and commercial release is Bt cotton which has added genes from the Bacillus thuringiensis bacterium, making the plant produce toxins that confer resistance to some insect pests.
A Bt cotton variety is being developed for Kenyan farmers at KARI. According to the regulations it will take a minimum of three months to get the green light for environmental release after permission is sought from the authorities.
Next in line will be Bt maize (corn also being developed by scientists at KARI, says Gichuki. Other crops undergoing confined field trials include virus-resistant sweet potatoes and drought-resistant maize,
Anne Wanjiku Maina, advocacy coordinator for the African Biodiversity Network, an anti-GM group based in Thika,
According to an analysis of satellite data by the nonprofit research institute Imazon in Belã m, deforestation was actually 42%lower this June than last.
If that number holds up in the final analysis using higher resolution satellite data it would still be the second lowest loss on record (see'Clearing the Amazon'.
Nature Newsa global agricultural monitoring network moved a step closer to reality this week with a meeting between a small group of academics and potential patrons at Columbia University in New york city.
Participants spent most of the meeting discussing what such a network might look like, how existing resources could be used
and how to get the network off the ground quickly. Sandy Andelman, an ecologist with Conservation International in Arlington
The John D. and Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation of Chicago, Illinois, has already put up funding for Andelman to set up a second site in Rwanda,
Washington, expects to make a decision on three additional sites in Africa in the coming months.
Scientists are also hoping that global food companies will play a large role both in financing and contributing data to the new network.
New york, says the network could provide valuable information for industry. Pepsico is always looking for data to evaluate its supplies of corn, potatoes, oranges and oats,
even with broad support, setting up such a vast network will take time. It's unrealistic for us to expect we are going to come up with a global system in the next few months
and monitoring networks maintained by scientists and businesses. If the group can attract industry support
Sachs sees no reason why the network couldn't achieve something on the order of 500 sites within two or three years.
They also need to learn how best to track desertification using satellite data. Remote sensing can measure surface temperature
and informatics to the field's grand, overarching goal of predicting how a plant with a given set of genes will fare in different environments.
'when around 1, 000 e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, UK, were posted online,
another set of e-mails has been released. The files, containing some 5, 000 e-mails, were posted anonymously on a Russian Internet server on 22 november,
a week before the United nations climate summit began in Durban, South africa. UEA vice-chancellor Edward Acton said that the university would investigate
RESEARCHGOOGLE ends RE<C Google has axed an initiative that aimed to make renewable energy cheaper than coal by improving solar thermal power systems.
Google says it still has more than US$850 million invested in other companies'wind, solar and geothermal products.
The Microbicide Trials Network said on 25 november that it would drop the use of vaginal tenofovir gel from the VOICE study involving 5, 029 HIV-negative women in South africa,
%Trials of tenofovir tablets in the VOICE study have failed also (see Nature 478,10-11; 2011).
which is trialling another antiretroviral tablet, continues. See go. nature. com/zqtiz6 for more. TREND WATCH A European fund aims to raise  4. 5 billion (US$6. 0 billion) for clean-energy projects in 2012 by selling 300 million allowances to emit carbon dioxide on Europe
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,
Earlier this year, a group of Czech researchers reported their failed attempt to replicate the finding using different Google earth images3.
Future medicine The US National Research Council (NRC) has called for a network that would connect patients'health records with layers of data on molecular tests, genetics,
Musk-ox remains are rarely found at sites where humans lived, for example, and the species'range has little overlap with that of humans.
and two-thirds of European and Siberian archaeological sites contain their bones, hinting at a role for humans in their disappearance.
Earthwatch plans to continue monitoring the sites in Brazil, China and India by working with local institutes.
the first private craft to reach suborbital flight) and Microsoft cofounder and billionaire Paul Allen.
and share it in international databases of genes and diseases. China is taking on about a quarter of the project's estimated 20
He and his team therefore developed networks to link flavour compounds with the ingredients found in one Korean
and two American online recipe databases, grouping recipes into North american, Western European, Latin american, Southern European or East Asian cuisine.
because it proposes a way of constructing flavour networks and flavour-based cooking has become popular in recent years,
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.
Another change weakens the status of  Permanent Preservation Areas (APP  the ecologically sensitive areas along rivers and streams, on steep slopes and hilltops throughout Brazil.
and the government has launched a website to solicit public input
Caution urged for mutant flu workwhy would scientists deliberately create a form of the H5n1 avian influenza virus that is probably highly transmissible in humans?
But they caution that virus surveillance systems are ill-equipped to detect such mutations arising in flu viruses.
Methane leaks from gas pipelines in Russia and rice paddies in China, eventually breaking down in sunlight and contributing to the production of smog and ozone.
In October 2010, a group of 41 governments and international agencies created the Global Methane Initiative to help poor countries finance profitable methane-capture projects at landfills and other sites.
Database tallies US emissions"It s a great resource, and I m sure people will find interesting things to do with it,
but EPA officials continued to work on a database, which would still provide investors and consumers with statistics to help them pressure industry to cut emissions.
The online database allows users to compare and rank about 6, 200 facilities by state, sector,
Some database searches produce very familiar results. Carbon dioxide makes up about 95%of the greenhouse-gas emissions logged
And almost all of the United states emissions of trifluoromethane (also known as HFC-23), a potent greenhouse gas, come from just two facilities the Honeywell International plant in Baton rouge, Louisiana,
Pieter Tans and his team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, measure greenhouse-gas plumes from major facilities through a network
The annual totals in the database will certainly help to improve their atmospheric models, he says,
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.
and to strengthen surveillance systems to track and report cases of resistance (see Nature http://doi. org/cshmhv;
Converting that goop into a liquid that can flow through a pipeline requires the use of heat and steam
Environmentalists see the pipeline, proposed by Calgary-based Transcanada Corporation, as enabling the development of a dirty fuel,
The site is adjacent to the KSU Biosecurity Research Institute, a BSL-3 facility that studies animal and plant pathogens.
"It is easy for those promoting the facility to argue for the Kansas site because their livelihoods are not at stake,
and it is keen to export the fuel, via US refineries, to Europe. Canada is also in the midst of negotiating a free-trade agreement with the EU. Spain
The researchers reconstructed the ancient ecosystem by analysing the positions of individual plants across three sites that together cover more than 1, 000 square metres.
the peat forest contained trees that looked like feather dusters, with trunks twice the height of telephone poles;
Mathematician Timothy Gowers at the University of Cambridge, UK, began the boycott with a 21 january blog opposing the company's practices,
because few other reactor proposals are in the pipeline. See go. nature. com/tws1oz for more.
Illumina takeover Illumina, the dominant developer of DNA-sequencing technology, has rejected, as expected a US$5. 7-billion takeover bid by drug giant Roche,
When the researchers examined the sediment cores, they found that samples that were between 20,000 and 3,
that formed in the nuclear cores of stars and were scattered later into space as those stars expired.
Although it is too early to see land-use changes in satellite data, the round tables do seem to be affecting the way many companies do business,
says Jeroen Douglas, South american programme director for the Solidaridad network in Buenos aires, which focuses on sustainable supply chains.
and pig flu deposited in the US National Center for Biotechnology Information s Influenza Virus Sequence Database between 2003 and 2011.
The database contains sequences from Genbank and several large flu sequencing projects, including the Influenza Genome Sequencing Project a major initiative run by the National Institute of Allergy
The number of avian flu sequences deposited in the database skyrocketed between 2003 and 2010, before dropping off in 2011.
and Surveillance a network created by the NIAID in 2007 to boost flu surveillance which has a policy of releasing all sequence data within 45 days of its collection.
The two agencies responsible for monitoring disease outbreaks in animals the Food and agriculture organization (FAO) of the United nations and the World organisation for Animal health (OIE) stipulate that sequences of potentially zoonotic viruses should be deposited in public databases within 3 months
for example, creating a network of sentinel sites, focusing on the countries and regions most at risk,
Such a network would probably even cost less than the fragmented and uncoordinated surveillance efforts in place today
The World health organization (WHO) runs a global network of labs for human flu surveillance and selects human strains to be included in vaccines for seasonal flu.
But last year, he received an e-mail from geneticist Thomas Gilbert at the University of Copenhagen,
and existing bar-coding databases tend to contain the longer stretches that were identified with old DNA sequencing technologies.
The researchers can then check the genetic sequences against databases to learn which plants or animals they come from.
including powders, tablets and teas. Focusing on DNA from chloroplasts and mitochondria energy-producing structures in cells that have their own genomes the researchers produced 49,000 genetic sequences.
because plant genetic databases are incomplete. The researchers also found DNA from eight genera of vertebrate animals.
and drug regulatory agencies should consider adopting deep-sequencing techniques to screen herbal medicines; his team has applied for a grant to test its methods on supplements that are on the market in Australia.
The cave is one of the oldest known sites of human habitation, showing traces of having been lived in from almost two million years ago.
Burned materials have been found that date back to 1 million to 1. 5 million years ago, at the Swartkrans site in South Africa2,
and 700,000-800,000 years ago, at a site in Israel called Gesher Benot Ya`aqov3.
But both these sites are exposed in spots, where lightning could have ignited the fire. That could not have happened in the Wonderwerk Cave.
"I think it likely that humans were using fire at this site, but I don t think that this means these hominins were regular fire users.
the sediment layers of many different sites of the same time period need to be analysed, she says.
and new infection sites crop up long distances from existing hotspots. Eradicating liver fluke could increase the sensitivity of the skin test
Switzerland, says that it has in the pipeline a bed net coated with a non-pyrethroid insecticide one that does not belong to any of the four WHO-approved classes
the report urges that a global database be set up to track the spread of resistance,
Add in fickle government policies and erratic feedstock supplies and the industry is unwilling to make big bets on large production facilities,
Intrigued, Allen hit the Internet. I just did a quick Google search, he says. His longstanding interest in history was helpful,
he notes. I knew that going that far back, there's very limited written history, he says.
Nevertheless, the company remains hopeful that its pigs will skirt the hardships that have befallen other GE animals in the pipeline.
With salmon frozen in the pipeline, Exemplar s piglets might skip to the front of the queue."
US$5-billion agricultural research portfolio unveiledthe CGIAR is a global network of research centres working to help foster food security, poverty reduction,
Archaeologists have also found fragments of domestic cattle bones at these sites but these do not indicate
what will be the world s largest network of marine reserves, covering 3. 1 Â million square kilometres of ocean along the nation s coasts.
Mikovits theft case Chronic-fatigue-syndrome researcher Judy Mikovits is no longer facing criminal charges for stealing lab notebooks, computers and other material from her former employer, the Whittemore
It also claimed third place with a supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Italy made its top-ten debut with a system at the CINECA computing centre near Bologna.
Russia, the United nations educational scientific and cultural organization s World Heritage Committee meets to discuss the state of conservation sites including Australia s Great Barrier  Reef. whc36-russia2012. ru26-28 june
marine scientists plan out an international network to monitor the acidification of the oceans. go. nature. com/lopgt6
and has been designated a World Heritage Site by the United nations educational scientific and cultural organization.""This is the epitome of a healthy ecosystem,
which is located adjacent to the NBAF site, and chairman of the civic action group No NBAF in Kansas,
At test sites in Burkina faso, he says, bed nets have halved the number of malaria cases,
and moved to another building on site. A more permanent structure will be built over unit 4 before fuel removal can begin in earnest next year.
Climategate closed Regional police have closed their investigation into the November 2009 release of e-mails from scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich
carried out remotely via the Internet. The investigation cleared anyone associated with UEA from involvement with the crime.
informatics, nanotechnology, biotechnology and food safety, in addition to developing better ways to feed the world. Agricultural scientists believe it
and environmental security through enhancing the pipeline of a well-educated and trained workforce. Â Â I doubt there is an interest in increasing funds for research infrastructure.
and surveillance networks and training for farmers and veterinarians in spotting and reporting incidents of disease,
"It is for the global public good to have a worldwide reporting network that extends into remote areas,
and the two firms will share profits and losses from Amylin s drugs pipeline. G. WOOD/AFP/GETTY IMAGESCARBON tax Australia introduced a carbon tax on 1 Â July, in
) And in Britain s Online Media Awards (for all forms of journalism), Nature s website and Twitter feed both won commendations.
says a Brazilian study that combines satellite data and biomass maps to model the change. The difference is in large part due to a natural lag as carbon stocks slowly decay
The Reproducibility Initiative will work through Science Exchange, an online marketplace based in Palo alto, California, that connects researchers wishing to outsource their experiments with service providers.
said Science Exchange. Authors will pay for validation studies themselves, and will be able to publish the results in PLOS ONE.
The site was one of many hotspots that still have especially high concentrations of dioxins after being sprayed with herbicides such as the infamous Agent orange (used to defoliate jungle vegetation) from 1962 to 1971.
Development work The United nations said on 9 Â August that it is to set up a global network of research centres,
The Sustainable Development Solutions Network will be directed by economist Jeffrey Sachs, who founded the Millennium Villages international development project
Dmitry Medvedev said on 9 Â August that the botched launch of two communications satellites earlier that week was costing the country money and prestige
a telecommunications satellite that August; and the Phobos-Grunt mission to the Martian moon Phobos in November.
saying that all data is published on the website of the Joint Research Centre, the commission's in-house science service in Ispra, Italy.
and in 1957 oversaw the construction of its iconic telescope then the world s largest fully steerable radio telescope which opened in time to track the launch of the first artificial satellite,
Sputnik 1. Lovell also worked on radar and cosmic rays; he was knighted in 1961 for his contributions to radio astronomy.
Fermilab change Pier Oddone, the director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, announced on 2 august that he would step down from his post in July 2013.
Assad s team has sampled several sites around the country and already has a rough idea that in central Brazil,
The Ethics CORE website (www. nationalethicscenter. org) is funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF)
The allegations that images have been manipulated in at least six of the laboratory s research papers appeared on the website science-fraud. org in July,
Regulators rely mainly on more robust tests that compare the toxicological and nutritional profiles of GM foods with their non-GM counterparts to screen for potential concerns.
, high speed rail, smart grid, and information technology. Of these funds, we made a $90 billion investment in clean energy that will produce as much as $150 billion in clean energy projects.
Charter school networks such as the KIPP Academies, Uncommon Schools and Aspire Public schools are producing remarkable results with students in some of our nation s most disadvantaged communities.
These practices are developed best by growers, handlers, processors, and others in the supply chain with specific knowledge of the risks, diversity of operations in the industry,
The Internet plays a central role in both our economy and our society. What role,
if any, should the federal government play in managing the Internet to ensure its robust social,
Thanks to the nongovernmental multi-stakeholder model, the Internet is and always has been open to all ideas and lawful commerce as well as bountiful private investment.
His policies interfere with the basic operation of the Internet, create uncertainty, and undermine investors and job creators.
The government has interjected now itself in how networks will be constructed and managed picked winners and losers in the marketplace,
In addition to these domestic intrusions, there are also calls for increased international regulation of the Internet through the United nations
. I will oppose any effort to subject the Internet to an unaccountable, innovation-stifling international regulatory regime.
and innovation and curtail needless regulation of the digital economy. Scientists estimate that 75 percent of the world s fisheries are in serious decline
He and other experts also say that an over-reliance on inadequate imaging by an Indian satellite system is making such destruction easy to overlook.
This biennial survey used images from India s remote-sensing satellite system and estimated that forest covered 692,027 square kilometres of the country roughly 23%of India s land area a decline of just
He confirmed his field observations with 2006 data from the LANDSAT Earth-observing satellites operated by NASA and the US Geological Survey.
The satellite data showed that roughly 150 000 trees in the area had been cut down in the preceding years, across an area of about 10 â°km2.
although it isn t being captured by the government s satellite data on forest cover, says William Laurance, a conservation biologist at James Cook University in Cairns, Queensland, Australia."
but I can t really imagine a case where any of the core findings are turned upside down,
Phones and tumours Italy s highest civil court has stated that mobile phones can cause brain tumours to the dismay of medical experts who say no study has proven a clear causal link between health risks
and mobile-phone use. In a 12 Â October decision made public last week, the court ruled in favour of a commerce manager who claimed his tumour was a consequence of the heavy phone usage demanded by his job.
See go. nature. com/bg6zly for more. Biodiversity cash Wealthy nations have agreed to double their support to developing countries for protecting biodiversity
Fascinated by the presence of so many injuries, Peterson and Dischler produced a three-dimensional computer model of a pachycephalosaur skull
"The lesions we were seeing were strikingly similar to those that we often see on the skulls of modern mammals that ram heads,
if the lesion sites actually suffered trauma, he says. Whatever the outcome, seven-year-olds will undoubtedly keep on bashing
Nuclear safety Hundreds of safety upgrades are needed at European nuclear reactors, according to an analysis of the continent's power plants.
Germany argued for a more powerful and versatile upgrade, whereas France maintained that it would be better to switch straight to a new and more economical launcher.
less-productive sites, and average yields plummeted from 115 tonnes per hectare in 2008 to 69 tonnes this year.
The PRRS Host Genetics Consortium, a network of US research groups has identified a region on one chromosome that affects levels of virus in the blood during infection5.
PNG was selected as the site for the gene bank in the 1990s because the country was relatively free of coconut pests and diseases.
Roland Bourdeix, coordinator of the International Coconut Genetic Resources Network, is arranging an urgent mission to PNG to assess the situation.
who has studied many of these sites. If a nearby colony is new, there is not likely to be as large a graveyard yet.
When Evans returned to a field site in Ghana where he had found different genera of possessed ants in the 1970s
we could not find any of the forest sites, he says. They were cleared all, gone and largely invaded by exotic weeds.
500 square kilometres of British countryside looking for sites of infection, which as of today number 129.
Because the sites of infection are scattered across the country, the spores were blown probably on the wind from continental Europe,
To look at canopy structure, he and his colleagues used microwave satellite data which are unaffected by clouds, from a NASA Â probe.
an expert on ivory at the wildlife trade-monitoring network TRAFFIC. Still, the bust is clearly not small,
Milliken stated in an e-mail. He adds that Cambodia first emerged as a destination in late 2011.
According to data from the CITES Elephant Trade Information system the year 2011 broke all previous records, with 39 tonnes intercepted (see graph.
He noticed that archaeologists working at ancient cattle-rearing sites in what is had now Poland found pieces of ceramic vessels riddled with holes, reminiscent of cheese strainers.
Evidence of dairy farming has previously been found at archaeological sites dating from the fifth millennium bc in Africa3 and the seventh millennium bc near Istanbul4.
The CCTV programme disclosed an email sent by Yin to Tang in which the CDC official said that he had changed the wording to avoid mentioning Golden Rice
But the African Biodiversity Network (ABN), a regional research network based in Kenya, supports the step taken by the government and calls for the ban's strict implementation.
MIT hacked again The website of the Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) in Cambridge was hacked on 22 Â January for the second time in a week.
an Internet activist who killed himself earlier this month. Swartz had been charged with using MIT data networks illegally,
by downloading millions of academic articles from JSTOR, a scholarly archive; he faced up to 35 years in prison and heavy fines.
MIT has asked one of its computer scientists, Hal Abelson, to review the university s conduct in the affair.
and to develop the potential of graphene. The projects should each receive  1  billion (US$1. 3  billion) over ten years.
Multilayered flakes or discs of graphene nanoplatelets which may find use in adding strength and conductivity to composites and coatings, are produced mainly in The americas and Asia, according to analysts Lux Research in Boston, Massachusetts.
as well as from Kenya, India, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe, to screen for resistant coffee plants and to analyse varieties of the pathogen."
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.
Other rules could target the oil and gas industry by limiting emissions from refineries and drilling sites.
The 2, 540-metre-long core comes from a site in northwestern Greenland that hosts some of the island s oldest ice,
and analysing the core, and its results are published in Nature this week1. Extracting a record of the Eemian was a challenge:
the core s lowest layers had been deformed and folded by the constant movement of the ice sheet."
and synchronized the disturbed parts of their core, layer by layer, with other well-dated ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica to tease out the story."
ratios of oxygen and nitrogen isotopes in the core show that some 6, 000 Â years after the onset of the Eemian,
according to the air content in the core that the team correlated with elevation. Before the Eemian, the Greenland ice sheet was some 200 Â metres thicker than it is today,
because it reflects conditions at only one site, which may provoke debate about the results,
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