says Martin van Ittersum, an agricultural modeller at Wageningen University in The netherlands. For example, the study failed to show a significant effect of soils which can vary dramatically in ph and organic-matter content,
Van Ittersum and his colleagues are creating a'Global Yield Gap Atlas'using simulation-based models to capture data on agronomic conditions, water usage and crop yield.
adds van Ittersum. Mueller and Foley plan to tackle the trade-offs associated with increasing irrigation next."
Pig fever sweeps across Russiarussian authorities have incinerated tens of thousands of pigs and closed roads in the past few weeks,
In 1957, the virus jumped to Portugal after pigs near Lisbon s airport were fed infected human food scraps (the virus particles can survive meat curing processes.
Pigs can leave virus particles on transport vehicles, for example, exposing whole shipments of uninfected animals.
Canale and his co-authors spent two years driving along dirt roads in three Brazilian states to interview local people about the presence of large mammals."
Russia lost three navigation satellites in December 2010; a military satellite in February 2011; a telecommunications satellite that August;
Battery rescue A123 Systems a leading US manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, may have found a solution to its financial woes.
China s largest maker of automobile parts, based in Zhejiang. Formed in 2001, A123 is a spin-off from work at the Massachusetts institute of technology, Cambridge.
and US President Barack Obama unveiled an aid package for stricken farmers on 13 Â August 17-23 august NASA s Mars rover Curiosity will attempt its first drive on the red planet next week
although no firm date had been set as Nature went to press. www. nasa. gov/msl19-23 august The American Chemical Society holds its autumn meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
and use of biofuels for transport be at least 35%lower than those from fossil fuels; thereafter, 50%lower.
Chandrayaan-1. Primate transport Air china said on 31 Â July that it would stop shipments of nonhuman primates for research.
which has led to many major air carriers refusing to fly primates bound for research centres (see Nature 483,381-382;
) PETA says that China Eastern is the only major airline now known to be flying primates out of China the country that last year transported more than 70%of the primates bound for US labs. See go. nature. com/ckhq93
Mars landing NASA announced on 6 Â August that its Mars rover, Curiosity, had landed successfully in Gale Crater after an 8-month journey
Higgs papers Researchers at ATLAS and the CMS, the two main physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, posted their papers describing a new Higgs-boson-like
particle to the online preprint server arxiv. org on 31 july (ATLAS Collaboration http://arxiv. org/abs/1207.7214 (2012) and CMS Collaboration http://arxiv org
Development boost Chinese President Hu Jintao announced a US$1. 5-million donation to TWAS, the academy of sciences of the developing world, on the opening day of the organization s 23rd
In May, the US Food and Drug Administration approved Elelyso (taliglucerase alfa) a drug for the lysosomal storage disorder Gaucher disease which is produced in cultured carrot cells.
which travel out from the hive in search of pollen. Again the two types have very different methylation patterns in their DNA.
It replicated in the airways and lungs of three infected ferrets killing one and causing such severe disease in the others that they had to be euthanized.
The virus gained two new mutations in its trip between the cages one from aspartic acid to glycine in the haemagglutinin protein (HA225G),
and growing in human lung tissues and airway cells than the parental strain, and could still thrive
Through the Recovery Act, my Administration committed over $100 billion to support groundbreaking innovation with investments in energy, basic research, education and training, advanced vehicle technology, health IT and health research
In an era of constant and rapid international travel, what steps should the United states take to protect our population from emerging diseases,
to develop specific guidance for the commodities most often associated with food-borne illness outbreaks.
He confirmed his field observations with 2006 data from the LANDSAT Earth-observing satellites operated by NASA and the US Geological Survey.
The report also found evidence that local forest rangers were involved in the illegal timber trade,
and that illegal coal mining in the area was taking place in full knowledge of the rangers.
and transport contributes a large proportion of the food system s greenhouse-gas emissions, whereas in China, for example, fertilizer manufacture has the biggest role, the researchers found.
) The proposals retain a target that 10%of transport fuels should come from renewable sources by 2020 but set a 5%cap on food-based biofuels.
Battery bankruptcy A123 Systems, a leading US Â manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, filed for bankruptcy on 16 Â October.
Politics holds back animal engineerswhen she saw the trailer for the documentary Genetic Roulette, Alison Van Eenennaam wanted to laugh, then cry.
The film touts the risks of genetically engineered (GE) organisms, calling them"the most dangerous thing facing human beings in our generation.
For Van Eenennaam, a geneticist at the University of California, Davis, the scientifically unfounded assertions that transgenic foods are increased responsible for incidence of autism,
But the film reflects attitudes that have thwarted Van Eenennaam s research into the genetic modification of animals to reduce food costs
Van Eenennaam once hoped to engineer a cow that produced milk rich in omega-3 fats,
Van Eenennaam says that she might do better by disrupting the genes that lead to horns,
On 27 september, Van Eenennaam was a panellist at a meeting in WASHINGTON DC, where advocates of GE animal research aired their frustrations with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA),
says Van Eenennaam, who was on the advisory panel.""We will never have investment in this field
and will use physical boundaries, such as rivers and roads, to prevent infected badgers from roaming in or out of the cull zone.
Private spaceflight California firm Spacex launched its first mission to resupply the International Space station on 7 october, a milestone in commercial spaceflight.
the Dragon craft was due to dock with the space station on 10 october. The launch saw one engine fail,
and take a census of local galaxies, as well as testing out technology for a larger project in which it is due to be involved:
A year in space Two astronauts one American and one Russian will stay on the International Space station for an entire year in a mission beginning in spring 2015,
NASA said on 5 october. Space-station missions are restricted usually to six months. The mission will collect more data about how humans react to long stays in space.
But one year is not a record: Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov spent 437 days in space on the Mir space station in 1994-95.
SOURCE: CIMMYT/FAOSTATAN analysis of agricultural potential in 12 African countries, released on 9 october, suggests that farmers are making use of just 10-25%of the land where wheat can be grown profitably without irrigation.
with collaborative efforts and'big data'coming to the fore. www. sfn. org/am201214-19 october New results from the Curiosity rover on Mars,
the outcome of last week s European space agency (ESA) budget negotiations was expected better than, given the continent s economic troubles.
But for Volker Liebig, ESA s head of Earth observation, there is a sting in the agreement.
The multi-year budget that member states approved which falls some  2  billion (US$2. 6  billion) short of ESA s proposed spending of about  12 Â
but in April ESA lost contact with Envisat, the one satellite providing such data (see Nature 484,423-424;
) Neither Japan s existing Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite nor NASA s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2),
says atmospheric physicist David Crisp of NASA s Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, who is the science team leader of OCO-2."A timely launch of this satellite should be among the highest priorities of ESA.
Carbonsat s competitor for ESA funding, FLEX, would also help to pin down carbon sinks, by measuring the faint fluorescence generated by plants during photosynthesis a measure of how efficiently they absorb carbon."
"The last thing we want to do is to destroy the forests or whatever is absorbing almost half of the CO2 that we are emitting,
However, there was better news for other ESA programmes. Europe s Ariane  5 rocket launcher, which is more expensive than competitors,
They also reached a deal on how to pay for Europe s contribution to operating the International Space station between 2017 and 2020.
The costs will be covered in kind by a German-backed plan to provide the propulsion and avionics for NASA s Orion manned spacecraft.
ESA also agreed to Russian involvement in its twin Exomars missions an ambitious programme of orbiters and landers scheduled for launch in 2016 and 2018.
NASA pulled out of the project earlier this year. But ESA s science programme faces a squeeze:
it will receive  508  million a year for the five-year period from 2013 to 2017.
Willy Benz of the University of Bern, chair of ESA s Space science Advisory Committee, says that this could force the agency to delay a future large mission;
There is only so much you can save by reducing travel or not making phone calls
Growth of ethanol fuel stalls in Brazil"A new moment for mankind. That was how Brazil s former president, Luiz In ¡
The price of pure ethanol at the pump is so high that in most states it is cheaper to fill up flexible-fuel cars with petrol blends that contain about 20%ethanol.
The shift back to fossil fuels, combined with rapid growth in the number of cars on the roads (see Fuelling Brazil s transport boom),
and caused emissions in the transport sector to spike at about 170 million tonnes of CO2 in 2011, up from less than 140 Â million tonnes in 2008."
Brazil s ethanol roller coaster is a sobering example of what can happen when climate and energy planning clash with economic decision-making.
Meanwhile, the government has tried to stimulate the economy with tax breaks on the sale of new cars.
That, combined with the cost of pure ethanol, has meant that"the share of alcohol in our transport fuel matrix has dropped from 55%in 2008 to 35,
enter the spinal fluid and travel straight to the brain, an environment where the immune system has a very difficult time eliminating or even just controlling infection.
David Hughes, an assistant professor of entomology and biology at The Pennsylvania State university, says. Every few months scientists are discovering yet another peculiar trait that,
As Hughes notes, ants have been incredibly successful, currently comprising an estimated half of all insect biomass worldwide.
Hughes and his colleagues wrote in a 2011 BMC Ecology paper describing some of the latest findings.
Hughes explains, the ant would fall to the ground, destroying the launching point for the fungus's spores.
Hughes and his colleagues noted in their BMC Ecology paper. The doomed ants do not wander too far afield, often ending up within meters of their familiar territory.
Hughes says. But this zombie fungus is natural selection's tax man. The zombie fungus, however, cannot live without the winning ants'continued success. It appears to be an obligate parasite,
Hughes and Simon Elliot (of the Department of Animal Biology at the Federal University of Vicosa in Brazil) described four new species of the Ophiocordyceps fungus that were found in just a small section of rainforest in Brazil
The researchers, led by Hughes, describe the find as perhaps the first example of behavioral manipulation in the fossil record.
Hughes says. It seems their entire nutrition comes from eating the fungus that manipulates ant behavior.
and most ant cadavers have hyperparasites exploiting the zombie-ant fungus at some stage, Hughes notes.
Indeed, Evans, Hughes and others continue to hunt for more bizarre, opportunistic organisms. Evans is collecting more zombie ants in Brazil,
as part of what he and Hughes have dubbed unofficially the World Ant Tour. The hunt may be a race against time, however.
As Hughes notes, discovering more about both the fungus and the ant behavior and signaling dynamics could add to research about pest control for agriculture.
So for the latest study, Sassan Saatchi, a remote-sensing expert at the California Institute of technology Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, studied the forest s microwave silhouette,
which are unaffected by clouds, from a NASA Â probe. When it passed over lush canopy,
such as this Biolleyana costalis in San Lorenzo forest, are distinguished by the pattern of venation on their delicate wings.
He wears a harness attached to a helium balloon, which is anchored to a rope extending across the forest canopy.
or was a transit point or the stated destination for seven ivory shipments of more than 800 kilograms each."
He adds that Cambodia first emerged as a destination in late 2011. Data from ETIS, compiled by TRAFFIC on behalf of Parties to CITESTHE Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) has banned trading in elephant ivory since 1989, apart from in specific circumstances,
involving the use of equipment such as night-vision goggles and helicopters.""The concern is a lot of rebel groups are actually selling ivory as a means to generate income for themselves,
according to results from NASA s MESSENGER probe, published on 29 november in Science. Although  the surface of the planet reaches temperatures of 400 °C,
Eventually, instrumented aircraft will join the effort. Once the operation is fully under way in 2013,
a systems engineer who is spearheading the monitoring initiative at NASA s Jet propulsion laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
while balloons and lasers measure the boundary between the pollution that sits over the city and the cleaner air above.
and Shepson augmented those measurements with detailed assessments from aircraft. With further funding, the team expects eventually to encircle Indianapolis with a dozen towers to measure CO2 and methane."
He expects to reduce that uncertainty to 20%by incorporating data from the towers in a high-resolution emissions model developed by atmospheric scientist Kevin Gurney,
Gurney s model incorporates real data about energy use: industrial activities at the level of individual buildings together with traffic patterns.
Vehicles are classified by the type of fuel used and emissions produced, and are simulated moving throughout the city
much as normal vehicles would. Gurney foresees a day when the combined results of the greenhouse-gas measurements and modelling will enable cities to pinpoint methane emissions from natural-gas leaks, for example,
or identify neighbourhoods that would benefit from traffic initiatives or projects to make existing buildings more energy efficient."
says Gurney, who has applied already the model to Phoenix in Arizona and is now adapting it to Los angeles."
Gurney adds, "you need to know where to do it. This is why Los angeles has bought into the monitoring programme.
says Charles Miller, a colleague of Duren s at the JPL. Tuned to near-infrared wavelengths,
25 31 january 2013nasa joins Euclid  NASA is joining a  1-billion (US$1. 3-billion) European space agency mission to explore the dark parts of the Universe.
On 24 Â January the US space agency announced that it would join Euclid, a space telescope that will measure the locations and shapes of some 2 Â billion distant galaxies.
The data will be used to probe dark matter and dark energy. Under the agreement, 40 NASA scientists will join the project
and NASA will contribute 20 infrared detectors, valued at around $50 million in total, for one of the instruments on the spacecraft.
The mission is scheduled to launch in 2020. Reed Schererdrilling team reaches Lake Whillans A US research team drilled through 800-metre-thick ice to reach the subglacial Lake Whillans in Western Antarctica on 28 january.
The project is the first to retrieve fully intact samples of liquid water (pictured) and sediment from a subglacial lake,
Emissions profits Airlines that fly to and from Europe may have profited by up to  1. 36  billion (US$1. 83  billion) last year by raising air fares to cover costs
The European commission had hoped to bring intercontinental flights into its 30-nation emissions-trading scheme, and had given airlines some free emissions allowances.
But it exempted intercontinental flights from the scheme for 2012, enabling the airlines to achieve windfall profits.
Coffee at risk Costa rica has declared a national coffee-growing emergency. The fungus Hemileia vastatrix which causes coffee rust,
looks set to wipe out half the nation s 2013-14 harvest in the most affected areas.
Reicher, an attorney by training, previously headed Google s $1-billion initiative for investing in energy and climate, where he guided investments into solar technologies and electric transport.
Since then, her agency has developed the first US greenhouse-gas standards for vehicles, tightened air-quality standards and proposed emissions limits for power plants.
These include federal greenhouse-gas standards for vehicles and the introduction by more than half of the states of significant energy and climate initiatives that could deliver further reductions  perhaps even the 17%cut by 2020 that Obama promised at the United nations climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009.
transport and industry in China has increased by more than half in 30 years, a study shows, adding to concerns about the country s deteriorating environment."
that nitrogen oxide emissions from transport and industry are increasing more rapidly than ammonia emissions from agriculture."
whereas coal consumption has increased more than 3-fold and the number of motor vehicles more than 20-fold.
or otherwise travelled over long distances to explain the wide distribution of placentals today.""What fascinates me most is the tremendous incongruence between the morphological and molecular data,
and others, ranging from synthetic biologist George Church of Harvard Medical school to environmental gadfly Steward Brand of the Long Now Foundation
ESA s climate-eye dilemmasnow, trees or the air we breathe? Europe s environmental research community is facing the difficult task of settling
this week to weigh up the scientific benefits of projects proposed for the roughly  300-million (US$390-million) seventh Earth Explorer mission of the European space agency (ESA).
Neither NASA s Landsat programme, which has captured images of Earth since 1972 (see Nature 494,13-14;
And climate scientists have been warning of an impending data crisis after the 2010 retirement of NASA s ICESAT mission,
) Once ESA has decided which it will back, a satellite could be ready for launch by the end of the decade.
Whichever proposal prevails at the Graz meeting is almost certain to be funded by ESA. A final decision is expected at the agency s board meeting in May in Svalbard, Norway,
but ESA has backed the verdict of the scientists in the past.""If I had my way, I would love to see all three missions fly,
Spain, France and Italy last year reduced their contributions to ESA, leaving the agency with  600 million less for its 2013-17 Earth-observation budget than it had hoped for.
says Volker Liebig, director of ESA s Earth-observation programmes. But tight budgets are likely to shrink the size and ambition of future missions."
Humans are not the only copycatsa team led by Erica van de Waal, a primate psychologist at the University of St andrews,
Map supplied by T. P. Robinson, G r. W. Wint, G. Conchedda, T. P. Van Boeckel, V. Ercoli, E. Palamara, G. Cinardi, L. D
Estimated numbers of people residing within two hours'travel time of destination airport calculated using gridded population-density maps and a data set of global travel times.
and THE WHO, have worked together in the past weeks to rapidly analyse airline-passenger data for China. The resulting maps and data may give an idea of where the zones of immediate highest risk worldwide might be.
that eastern China the epicentre of the current H7n9 outbreaks is one of the world's busiest hubs for airline traffic.
A quarter of the global population outside of China lives within two hours of an airport with a direct flight from the outbreak regions,
successfully completed its maiden test flight on 21 april. The rocket is the first vehicle to take off from NASA s new launch pad at the Wallops Flight Facility In virginia.
The flight puts NASA one step closer to having two US cargo carriers available to resupply the International Space station."
"It looks like it performed flawlessly throughout the day, said NASA launch commentator Kyle Herring. See go. nature. com/b6oeoz for more.
Lawsuit settlement Cancer researcher Philippe Bois has settled a lawsuit against the US Department of health and human services (DHHS) over scientific misconduct, according to an announcement on 18 Â April.
Primate carriers Vietnam Airlines said on 19 april that it will no longer transport primates used in research experiments, effective from 1 may.
The airline has been under pressure from animal-rights groups. It was one of the last major carriers to transport primates for research:
only Air france and Philippine Airlines say that they still do so. Air canada, United airlines and China Eastern announced that they would stop shipments in December, January and March respectively.
Animal activism Animal-rights activists occupied an animal facility at the University of Milan in Italy on 20 april.
They demanded that all its 800 animals (mostly genetically modified mice) be transferred into their care.
or to maintain a road for the large trucks that would deliver the gas. So daunting are the challenges that the team plans to ask the engineering arm of the Brazilian military for help.
and can travel a long distance.""They tend to evaporate in hot places, hitch a ride on winds,
when he travelled to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, reaching a depth of 10,
They also may be more lethal in people depending on how the viruses bind to receptors in the human airway.
scientists say that it seems clear from the sequence that the novel virus has acquired key mutations that permit the H protein to latch onto receptors on mammalian cells in the airways instead of onto avian receptors.
Cruising around the eastern United states with his car window open, he slows down or stops every few hundred metres,
cocks an ear and taps on a data-logger strapped into the passenger seat. Since last week, Cooley, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, has been on the road mapping populations of periodical cicadas (Magicicada.
These loud, red-eyed insects have spent the past 17 Â years maturing underground, only to emerge this month by the billions for a few weeks of singing
With the warm weather this month, the nymphs have been crawling out of the ground before moulting for one last time and taking wing.
Ron Edmonds/AP Photoa cicada moults for the last time before taking wing. To synchronize their emergence, the nymphs must somehow keep track of how long they have been underground.
One example of this time travel might be happening right now in north-central Cincinnati, at least 500 kilometres from Brood  II s range.
said the European space agency. Astronomers have hailed the legacy of the observatory, which over three years has helped them to revise theories about the birth
Drug application with the FDA. 2001 â Aquabounty submits its first regulatory study to the FDA. 2009 â The FDA releases guidance for its evaluation of genetically engineered animals as veterinary drugs;
and many roads built legitimately by logging companies become arteries for illegal agricultural development. As such, logging often serves as a precursor to large-scale deforestation.
and physicians to boost GSK drug sales, funnelling the money through travel agencies. The executives are suspected of giving 3 Â billion renminbi (US$489 Â million) in bribes since 2007
and trucks as they move between barns. And researchers still hope that they can elucidate the virus s international and domestic path by looking for subtle evolutionary changes in viral genome sequences of samples from Asia and different US states.
The best way to get rid of cordgrass over a large area is to spray herbicides from a helicopter as has been done successfully in the western United states, Australia and New zealand.
But the reserve s management could not get permission to fly helicopters over Chongming, says Tang,
As more farmland is converted to hotels, amusement parks and golf courses in Chongming, local officials are pressed increasingly to find lands to replace them as required by the central government.
the German Aerospace Center (DLR) reported on 9 july, on the basis of images collected by its Terrasar-X satellite.
Economy rocket The European space agency (ESA) announced the design of its next rocket Ariane  6, on 9  July.
ESA s choice of a more cost-effective design was influenced by competition from rockets abroad, notably the Russian Proton launcher.
NASA/ESA/M. Kornmessertrue blue planet Using the Hubble Space Telescope astronomers have discovered the deep blue hue of exoplanet HD Â 189733 Â b (pictured in an artist s impression) the first planet beyond the Solar system to have its colour directly measured.
Red rover NASA s next Mars explorer will be a leaner meaner version of the Curiosity rover, with one major upgrade:
the ability to store rock and soil samples for return to Earth, the agency said on 9 july.
The vehicle, planned for launch in 2020, will cost about US$1. 5 Â billion. NASA proposed the mission in December,
less than a year after it disappointed planetary scientists by pulling out of Europe-led Mars missions planned for 2016 and 2018.
19 july NASA s Cassini spacecraft turns to image Saturn and its entire ring system while also capturing a picture of Earth from 1. 44 Â billion kilometres away. 20-24 july In Kagoshima, Japan,
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