used to produce the flatbread injera. Depending on how much rain falls on this particular swath of the northern highlands in August and September,
helping villagers to keep food on the table and buy seeds to start over again next year.
asks M. J. Mace, a negotiator for the Federated States of Micronesia. If there's a deal,
Nature Newson 10 july, G8 leaders promised to dedicate US$20 billion over three years to food security around the world.
The money will be spread between emergency food aid and investment in agriculture. The latter push mirrors,
Food crops are produced mostly by women and male extension agents cannot meet with women to transfer knowledge to them as easily.
Some people say that there already enough food to go around and that there is a need for better distribution rather than improving yields.
There may be enough food globally per capita. But we do not have a system of world governance in
which the surplus food from Thailand or Bangladesh will be available to Somalia. African countries that do not have the financial resources to import food should invest in production.
Will increasing production put greater stress on the environment? No. If you doubled yields in Africa from one tonne to two tonnes per hectare, you would only need half the land
and ate a novel food, even with their ancestral food all around them, suffered over multiple generations, according to a study presented last month at the Evolution 2009 meetings in Moscow, Idaho.
The work provides some of the first empirical data for whether behavioural plasticity the ability to adapt immediately to changing environments helps
Agashe tested Tribolium castaneum, the ubiquitous flour beetle, by offering the beetles wheat flour their ancestral diet and maize (corn) flour,
After only two weeks, Agashe found, the beetles'diet shifted to almost 30%maize flour. This was a never-before-seen food source,
she says, and they were eating plenty of it. This was a major behavioural change. The researchers let the beetles multiply through six generations,
But in groups that were fed only on maize flour, genetic diversity becomes really important, says Agashe.
Some populations died out after about 12-15 weeks on a maize-only diet, whereas those that survived the more genetically diverse groups began to recover by the 25th week.
so the team raised a number of different laboratory strains of pink bollworms on a diet that contained the toxin.
The resistant pink bollworms were able to withstand high concentrations of both toxins in their diets,
That increase will require an area of between 19 and 31 million hectares the largest component of Mcdonald's projected energy sprawl
Iran last week allowed inspectors from the International atomic energy agency to visit a heavy-water nuclear reactor near the city of Arak,
The country last year withdrew access to the 40-megawatt Arak reactor, which is currently under construction
the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) halted plans for the world's first clinical trial of a therapy generated from human embryonic stem cells.
The monoclonal antibody gained recommendations from an advisory committee at the Food and Drug Administration on 14 august,
Lawrence Deyton (pictured) was appointed to direct the new Center for Tobacco Products in Silver Spring, Maryland, part of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA.
according to a non-peer-reviewed report from the US Geological Survey (USGS). More than two-thirds contained levels exceeding the Environmental protection agency's level of concern for the protection of fish-eating mammals,
Having these genes in more vulnerable rice varieties could save billions of dollars and feed millions more people.
Flooding is not the only threat to the world's largest diet staple. Rice blast disease destroys around 10-30%of global rice crops enough food to feed about 60 million people each year.
Some rice plants are resistant to the pernicious fungus responsible the disease, but the rice from these plants often has undesirable qualities,
however, they still need to be tested both in the paddy and on the plate. We need to see how these behave in field situations
when prices spiked for commodities such as soya and beef. Deforestation rates seem to have dropped again in the most recent season;
if they are to produce enough food to feed their growing populations in the future. Asia contains 70%of the world's 277 million hectares of irrigated land.
state-funded irrigation systems that powered the Green revolution helped Asian countries to become self-sufficient in food production,
By lowering food prices, they also discouraged further investment in irrigation systems. The report was motivated by the spike in food prices in 2007-08
says Aditi Mukherji, one of the lead authors. That food crisis reminded people of the imminent threat in the 1960s
and 1970s that Asia wouldn't be feed able to its population, says Mukherji. But the face of Asia has changed a lot since then.
and expect a more diverse diet, so demand for meat and fruit has risen, yet the irrigation systems were designed principally for cereal production.
A lot of 1970s irrigation had to do with canals surface irrigation, says Colin Chartres, director-general of the IWMI.
The 2007-08 food crisis caught us by surprise and it was a wake-up call.
it should be possible to provide more food for Asia in the next 30-40 years.
Some of the creatures were filmed also for a short time while eating fruits of different hardness.
The problem is we don't really know what they are eating, says Dumont. These guys are really rare
Hyenas have large bite forces that allow them access to a wider array of foods
So the researchers inserted an (E)- Ã Â-caryophyllene synthase gene from the oregano plant a technique for which they have filed a patent.
because the oregano synthase gene is switched always on. Although this is better than spraying caryophyllene over a field
The study by the International Food Policy Research Institute in WASHINGTON DC is one of the most comprehensive to look at the links between climate change and food security.
reducing production and increasing food prices. As a result, he says, consumption and calorie intake will fall,
This report links climate change to food security, Keith Goulding, says a soil scientist at Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire Britain's largest agricultural research centre.
and that could further increase the risk to food security.
News briefing: 1 october 2009: Nature Newspolicy Events Research Business The week ahead News maker Number crunch Policy Merkel wins:
The United nations Security council unanimously backed a non-binding resolution to bolster efforts aimed at slowing the spread of nuclear weapons.
Roger Beachy, the founding president of the Donald Danforth Plant science Center in St louis, Missouri, was appointed last week to direct the US Department of agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture,
Political influence led the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve a device to repair damaged knees against the recommendations of its own scientists,
It uses lithium iron phosphate in the cathodes, and is currently in a patent dispute with the University of Texas in Austin,
and does not compete with food-supply needs. In February 2007 the US Department of energy selected Bluefire and five other companies to negotiate for up to US$385 million in funding for commercial-scale plants.
whose enzymes can break cellulose down into simple sugars and immediately convert those into ethanol.
The National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) opens its doors on 1 Â October, with plant biotechnologist Roger Beachy at its helm.
including climate change, biofuels, nutrition, and food safety and security. Yet Beachy's arrival also underscores the often-close ties between US agribusiness and federal research.
At Washington University in St louis in the 1980s Beachy worked on virus resistance in plants,
because too much went to pork. Beachy says he hopes that NIFA and its competitive grants programme,
the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI), will cut back on congressional demands to earmark funds for specific projects.
and lay eggs, they release spores of the blue-stain fungus (Grosmannia clavigera), which stops the production of a protective toxic resin released by the tree
where it provides jatropha seeds for farmers to plant among other crops or on spare land that is unsuitable for food crops.
says Pushpito Ghosh, director of the Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute in Bhavnagar.
He was found guilty of embezzling government funds and buying human eggs in violation of the country's bioethics law,
Nature Newsstiff opposition from activists has persuaded the Indian government to put off commercial release of the country's first genetically modified (GM) food crop,
and food safety studies on animals carried out since 2002 show that Bt brinjal is absolutely safe to eat.
According to Seralini, eating Bt brinjal reduced appetite in goats, increased prothrombin time (the time it takes blood to clot) in goats and rabbits,
After a bitter and lengthy controversy over water management, four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in Oregon and California will be removed to restore salmon runs.
according to a study released on 30 september by the International Food Policy Research Institute in WASHINGTON DC.
a food microbiologist at the University of Reading, UK, agrees that previous studies have shown by implication that immune responses are linked to organisms in the gut.
In the household energy and food and agriculture sectors, the proposal with the biggest impact on both climate change and public health was a 10-year programme in India to replace 150 million indoor biomass-burning
less livestock could lead to poor nutrition in low-income countries, and better housing insulation could lead to health risks from factors such as more indoor air pollution.
The genetic secrets of maize, one of the world's most widely grown grains, should accelerate efforts to develop improved crop varieties to meet the world's growing hunger for food, animal feed and fuel.
which was set up by the late chocolate and coffee magnate Klaus Jacobs. The award, which will be presented on 3 december, must fund research.
That's the conclusion of a suite of studies that marks the latest chapter in a bitter environmental debate over its benefits
195 eggs when they made Snuppy to around 3 per 100 eggs now. To be able to produce that many animals,
deciduous trees such as poplar and walnut use less, especially in winter. Also, planting only some portions of the watershed might achieve the balance of providing wood products for the people without the impact on the basin's water balance
Nature Newsa notorious pair of man-eating lions that teamed up to terrorize Kenyan labour camps more than 100 years ago did not have the same taste for human flesh,
while the other stuck to a more traditional diet. We would expect that if they're within a cooperative coalition,
It is the first time that different food preferences have been seen within one coalition of social carnivores.
but in 1898, drought, pestilence and hunting left the Tsavo region of Kenya barren of the lions'favourite meals.
because their food shrubs and trees versus grasses carries out different types of photosynthesis. The team characterized the humans'isotope ratios by taking advantage of a fluke of history,
The lions'remains gave Yeakel two time windows of food preferences: the last 2-3 months of the animals'lives, obtained by analysing the quickly regenerating tail tuft hairs,
the maneaters'diets consisted primarily of grazing animals. But in the final months, the authors say,
one animal continued to focus on grazers, with an occasional human meal, whereas the other was mainly feasting on browsers and people.
but they weren't sharing food. Dominy says that lions may team up for territorial defence2,
but such extreme dietary specialization in a cooperative group has not been seen before. Apart from the environmental pressures on the lions, the dominant maneater also had severe wounds in his mouth and jaw,
Their divergent diets are mostly relevant for illuminating this one particular case says Craig Packer, an animal behavioural scientist at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,
Yeakel acknowledges that there are many possible combinations the model shows that humans could have made up 4-56%of the dominant maneater's diet
Humans probably made up 30%of his diet. Regardless of the specific numbers, Yeakel says,
In fact it turned out to be Achaea catocaloides, a less threatening caterpillar that feeds mostly on the Dahoma tree.
Apart from the initial destruction of a few tree crops like cocoa, coffee and plantain, Achaea did not pose any threat to food crops like rice,
And finally â Â Rampant rabbits In November we reported that artificial and fully functional penises had been built
and grafted onto male rabbits whose penises had been removed surgically. The fake penises were built by stripping donor rabbit erectile tissue of cells
leaving behind a scaffold of collagen onto which the rabbits'own muscle and skin cells were grown.
The work was done by Anthony Atala at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-salem, North carolina.
what male rabbits do best impregnate female rabbits (see'Engineered penis raises reproduction hopes').'Since then Atala has presented preliminary, as yet unpublished, results at the Materials Research Society meeting in Boston,
Stone age sorghum found in African cave: Nature Newshumans may have been baking bread 105,000 years ago,
says a researcher who has discovered evidence of ground seeds from sorghum grass on stone tools in a Mozambique cave.
Whether they were eating it or not, we cannot be sure, but I cannot see how sorghum gets into the cave
unless humans bring it in, says study author Julio Mercader, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.
Today, seeds from domesticated sorghum grass are used as flour for porridge, as a fermentation substrate for beer and as a dye for clothing.
Most researchers think that humans in the middle Stone age which began around 300 000 years ago and ended around 50,000 years ago depended on foodstuffs such as underground tubers and meat.
Grains require a complex preparation process of grinding and charring before they can be digested by humans.
Mercader says that sorghum flours could have been used to make culinary preparations such as bread. The first confirmed use of grains in the human diet comes from charred barley
and wheat from Israel dating to about 23,000 years ago1, so the latest findings could push that date back another 80,000 years.
including scrapers and grinders, he found that 80%contained traces of starch granules, mainly from wild Sorghum species. Some of the grains appeared damaged,
but none had been cooked. These data imply that early Homo sapiens from southern Africa consumed not just underground plant staples,
Even if sorghum is truly present at the site, she says, there could be a reason for this presence other than eating of grains.
At the Sibudu cave in the Kwazulu-Natal province of South africa, her group has found that grasses similar to sorghum were used for bedding and as tinder for fireplaces.
Loren Cordain, an exercise physiologist at Colorado State university in Fort Collins and an expert on the Palaeolithic diet, agrees that the evidence is too thin to support the consumption of grains as food.
I don't think they've really built a strong case for the notion that cereal grains were exploited on a real basis
and were part of the diet of our ancestors, he says. It's fascinating and suggestive,
chief veterinary officer for the Food and Agricultural organization of the United nations (FAO) in Rome. Just as smallpox ripped through human populations for centuries,
It first spread from Asia to Europe in the herds of invading tribes, causing outbreaks in the Roman empire in 376-386,
'Stars in the Milky way are made mostly of the hydrogen and helium, with a few percent of their mass made up of heavier elements.
chief veterinary officer for the Food and Agricultural organization of the United nations (FAO) in Rome. It not only kills cattle and other wildlife,
and other wildlife around the world since it first spread from Asia to Europe in the herds of the invading tribes, causing outbreaks during the Roman empire in 376-386.
Glenn Gibson, a food microbiologist at the University of Reading, UK, says that previous studies have suggested that immune responses are linked to organisms in the gut.
a modified Escherichia coli bacterium that can make biodiesel directly from sugars or hemicellulose, a component of plant fibre (see page 559).
filling gas tanks without raising global food prices or increasing hunger and deforestation in far-flung locales.
LS9 says that the shift from sugars to biomass as a feedstock would reduce greenhouse gases even further.
The company has been working to convert sugars into tailored molecules for several years, says co-author Stephen del Cardayre, LS9's vice-president for research and development.
Whales take carbon out of the system through their food, then incorporate that carbon in their tissues.
the carbon is released through the consumption of whale meat by humans, but you're still taking carbon out of the whale
other species that compete for the same food might decline. But even if ocean food supplies are limited,
there could still be a substantial increase in total biomass owing to the difference in size between whales
Because large animals require less food per unit mass than smaller animals, any given food source (such as krill) can support a lot more biomass in a whale than in a small animal such as a penguin.
Other scientists greeted Pershing's presentation with enthusiasm. It's exciting says Daniel Costa, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California,
which ultimately means more food for everything, including whales. In order to drive these large algal blooms you need iron
Two senators also challenged Margaret Hamburg, the commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA),
and the interplay between the environment, nutrition and health. In 2008-09 the trust spent a total of £720 million (US$1. 1 billion) on research.
and municipal waste to sugars are getting cheaper. At a national US ethanol conference in Orlando, Florida, last week, biotech companies Novozymes and Genencor launched new generations of enzymes that they claim will cut the enzyme-related production costs of cellulosic ethanol
or early 2012 at a total cost of under $0. 53 per litre roughly on a par with that of'corn'ethanol produced from sugar-rich maize cobs.
Consequently, the country's numerous lakes, rivers and coastal waters have suffered from repeated outbreaks of algal blooms owing to the excess of nutrients polluting the water.
He agrees with Zhang's assessment that continued use at these rates could threaten China's food security.
In the worst cases, lime could be spread across fields, he says. In 2005, the Chinese government launched a scheme to educate farmers on issues including fertiliser use and techniques to rebalance the soil,
India's transgenic aubergine in a stew: Nature Newsindia's government has refused to allow commercial cultivation of what would have been the country's first genetically modified (GM) food crop.
The decision has been welcomed by green activists, but some scientists say that it will set back Indian plant-biotechnology research.
This is a victory for India's food sovereignty, preserving the control of seeds and food in the hands of our farmers and consumers instead of a few multinational corporations like Monsanto, says Gangula Ramanjaneyulu, director of the Centre for Sustainable agriculture in Hyderabad.
GEAC member Pushpa Bhargava the founding director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular biology in Hyderabad and an active campaigner against Bt brinjal, added that he was pleased with the precedent-setting decision.
The moratorium will actually affect the indigenous effort to create GM CROPS that could feed India's rapidly growing population
We have no less than ten GM products to get into the regulatory system for trials including brinjal, chickpea, sorghum, sugar cane, castor oil plant,
will publish its first research findings by November and feed them into the fifth report of the United nations'Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Is climate change hiding the decline of maple syrup?:Nature Newsthe burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil releases carbon dioxide that alters the balance of carbon isotopes naturally found in the environment an effect that is now being found in food,
reveals a US study. Modern methods for tracking the origins of processed foods use isotopes atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons.
Of the most common naturally occurring isotopes of carbon carbon-12, with six neutrons, and carbon-13, with seven the heavier carbon-13 isotope is rarer.
Tracking these ratios is a key part of how food regulatory bodies determine if low-cost sweeteners,
such as corn syrup, have been added to foods. Because sweeteners from sugar cane and maize have a higher proportion of carbon-13,
the carbon isotope ratio of the final product will be skewed. As part of an undergraduate project intended to show how isotope analysis works,
New york, got his students to analyse maple syrup from different parts of the northeastern United states. Our intent was really just to see
or if anyone was putting in sweeteners, says Peck. All of the isotope values that the class collected were much the same,
but when the group compared their values to isotope values of maple syrup in papers from the late 1970s and early 1980s,
Their analysis revealed that the relative amount of carbon-13 in maple syrup seemed to have gone down since the 1970s.
Stephanie Tubman, obtained maple syrup samples from producers in the states of New york and Vermont, covering the period 1970-2006.
When we opened one old can of syrup, it smelled like freshly mown grass. It was disgusting.
if the mould might change the isotope ratio of the syrup, recalls Peck. Fortunately, it did not.
and Food Chemistry1 that maple syrup isotope ratios have shifted over the years. Samples of 1970s syrup had 108.7 carbon-13 isotopes per 10,000 carbon atoms
whereas the 2006 average was 108.5 carbon-13 isotopes per 10,000 carbon atoms. So syrup carbon-13 values are approaching the average 108 value that maple trees
and most plants should have, explains Peck. The reason, he suggests, is released that carbon from the burning of oil or coal,
Atmospheric data show that isotope ratio changes correlate directly with the changes in the maple syrup isotopes over the course of the 36 years studied
but nobody was applying this to food science, says geochemist John Valley at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Clearly, food-monitoring studies need to start taking atmospheric isotope data into account. The findings raise the possibility that producers of foods that are monitored for carbon isotope ratios might be able to add cheap sweeteners without being caught.
Yet Peck doubts this is the case. The producers that could cheat have not had the necessary information do so effectively,
And the findings apply to more than just food. Isotope analysis of human tissue is being considered in some countries to help determine where immigrants have come from.
I think this maple syrup study demonstrates the danger of tissue testing. If we are making serious decisions about peoples'lives with isotope analysis,
As for whether isotope ratios change the taste of maple syrup, for the moment, that remains a mystery.
We had a pancake party in class at the end to celebrate the findings, says Peck. Nobody was brave enough to try syrups from the 1970s.
Future funding for agricultural research uncertain: Nature Newsfinancial donors to a global network of 15 agricultural research centres want changes to the way the influential group plans to reshape its research programme.
which supports thousands of scientists working on agriculture and food security in developing countries. Debate over the CGIAR's future direction
and agriculture'and'mobilizing agricultural biodiversity for food security and resilience'.('By contrast, donors currently fund individual centres directly,
collected over meals and cocktails during the course of an often contentious week. As he rattled through the scenarios
Another cadre of researchers is pushing a more benign technology that involves seeding clouds with sea salt to increase their brightness.
many thought that truffles could be like cheese or wine, in that the microflora and yeast living on the truffles played a vital role in releasing volatile compounds,
which the fungus trades nutrients with oak-tree roots. The T. melanosporum genome also reveals that the fungus reproduces sexually more often than researchers thought.
gourmands who delight in truffled duck, white wine truffle sauce or truffled risotto are likely to wrinkle their noses at the thought of button mushrooms that have been engineered to smell like the real thing.
When you taste the black truffle on hot pasta, that is something you cannot forget, says Martin. Â
New zealand's GM cattle under fire: Nature Newsscientists in New zealand whose work with genetically modified (GM) animals had been threatened by A high Court ruling have been given a reprieve.
But they say that the case highlights the legislative challenges their research faces. The case involves a series of applications made by the state-owned science company Agresearch to the Environmental Risk Management Authority (ERMA), a government regulatory agency.
Chicken's split sex identity revealed: Nature Newsa study of sexually scrambled chickens suggests that sex in birds is determined in a radically different way from that in mammals.
Researchers studied three chickens that appeared to be literally half-male and half-female, and found that nearly every cell in their bodies from wattle to toe has an inherent sex identity.
This cell-by-cell sex orientation contrasts sharply with the situation in mammals, in which organism-wide sex identity is established through hormones.
The confused fowl have upended a century-old rule, established for vertebrates, that all cells in an embryo start off sexually indifferent and remain so until a sex-determining gene directs the development of gonads into either ovaries or testes.
Researchers were alerted first to the chickens by an employee in the poultry industry who spotted the unusual birds while visiting farms.
Instead, they found the chickens to be almost perfectly split between male and female. The hen half was made,
Clinton says the work shows that chickens have a fundamentally different way of determining their sex from mammals:
it becomes the only game in town, Clinton says. Sam's tubes and plumbing would suggest there is no rule for all vertebrates.
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