The appeal of Arabidopsis is as a stand-in for unwieldy food crops that grow slowly
But some reports suggest that the commission could continue to approve GMOS across the EU on the basis of scientific advice from the European Food safety Authority (EFSA), its independent risk-assessment body in Parma,
where testing will begin this summer on sheep and goats on both dairy and meat farms,
and also offer a way of charting the chemical evolution of the Milky way. The interstellar dust is fundamentally the stuff we're made of,
A few days after treatment, the mice had 98%fewer parasite eggs in their faecal samples
In fact, says tree-ring expert Edward Cook, the models are poor enough that they don't even agree on
The problem, says Cook who is director of the Tree-Ring Laboratory at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New york,
explains Cook. These analyses used tree-ring data from recent years, comparing them to existing weather data to find correlations with the older data
but notes that Cook's data still give climate modellers a wealth of new information.
In a paper published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tree-ring specialist Brendan Buckley, one of Cook's co-authors who is also at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory,
Additional work published in the study by Cook and his colleagues compared well-documented droughts with their monsoon data to validate the accuracy of their models including one in 1756-68.
that making these more productive is key to both alleviating poverty and meeting local and global food demand.
We lose as much as 30 to 35%of the world's food output. That gives us a large margin of manoeuvre to increase the food available.
We are doing research with food processors and distributors to explore solutions. We certainly won't be able solve the problem,
We need to ensure food availability of 3, 000 kilocalories a day per person of which only 500 kilocalories is from animal products we are not trying to transform everyone into vegetarians.
This provides a healthy and satisfying diet, but is far from a typical Western diet.
If we continue the current dietary regime typical of OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries,
and if many other countries follow us on this trajectory, we will not have the same results in terms of food availability as we would with a more moderate diet worldwide.
What's the role of food prices? One really big research area is studying the volatility of prices.
It is the main problem. Remember the food riots in several countries in 2008? We are still trying to understand what happened,
but much of it was because of financial speculation. We already have enough food to feed everyone on the planet at 3, 000 kilocalories per day,
but it is a question of price. We need research to find out which economic tools are available to stabilize prices at the international level,
and regulation of markets of agricultural foodstuffs to avoid the yo-yo whereby prices can go so high that people do not have access to food.
We also have to guarantee minimum prices if farming is to remain viable. Much media coverage on developing-world agriculture has focused on genetically modified organisms (GMOS.
that hominids began walking upright in response to the spread of grasslands in eastern Africa less than 8 million years ago.
For instance, White notes that isotopic analysis of tooth enamel of Ardi herself shows a diet from a woodland habitat.
after the Food and Drug Administration began an investigation into whether the kits require regulatory approval.
which owns plant-genetics firm Pioneer hi-bred International, based in Johnston, Iowa. Alexander worries that Monsanto will cut prices to protect its share,
who rely on vanishing natural resources for food and income. But several studies presented at a meeting of the Zoological Society of London last week challenged the largely anecdotal evidence linking conservation projects with a reduction in poverty.
British columbia, presented the results of a project that has been assessing the contribution of non-timber forest products (such as food
conservation projects can actually limit people's access to forest resources by rendering their normal methods of gathering food illegal,
There are non-chemical alternatives to soil fumigants including planting strawberries alongside mustard or broccoli, which release chemicals that deter insects
although organic and conventional farms did not differ markedly in the richness of beetle eaters,
the amount of land required to grow food expanded by nearly 1. 8 billion hectares.
and her colleagues in the Journal of Applied Ecology provides evidence that mosquito control has effects further up the food chain.
The fall in reproductive success was due to the loss of mosquitoes the birds'preferred food source.
051 flights to obtain food and 14,857 prey items collected by the birds across three control sites and three treated sites.
They found that 58%of the differences in food source and 63%of the variation in the size of prey taken by birds in the control
including whether suitable replacement food items are available, he says. Poulin says she is addressing this concern in a second study on the impacts on invertebrates living in reeds beds in the same national park
may be a way of tracking the spread of some diseases. To assess whether mosquito populations are harbouring dangerous viruses,
such as chickens and pigs, for antibodies that signal the presence of pathogens. Both methods put people at risk of exposure to the viruses.
chikungunya and yellow fever viruses, prefers blood meals over honey. The kinds of mosquitoes they trapped with this method are not necessarily the most important vectors for some viruses,
Dominant breeders rely on helpers to feed chicks, but they also tolerate individuals that don't seem to help at all.
and halting the spread of weapons technology. On 28 may, after almost a month of negotiations, 189 nations, including Iran,
On 24 may, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fined Genzyme US$175 million for poor oversight at one of its manufacturing plants.
Last year, a US Food and Drug Administration committee recommended that the drug be approved for certain patients,
The EU currently takes advice from the European Food safety Authority (EFSA an independent body based in Parma, Italy,
So far, only a potato with modified starch content Amflora, developed for industrial rather than food use by German chemical company BASF,
 See Editorial, page 531 and http://www. nature. com/food
Mexican'climate migrants'predicted to flood US: Nature Newsa wave of up to 6. 7 million migrants from Mexico could head to the United states to escape the ravages of climate change on crops,
But in the Northern hemisphere, fertilization experiments which involve pumping tonnes of CO2 into forest plots indicate that the effect is limited by the availability of nutrients such as nitrogen.
In the Amazon, deforestation is linked often to the expansion of soy farming and cattle ranching.
Carlos Castillo, now 78, was an avid skin diver at the time who used a speargun to catch fish for his small restaurant.
whom had nowhere else to turn for income or food, but fisheries recovered faster than most researchers expected.
But the curtailment of commercial fishing owing to fears over contaminated seafood may hasten the recovery of exploited species. In some parts of Campeche,
and for about 70%of the drinking water in the dry northern and northwestern regions. According to Opportunities and Challenges in the Chinese Groundwater Science
China may want to rethink its food security issues because the current strategy is completely unsustainable, says Scanlon.
Argentinian growers are exporting soya meal harvested and processed from these crops to Europe, especially The netherlands.
claiming that the imported soya meal contained the DNA sequence that it had patent protection for in Europe.
The European Court of Justice Europe's top court, based in Luxembourg ruled on 6 july that Monsanto couldn't bar imports of the soya meal.
It argued that citing the fact that the DNA in the soya meal was not performing the function for
such as Andrew Montford who maintains the blog Bishop Hill. I find the review pretty appalling,
a conservation biologist at James Cook University in Cairns, Queensland, Australia, and one of the authors of the analysis, to be published in the journal Conservation Letters1,
In the analysis, the researchers assessed data on the growth in Indian plantations collected for the Food
Without adequate irrigation, severe food shortages will become even more likely over the coming months. The Asian Development Bank,
adds Etienne Labande, deputy chief of the Preparedness and Response Branch at the UN World Food Programme,
and food stocks are running short. Millions of families may have lost their personal grain stores in the flood water and chaos. Â
and the Center for Food safety, headquartered in California and WASHINGTON DC, respectively, sued the USDA in 2008 for approving the sugar beet without adequately assessing the effects that it could have on weeds and nearby conventional crops.
500, the United nations this week warned of the spread of acute diarrhoea and waterborne diseases such as dysentery and cholera.
including the major staple food crop wheat. The summer monsoon was exacerbated this year by an unusual jet-stream pattern in the upper atmosphere;
He took the helm after the US Food and Drug Administration accused the company of falsifying safety data.
Goldammer says the fires were started by negligent behaviour on the part of members of the public, who lit barbecues and fireworks in forested areas.
By contrast, her research team found feral populations of herbicide-resistant canola growing along roads, near petrol stations and grocery stores, often at large distances from areas of agricultural production.
Phosphate fertilizer warning for China: Nature Newsresearchers are warning that inappropriate management of phosphate fertilizer
and animal manure in China has resulted in serious water pollution and substantial waste of phosphorus, a nonrenewable inorganic chemical.
In its phosphate form, phosphorus is a vital part of the cell's genetic material, and is also found in adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the main energy carrier in cells.
As demand for food production rises, so does the global demand for synthetic fertilizer, in
Chinese researchers presented their findings on China's phosphate use at the 4th International Symposium on Phosphorus Dynamics in the Plant-Soil Continuum in Beijing.
An unpublished study by Zhang and colleagues, presented at the symposium, traced how the country has boosted steadily its use of phosphate over three decades.
close to 80%of cropland in China contained less than 10 milligrams of phosphate available to plants per kilogram of soil indicating a phosphate deficiency.
Since then, the Chinese government has created a series of policies to encourage the production and use of phosphate fertilizer.
But with phosphate use increasing at a rate of 5%per year, 85 million tonnes has accumulated in the soil.
The average phosphate content in the soil has tripled nearly and only a quarter of cropland is deficient in this nutrient now,
says Zhang. This has increased greatly crop production. Such heavy fertilizer use has made China one of the biggest consumers of phosphate fertilizer.
Last year, it used 11 million tonnes, or about 35%of global consumption, according to Zhang.
With ever-increasing food demand, there is no sign that phosphate use in China will dwindle.
Zhang says that there should be a national network for monitoring the build up or deficiency of phosphate in soils,
and maintain the soil phosphate content at a level that is optimal for crop yields, Zhang says. This'build up and maintenance'strategy alone could reduce current levels of phosphate fertilizer use by more than 20,
%he estimates. In addition technologies are needed to improve the efficiency of phosphate use by plants, researchers at the symposium said;
in most cases, they estimate, plants take up less than 15%of phosphate in the soil. Zhang and his colleagues are trying to crank that up by manipulating the chemistry and biology of the rhizosphere, the narrow layer of soil surrounding roots.
Many researchers also called for better livestock management. Livestock rearing is increasingly hugely in China, and phosphate concentrations in animal feed in the country are much higher than Western standards,
says Zhang. With a limited labour force but ample subsidized chemical fertilizer available in most of rural China, dumping this phosphate-rich animal manure into waterways has become an easier and cheaper option than using it to fertilize cropland.
A pollution census conducted by China's government earlier this year earlier this year see'China takes stock of environment')found that livestock is the largest contributor to run off pollution from the land into waterways,
an ecologist at the Beijing-based Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, examined phosphate run off into Lake Tai,
It found that the area of land from which water drains into the lake exports more than 6 kilograms of phosphate per hectare-most
This is an amazing amount of phosphate run off, says Peter Kleinman, a soil scientist at Pennsylvania State university in University Park,
According to Zhang, 3. 3 million tonnes of phosphate fertilizer nearly a third of China's total consumption could be saved
Nature Newsindia's moratorium on genetically modified (GM) food crops is unlikely to be lifted after it emerged that key sections from a landmark report by six Indian science academies,
which recommended that the country resume planting of GM food crops, had been plagiarized from an article in favour of such crops.
Devinder Sharma, chairman of the Delhi-based Forum for Biotechnology and Food security, a group of scientists that is against GM CROPS
and spread of higher plants probably drove the increase. The evolution of vascular plants completely changed history, allowing a high concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere to be sustained.
and that it was not until the rise of vascular plants those with a circulatory system to transport nutrients in the Devonian that oxygen levels rose to near-modern values.
adding that lowering the supply of nutrients in the ocean also increases oxygenation, as animal life respires less.
Quietly, you reach for a doughnut. Stress speeds up the metabolism of grasshoppers, making them seek out easily digested sugars and carbohydrates for a quick energy boost.
This and other results, published in three journals in the past month, could have big implications not just for prospective prey,
In more relaxed conditions, many animals opt for high-protein foods that help them to grow
Grasshoppers that were exposed to spiders switched from eating protein-rich grasses to munching on several species of sugary goldenrod plants.
Instead of plants, the grasshoppers were fed with an artificial diet of high-sugar or protein-rich'biscuits'and he saw the same trend.
Fearful grasshoppers went for the high-sugar cookies rather than the protein-rich bars1. All that sugary food means that the stressed-out insects are ingesting foods richer in carbon and poorer in nitrogen than their calmer,
protein-pumping cousins. Meanwhile, their bodies are breaking down proteins to make even more glucose. The result is a body that is made of significantly more carbon
and less nitrogen and thus makes poorer fertilizer when it dies and rots. Hawlena thinks that the ecosystem is likely to be changed in two ways by frightened grasshoppers.
The stressed-out living are likely to alter their diet, and the relaxed and happy dead are likely to make better fertilizer2.
'and feed there for a few days, says Kauffman. It remains to be seen whether the physiological effects of stress on grasshoppers scale up to plants, soil, bacteria and onwards,
early humans ate ground flour 20,000 years before the dawn of agriculture. Flour residues recovered from 30,000-year-old grinding stones found in Italy, Russia and the Czech republic point to widespread processing and consumption of plant grain,
according to a paper published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
It's another nail in the coffin of the idea that hunter-gatherers didn't use plants for food,
says Ofer Bar-Yosef, an archaeologist at Harvard university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was involved not in the study.
The meat-centric view of early modern humans stems partly from the fact that meat-eating leaves a more indelible mark in the archaeological record than omnivory,
and her team were widely distributed, offering a reliable, even nutritious source of food, she says.
Bar-Yosef says that the study proves that flour-making was common to early modern humans.
a paleoanthropologist at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, expects that flour-making dates back even further than 30,000 years.
After all, humans, ancient or modern, just aren't equipped to live on a diet of meat alone.
If you get that much meat in your diet not balanced out with other nutrients, you get protein poisoning,
But 5 of the 18 authors listed on the Science paper work for big food
Iowa and General mills in Le Sueur, Minnesota. Hutchison says that the authors who work for industry provided data about corn borers
Margaret Mellon, director of the food and environment programme at the Union of Concerned Scientists based in Cambridge,
because global food production is going to have to double over the next 40 years to meet the needs of a growing population.
matooke, is synonymous with'food'in one of the local languages. But delays to a law regulating the commercial growing of genetically modified (GM) food in the country means it is not clear
when the improved banana could be released to farmers. The bananas have a gene from green pepper to protect against banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW
Although political resistance to the introduction of GM food has softened in recent years several MPS remain sceptical.
in breakfast cereals imported from South africa, says Wilberforce Tushemereirwe, who heads the country's National Banana Research Programme.
says archaeologist Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. It could take months
it seems possible that the phytoliths are evidence that animal fodder or grains were stockpiled at the site.
The net effect was a shortening of the growing season by about one month for steppe plants and three weeks for meadow vegetation.
Almost all species showed earlier bud burst, but some had years of abnormal bud-burst timing
because they had chilled not enough over the winter. Many models of climate change's effects on the growing season don't deal with the internal climate-control system by which plants respond to seasonal temperature changes,
which may mean queen bumblebees find less nectar when they come out of hibernation. This group proposed long-term monitoring projects
Research Milky way's double bubble Using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, a team of astronomers declared last week that they had discovered two gargantuan'bubbles'of ray-emitting particles extending north and south of our Galaxy's centre (M. Su et al.
The aim is to help to secure future affordable food supplies for the world's poorest people.
Rice is the most important food crop of the developing world and is the staple food of more than half of the world's population.
But owing to falling research funding during the past 10-15 years and a lack of commercial interest in the crop,
and the Japan International Research center for Agricultural Sciences in Ibaraki, will seek to improve rice nutrition and quality.
themselves a replacement for the original ozone-eater, chlorofluorocarbons. At present, HFCS are covered under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change,
The strategy was intended to restrict the spread of toxin-resistant pink bollworms by flooding the population with sterile moths.
To prevent the spread of Bt resistance, farmers are required to plant nearby'refuges'of conventional crops.
Judith Curry turns on her colleagues: Nature Newsin trying to understand the Judith Curry phenomenon,
it is tempting to default to one of two comfortable and familiar story lines. For most of her career, Curry, who heads the School of Earth
and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of technology, has been known for her work on hurricanes, Arctic ice dynamics and other climate-related topics.
Curry has been engaging actively with the climate change skeptic community, largely by participating on outsider blogs such as Climate Audit,
Curry says. But not all of it is. If only 1 percent of it or 10 percent of what the skeptics say is right
but Curry thinks it needs thoroughgoing reform. She accuses it of corruption. I'm not going to just spout off
earning Curry epithets from her colleagues ranging from naive to bizarre to nasty to worse.
The first paints Curry as a peacemaker someone who might be able to restore some civility to the debate and edge the public toward meaningful action.
Is Curry making things worse or better? Curry's saga began with a Science paper she co-authored in 2005,
which linked an increase in powerful tropical cyclones to global warming. It earned her scathing attacks on skeptical climate blogs.
Curry says, but the critics argued that these issues were much more significant than we had acknowledged.
Curry says, and we now have very cordial interactions with Chris Landsea (whom we were at loggerheads with in 2005/2006),
In the course of engaging with the skeptics, Curry ventured onto a blog run by Roger Pielke, Jr.
The latter, Curry adds, became my blog of choice, because I found the discussions very interesting and
'It was here that Curry began to develop respect for climate outsiders or at least, some of them.
Curry says, I realize I engaged in groupthink myself not on the hurricane paper per se
Curry says, on the subject of atmospheric aerosols that is, particles such as dust and soot that affect cloud formation.
Still, once Curry ventured out onto the skeptic blogs, the questions she saw coming from the most technically savvy of the outsiders including statisticians,
Climate skeptics have seized on Curry's statements to cast doubt on the basic science of climate change.
Curry is not alone in criticizing the IPCC and individual climate scientists; in the wake of Climategate, an error about glacial melting in an IPCC report,
the central issue that concerns Curry also happens to be the key problem in translating climate science into climate policy.
what temperatures have actually been over those hundreds of years and Curry, along with many skeptics, does not think we have as good a handle on that as the scientific community believes.
More important, other scientists part ways with Curry over how significant those uncertainties are to the final calculation.
For that reason, Curry's charges are misleading, her critics say. We've seen a lot of strawmen from Judy lately,
however, Curry is in harmony with her colleagues. The public needs to understand that in science uncertainty is not the same thing as ignorance;
In fact, Curry says, we don't know how to quantify it, so we don't even include it in our models.
as Curry's overall critique might lead one to assume, the IPCC's 2007 Fourth Assessment Report flags this uncertainty.
Curry says. The rise in temperature from a doubling of CO2 could be one degree.
There is no question Curry has caused a stir; she is cited frequently by some of the harshest skeptics around,
What scientists worry is that such exposure means Curry has the power to do damage to a consensus on climate change that has been building for the past 20 years.
To Curry, the damage comes not from the skeptics'critiques themselves, most of which are questionable,
By treating Curry as a pariah, Haslam says, scientists are only enhancing her reputation as some kind of renegade who speaks truth to power.
it is not in the interests of climate scientists to treat Curry as merely an annoyance or a distraction.
the two competing storylines about Judith Curry peacemaker or dupe? are both true. Climate scientists feel embattled by a politically motivated witch hunt,
what Curry has tried to do naturally feels like treason especially since the skeptics have latched onto her as proof they have been right all along.
But Curry and the skeptics have their own cause for grievance. They feel they have all been lumped together as crackpots, no matter how worthy their arguments.
Smorgasbord of genomes for food lovers: Nature Newsgenome gastronomes rejoice! Today sees the publication of genome sequences behind two of the tastiest treats:
Earlier this year, a team backed by food giant Mars unveiled a preliminary sequence of the cacao tree Theobroma cacao.
Now a team partly supported by rival chocolate company Hershey has become the first to get a genome of the valuable plant into a peer-reviewed journal1.
and the local environment Independent measurements taken in November by the international environmental organization Greenpeace confirm that tap water
and do not compete for land with food, but the cellulose they contain is hard to break down.
Scientists know how to convert these materials into simple sugars, but doing so requires energy and specialized enzymes, or both.
Nature Newsresearch Policy Events People Business Trend watch Research Crop catalogue A global search to gather the wild relatives of essential food crops such as wheat,
aims to increase food security by finding genetic traits that might be suited to future climates. Samples of wild plants will now be conserved alongside existing stores of domesticated seeds (such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.
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