did not rely on forests as a safety net,
says Paul Telfer, head of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Congo programme in Brazzaville. The Amazon basin in South america, the Congo Basin in Central africa and the Borneo-Mekong Basin in Southeast asia are home to about 80%of the world's rainforests and two-thirds of global terrestrial biodiversity.
says Telfer. Before leaving for the Republic of congo, Gustavsson called the conference organization chaotic and confusing.
says Telfer.
German E coli outbreak caused by previously unknown strain: Nature Newsthe bacterium responsible for the current outbreak of enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) infections in Germany is a strain that has never before been isolated in humans.
but the direction of travel is still not where we want it to be, he told Nature.
As drivers of change in ecosystem services, climate change and invasive species will become more and more important over the next 50 years,
an aircraft that will combine a state-of-the-art optical sensor with a laser capable of mapping forests in unprecedented three-dimensional detail.
The heart of the CAO's US$8. 3-million sensing system dubbed the Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System (ATOMS) is a spectroscopic imager designed by engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL
This really has taken everything we have learned at NASA and brought it to bear in the most advanced airborne imaging spectrometer ever built,
lead engineer on the project at the JPL. With data from a single flight that used an earlier version of the system,
Asner and his colleagues identified more than 30 species. The latest technology, he says, will be three to six times more sensitive,
and the import, export and in-country transport of GM products. For example, when seeking permission to release a transgenic product into the environment or place it on the market
The 22-23 Â September meeting, hosted by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase,
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,
being tested On earth last year) launched on 26 november from the Kennedy space center in Florida. 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:
California. sites. agu. org/fallmeeting5-9 december The first conference on the scientific results from the Kepler exoplanet mission takes place at the NASA Ames Research Park, Moffett Field,
investing in the development and operation of an energy-efficient rapid transit system in Delhi, India; and dissemination of efficient wood stoves in Nigeria to reduce wood demand and deforestation.
and Water that it had to offer better guidance to improve consistency in emissions estimates
one-third of the food produced for human consumption is lost to inefficiencies in production, storage and transport,
Events Heavenly kiss China's unmanned Shenzhou 8 spacecraft docked with its Tiangong 1 module on 2 november,
Two more missions, perhaps carrying astronauts, will follow in 2012. If the next stages of testing go to plan,
China will launch further modules to be assembled into a space station by 2020. Back from'Mars'Six men have survived 520 days cooped up in 3 small rooms at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow
How icebergs begin A seasonal ice-survey flight has spotted the birth signs of a large iceberg in West Antarctica:
The rift (pictured, around 80 metres wide and 50 metres deep) was seen first in Mid-october by NASA's Operation Icebridge project, which released images last week.
so Santa would drag his sleigh with woolly mammoths. 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
will head NASA's US$5-billion science mission directorate, the agency confirmed on 19 december. Nature reported the first news of the appointment in November.
From air to orbit Rockets bound for orbit could one day be fired not from launch pads,
but from the underbelly of the largest aeroplane ever built according to Stratolaunch Systems, a company that was announced on 13 december.
aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan (who won the Ansari X Prize in 2004 for designing the Spaceshipone rocket-plane,
the first private craft to reach suborbital flight) and Microsoft cofounder and billionaire Paul Allen.
and human payloads) would be cheaper and more flexible than the conventional launch-pad approach. See go. nature. com/ead2ql for more.
A twin Earth NASA's Kepler telescope has reached one of its major mission milestones: discovering another Earth-sized planet.
Declining module prices have aided the boom, but the rush was driven also by a federal programme that provides solar-investment tax credits in the form of cash grants.
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.
All flights to or from Europe will have to buy carbon credits under the region's emissions trading scheme.
China and the United states are contesting the plan
Mining molecular gastronomydieter Heinemann/Westend61/Corbisshrimp and tomato are paired often together in North american cuisine, because they share certain flavour compounds.
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.
best chance to establish a fresh road map to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. Agreed in 1997,
whether the Durban Platform really can work as a global road map for climate-change action."
and expanding prospects for a low-carbon market and tourism. Although the study has been lauded for its innovative methodology,
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.
Black-carbon reduction would focus on cleaning up diesel vehicle emissions biomass stoves, brick kilns and coke ovens.
Airline carbon row Global airlines are protesting a European law that requires them to pay for some of the carbon emissions from their flights using European airports.
Last week, China's airlines said they would not pay the charges; US airlines have raised prices for European flights,
but the country's government is said to be looking at ways to counter the policy.
From 1 january, aviation was included in the European union's Emissions Trading System, with airlines expected to buy permits covering 15%of their carbon dioxide emissions in 2012.
First payments will not be collected until next year. Safer reactors France's nuclear regulator is demanding stringent safety upgrades for the country's reactors in response to the disaster at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant.
allegedly caused by a tourist, and by 5 january, five of six pockets of fire in the park region had been controlled.
) Although it is accepted widely that overusing antibiotics can be a major driver of resistance in microbes,
leaving the door open to a revised application down the road, and this week Obama seemed to welcome news that Transcanada is considering a new route.
Plans stall for biodefence labfor Katharine Bossart, a trip to the lab can involve a 22-hour flight.
says Nusa Urbancic from the environmental organization Transport and Environment in Brussels."All fuels need correct carbon accounting to count their contribution,
NASA, meanwhile, looks set to lose out, with cuts of 3. 2%to its science budget
and 21%to planetary science leading the agency's administrator Charles Bolden to cancel plans for joint Mars missions with the European space agency.
BUSINESS Biosimilars rules Drug-makers keen to sell generic forms of branded biological drugs such as enzymes and antibodies were excited to finally see draft guidance on the matter emerge from the US Food and Drug
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,
had a successful maiden flight on 13 february. 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: sphere on top of the rocket's payload) which will study the Lense-Thirring effect,
a distortion of space-time caused by Earth's gravity. The Vega rocket has cost more than  700 million (US$924 million) to develop;
five further flights are planned before 2016. See go. nature. com/srl2fb for more. LHC schedule On 13 february, operators of the world's most powerful particle accelerator announced their plan for its 2012 run,
what the present day human effects will be with logging, modern transport, groups displaced by conflict,
A whiff of interstellar clouda NASA spacecraft has detected directly atoms from outside the boundary of the Solar system
The result from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) suggests that oxygen abundances throughout the Galaxy are more variable than expected.
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.
As the Sun travels through the Galaxy the bubble stops electrically charged atoms in their tracks
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.
and travel to the inner Solar system, where they are caught by  IBEX.""I call it the 15-billion-mile hole-in-one,
Although a previous NASA mission, Ulysses, measured neutral helium from beyond the heliosphere, IBEX is the first to measure heavier elements, such as oxygen and neon,
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
George Gloeckler, a heliophysicist at the University of Michigan in Ann arbor, points out that the ratios could offer information about how the Galaxy has changed in the 4. 6 billion years
"Even though a large investor would prefer to have his thousands or millions of hectares near a port or road, in reality,
but the road to the mine will slice and dice rural ecosystems, says White. Â But international efforts at sustainable development are also threatening these areas.
Now a consortium of scientists, environmentalists and industries is expanding the focus from preserving forests to tackling the main driver of deforestation:
a highly conserved set of six genes that allows the virus to swap genes with flu viruses from other species much more freely than the seasonal H1n1 that circulated before 2009 (see Pandemic 2009 H1n1 virus gives wings to avian flu).
and to conduct targeted surveys led by scientists and park rangers. Wilkinson and his colleagues at the WWF plan to gather leeches from the Vietnamese side of the Annamites
including the downstream Lower Lakes and Coorong regions, in the form of increased tourism and improved water quality, for example.
says Allen Van Deynze, a molecular geneticist at the Seed Biotechnology Center at the University of California,
says Van Deynze. Giovanni Giuliano, from the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development in Rome,
Canadian biofuel plans deraileda leading biofuels company whose products have powered Formula 1 racing cars has hit a major bump in the road.
Iogen Corporationiogen's cellulosic ethanol has powered Formula 1 race cars. Fluctuations in the price of oil also pose a challenge for the industry,
It hits a blend wall of 10%15%for some vehicles, says Tyner.""There isn t room for much more ethanol.
naphtha and aviation fuels from old electricity poles. Kior expects to begin producing gasoline and diesel from southern yellow pine trees at its Columbus, Mississippi facility at the end of the year.
and organizations including the World bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
15 21 june 2012space X-rays NASA s Nustar telescope, which will examine high-energy X-rays produced at the thresholds of black holes (see Nature 483,255;
Chinafotopress/Gettychina celebrates space-station success In a milestone for China s space programme, three astronauts boarded the country s orbiting Tiangong 1 space module on 18 Â June.
Their flight on the Shenzhou 9 craft was the country s fourth manned space launch,
but is the first of a series of missions in efforts to build a manned space station, the Tiangong (Heavenly Palace),
by 2020 (see Nature 473,14-15; 2011). ) The mission carried China s first female astronaut, Liu Yang.
See go. nature. com/f5qkka for more. Marine reserves Australia s government has unveiled its final plans to create
Now, mechanical diggers and dump trucks are much more common. Peru is the sixth-largest producer of gold in the world,
Two years ago, Peruvian engineer Carlos Villachica unveiled the ECO-100v, a US$4, 500 machine that uses water and jets of air to separate gold from sediments.
It also takes into account environmental factors such as damage caused by tornadoes a real possibility in Kansas and one that the first risk assessment overlooked.
The estimates are based on the world s first guidance on seasonal malaria chemoprevention, issued by the World health organization (WHO) in March.
The guidance gives a broad stamp of approval to governments and donors seeking to use anti-malaria drugs as prophylactics in African children,
the malaria-prevention pills that many tourists take when they visit these countries. At this low price
which is one of the reasons why it is recommended no longer for tourists today. Â Toxicity is one reason that African children have received never medicine to prevent the potentially lethal disease,
despite the fact that tourists have taken preventative treatments since the 1960s. Another argument was based on the idea that African children are more vulnerable to severe malaria than adults
according to the US Drought Monitor service, run by the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Nebraska.
R. Sachs/CNP/Corbissally Ride dies Scientist, astronaut and educator Sally Ride (pictured), who was the first US woman in space,
Ride s first space flight was aboard the shuttle Challenger in June 1983; she later served on the commissions investigating the Challenger
After working at NASA, she headed the California Space Institute in San diego, and founded a company, Sally Ride Science,
Fausto Llerena, a ranger at the Galapagos National park and George s long-term keeper, found him slumped in his corral.
000  endangered species. Ryder arranged for colleagues in San diego to deliver tissue-culture medium and the cryo  protectant dimethyl sulphoxide to Ecuador on the first available flight.
and all are diverging into separate species. Genetic differences suggest that Lonesome George s own ancestors somehow travelled to Pinta from the island of Espa  ola about 300,000  years ago,
astronauts and former NASA officials, says that the telescope would be the world s first privately funded deep-space mission.
The EU has a binding target to raise the share of biofuels used in road transport to 10%by 2020
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