Sleep-deprived bees are less proficient than their well-rested hive mates at indicating the location of a food source to other members of the colony by waggle dancing the figure-of-eight dance used to communicate the quality
and location of nectar supplies to the hive according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
They attached magnetic steel discs to 25 bees that had been trained to visit a feeder of sucrose solution located 1 kilometre away from the hive.
The team found that steel-tagged bees were less able than those with copper tags to indicate the direction from the hive to the feeder (see videos of waggle dances performed by non-sleep deprived
However, their ability to communicate the distance to the feeder was affected not significantly. Signalling the direction information may be cognitively
whether the bees following the compromised waggle dances can find their way to the feeder.
Food safety Sweeping food safety legislation was passed by the US Senate on 30 november but hit an unexpected roadblock.
The bill comes after repeated outbreaks of food-borne illness, and gives the Food and Drug Administration broad new food-policing powers.
The agency would also have to identify the most significant contaminants and issue science-based guidance on how to fight them.
But because the bill is argued to raise taxes, congressional rules require a revote in the Senate,
The ruling meant that GM beets which provide about half of the US sugar supply could not be grown until the US Department of agriculture (USDA) completes environmental-impact statements.
Red wine drug Drug company Glaxosmithkline (GSK) has halted all development of a proprietary formulation of resveratrol a chemical found in red wine
allowing sinistrality to spread throughout previously dextral populations. Sinistrality also prevented mating with dextral ancestors,
Studies in animals suggest that exposure to bisphenol A a hormone-disrupting plasticizer used in food-can linings
and food security in response to climate change in the region. go. nature. com/b4gqxb 2 december Commercial spaceflight company Spacex, of Hawthorne, California,
for example, Britain's Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs published the first batch of plans from the agencies responsible for national infrastructure,
and towards improving functional landscapes so they are not just making food, for example, but also providing ecosystem services.
when food supplies dwindle. But now, a selection of the soil-dwelling species Dictyostelium discoideum have been shown to husband their bacterial food source.
By prudently harvesting the bacteria and then migrating with them, the amoebae are seed able to a new food source at their destination.
The study published today in Nature1, shows that this'bacterial husbandry'is similar to the behaviour of other social animals,
which actively feed, nurture and defend their crops, the amoebae are relatively primitive farmers, with no active cultivation at the new site.
when scant food supplies prompted a move to new hunting grounds. Debra Brock, a molecular biologist at Rice university in Houston, Texas, who led the study,
'When presented with a food source, farmer amoebae stop feeding earlier than their non-farming relatives,
and save some food to take with them during their multicellular migration. If they then end up in an area that lacks sufficient edible bacteria,
This is probably because farmers consistently relinquish nourishment so that they can save some to migrate with,
because carrying your own food source means that you don't have to travel as far to find lunch.
and more like just bringing lunch along on the trip, says Purugganan. Farmers don't eat their seed.
Research Hunger still rife Entire segments of the food production system have been neglected damagingly in international attempts to reduce hunger and poverty, according to a report from the Worldwatch Institute,
After artemisinin At least US$175 million is needed to halt the spread of malaria parasites that are resistant to artemisinins,
Transgenic chickens curb bird flu transmission: Nature Newsresearchers have made genetically modified chickens that can't infect other birds with bird flu.
The H5n1 strain of influenza which raged through Southeast asia a decade ago and has killed hundreds of people to date remains a problem in some developing countries,
We have more ambitious objectives in terms of getting full flu resistance before we would propose to put these chickens into true production,
even if the GM chickens carried full resistance to influenza, there are political and economic hurdles to their widespread commercial use not least the public's aversion to GM food.
It's the beginning of something which will require a certain number of years to see
The chickens were modified by a team led by Helen Sang, a geneticist at the Roslin Institute of the University of Edinburgh, UK.
The researchers modified the chickens by injecting a lentivirus carrying the cassette into clusters of cells on top of egg yolks.
These animals can be crossbred to produce chickens that carry the cassette in every cell. The researchers infected decoy-carrying birds with H5n1
The technique may become most useful not for preventing the spread of H5n1 but for using similar cassettes to create resistance to other common poultry diseases.
Future of food could be bright: Nature Newsthe world will be feed able to the predicted 2050 population of nine billion people, according to two French agricultural research organizations.
but this would of course be at the expense of pastures and forests, which are a reservoir of biodiversity and carbon,
The second scenario, based on a food intake of 3, 000 kcal per person per day in all regions of the world, including 500 kcal per day of animal origin,
and would mean a substantial cut in food consumption in some countries and a big increase in others.
The figure of 3, 000 kcal per day is the current world average for individual food intake,
Changes in food needs living standards, climate and other factors call for new avenues of research, according to the report.
These include the Dualine project on food sustainability; European projects looking at the longevity of animal production;
food-market regulation; and the use of international consortiums to develop new production strategies for rice, wheat and other cereals.
Last week, Dupont subsidiary Pioneer hi-bred International, headquartered in Johnston, Iowa, announced plans to release a series of hybrid maize (corn) strains that can flourish with less water.
which nutrients are available. Moreover, varieties that perform better when thirsty often underperform when water is plentiful.
The error bars are 100, %he says. The water muddies even more when it comes to seagrasses.
Business Biofuel offering Gevo, a company that genetically modifies microbes to produce chemicals from plant sugars,
owing to increasingly intensive farming practices and the world's growing taste for meat and other animal products.
owing to increasingly intensive farming practices and the world's growing taste for meat and other animal products.
This gap could imperil food security in the developing world, where up to 40%of household income can depend on livestock,
Mcdermott and his ILRI colleague Delia Grace warn today at a conference in New delhi (Leveraging agriculture for improving nutrition and health).
and animal diseases will be critical in controlling the spread of diseases, he adds. Mcdermott points out that methods need to be tailored to the circumstances in developing countries to control the spread of livestock diseases.
For example, some diseases, such as contagious bovine pleuropneumonia a respiratory disease with high death rates can be controlled in Western countries by quarantine
These questions will be investigated as part of a new $us60-million per year research programme proposed by the International Food Policy Research Institute,
Perchlorate ruling The US Environmental protection agency (EPA) will start to regulate perchlorate in drinking water 墉 a significant moment in a debate that has raged since the late 1990s,
On 1 february, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told Orexigen Therapeutics of La jolla, California, that concerns about the possible cardiovascular risks of the drug Contrave (naltrexone/bupropion) outweighed its weight-loss benefit.
and the closure of its research centre in Sandwich, UK. Most of the 2, 400 staff there are scientists.
Another study in The Holocene5 by Dorian Fuller, an archaeologist at University college London, explores methane emissions from livestock and the spread of rice agriculture in Southeast asia.
First author Camille Parmesan, a population biologist at the University of Texas in Austin, explains why.
to conserve global food security. The funding was confirmed at a meeting of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture this week in Bali, Indonesia.
The treaty is known best for its role in paving the way for construction of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.
No country has within its borders the crop diversity required to meet future food needs.
signatories are legally bound to pass on genetic information about the world's 64 most important food crops,
We need to invest in research in crops that feed the poor, he says.
Counting the carbon cost of peatland conversion: Nature Newsup to 6%of carbon-rich peat-swamp forests had been cleared in Peninsular Malaysia
The clearances, a response to rising demand for food and biofuel, released as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the entire UK transport sector does in a year.
because peatlands are low in nutrients and suitable for only some types of agriculture, making them an expensive option.
Nature News2011's biggest problem will be food, John Beddington, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, told a meeting in London on 28 february.
while producing more food to feed the world's growing population means that climate-smart agriculture is the only way forward,
So future rises in food production must be achieved without corresponding boosts in fertilizer use, added Gordon Conway, professor of international development at Imperial College London.
which has soils that are starved of key nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. The overuse of nitrogen fertilizers elsewhere in the world,
began work last month to figure out how to achieve sustainable agriculture that contributes to food security, while tackling climate change.
These lollipops will not do. Research Shuttle swansong NASA's space shuttle Discovery launched for its 39th and final flight on 24 february, taking six astronauts as well as supplies and additional science capabilities to the International Space station on an 11
providing food and coastline protection, and said that they can rebound if communities stop unsustainable practices.
In rich countries, people generally have access to a diverse diet and to foods that have been fortified with various essential nutrients,
but these items are often unaffordable or unobtainable in the developing world. People in poor nations
and lives because we are using sustainable foods that people already grow, Kent says. Plants can be fortified either through conventional plant breeding
and Biocassava Plus to meet food safety and environmental regulations. These crops will not be used by farmers
nutrients and animal wastes and reduce pollution, he says. But a prerequisite of a mixed system is to tighten up regulations on animal-feed production
he adds. In addition to laws on soil protection and livestock management, regulations on the use of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides the use of which is much higher per hectare in China than in developed countries are needed urgently,
Money set aside for conservation could be used to target the underlying drivers of deforestation-such as local people's need for food
Just conserving a plot of land doesn't mean that the market from somewhere else is going to supply food to those people,
With food insecurity, low yields and growing populations in Sub-saharan africa, conserving future farmland could pose a serious cost to people in terms of their welfare and livelihood.
and help to meet the increasing demand for food. In addition, free distribution of fuel-efficient stoves would decrease the need for charcoal.
But it would simultaneously prevent leakage, increase food production and decrease emissions. And even if crop yields had to be doubled
increase food security and have a positive impact on biodiversity for a pretty low cost, Fisher says.
Radiation effects on egg hatching and the survival of newborn mammals still need to be surveyed
and lower reaches of the Yangtze that has devastated farmland and left millions of people short of drinking water.
Business Hepatitis approvals As expected, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved what is only the second drug to directly target the hepatitis C virus. Telaprevir (Incivek),
Nature Newsfarmers have produced less food during the past three decades than they would have done were climate change not happening, according to a study published today1.
says Gerald Nelson, an agricultural economist with the International Food Policy Research Institute in WASHINGTON DC,
There has been a perception that a perfect storm of conditions led to higher food prices in recent years.
and rainfall trends had on each nation's food production from 1980 to 2008. They estimate that
bumped up food commodity prices worldwide by about 6. 4%over 30 years. The authors admit that their results are packed full of assumptions.
That same study also concluded that warming would hit food production in developing countries harder than in the developed world,
The results should add impetus for developed nations to take the effects of climate change on food production seriously,
Roger Beachy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) in WASHINGTON DC, resigned his post,
the controversial overhaul of NIFA's flagship competitive grants programme, the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI.
Locusts lay their eggs in moist, sandy soils and flourish when the desert blooms. If the breeding gets out of control,
the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced its intention to assemble an international coalition of regulatory agencies to strengthen product safety worldwide.
the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved more cancer drugs than the European Medicines Agency (EMA),
¢â oe2 July An annual United nations Food and agriculture organization meeting in Rome debates rising global food prices. go. nature. com/l3naqa Â
Bacterial infections often originate from contaminated food, but it is now about six weeks since the start of this outbreak and the trail is going cold.
but this simply serves to highlight the importance of understanding how infectious bacteria get into the food chain in the first place.
Case-control studies of patients in the German outbreak pointed to salad vegetables and both cucumbers and beansprouts have been suspects.
Pathogenic E coli are passed typically to humans from ruminant animals (cows or sheep) via faecal contamination in the food chain or through consumption of raw milk or meat products.
and David Acheson, a managing director for food safety at consulting firm Leavitt Partners in WASHINGTON DC, agree it is plausible that exposure to antibiotics in agricultural use
or in the environment might be enhancing the spread of Shiga-toxin-producing phage. Acheson worked on this question
It also warns that rising food and fuel prices could easily favour the conversion of land for agriculture and other uses over forest conservation.
The discovery, announced today by the food safety office of the World health organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland,
cucumbers and salad vegetables prior to contracting the disease, but exactly which vegetables are responsible,
but Flemming Scheutz, head of THE WHO Collaborative Centre for Reference and Research on Escherichia and Klebsiella in Copenhagen, suggests that the bacteria might not have originated in the food chain at all.
handle and consume salad vegetables. This is still our only explanation for this demographic, says Wieler.
It is possible that the strain has evolved a combination of adhesion proteins that makes it particularly hard to remove from food,
for example from pollution from fertilisers running off of agricultural land, says Bob Watson, chief scientist for the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs,
as well as market goods, such as energy and food. In doing so, it builds on previous studies,
The signal varies depending on the leaves'concentrations of nutrients, minerals, pigments such as chlorophyll, and the compounds that plants use to protect themselves against the Sun and predators.
and discovered that an invasive ginger plant was competing with native trees for the nutrient.
but the USDA jury-rigged it, says Bill Freese, science-policy analyst at the Center for Food safety in WASHINGTON DC.
and former head of the USDA's National Institute for Food and Agriculture. The Kentucky bluegrass decision drives this point home,
The not-so-humble potato (Solanum tuberosum) is the world's fourth most important food crop
and is vital for global food security. It has proved surprisingly economically stable compared with major grain crops such as rice, wheat and maize (corn:
We have lots of our eggs in the pyrethroid basket, says Robert Newman, director of the Global Malaria Programme.
The tensions have been fuelled by high prices for commodities such as soya beans and beef, which have driven up demand for arable land
a tropical ecologist at the Heinz Center in WASHINGTON DC, says that the bill is a recipe for Amazon dieback,
changing the flow of fundamental nutrients like nitrogen, and the pressure is only going to grow as the population rises in coming decades.
In addition to basic environmental data about soils, nutrients and land cover, the project tracks agricultural practices.
Scientists are also hoping that global food companies will play a large role both in financing and contributing data to the new network.
Robert ter Kuile, a senior director for environmental sustainability issues at Pepsico, based in Purchase,
Pepsico is always looking for data to evaluate its supplies of corn, potatoes, oranges and oats,
Researchers hope that by studying how the viruses jump to people they can come up with ways to limit the spread of disease without culling the bats
Spread of infection from bats to humans is an increasing problem in Asia and Africa
Although the loss of soil nutrients and moisture threatens roughly a third of the world's land area,
Monitoring and assessment have focused so far mainly on the symptoms of land degradation and desertification, such as loss of top soil and decreased food production.
Ancient sea jelly makes tree of life wobble: Nature News A 580-million-year-old fossil is casting doubt on the established tree of animal life.
which was funded by the US National institutes of health and Danone Research, the research arm of the food company that makes some probiotic yoghurts,
was published in Science Translational Medicine1. Companies that sell foods with added ingredients that are intended to boost health
or prevent illness are under increasing pressure to substantiate the claims about their products. The pressure was increased earlier this year
when the European Food safety Agency criticized many products, following an extensive three-year review. The health claims are hard to test,
he can examine the effect of probiotic foods under tightly controlled conditions, with defined communities where all the actors and genes are known.
The mouse models provide a foundation for critically evaluating the claims from manufacturers of functional foods and probiotics
the first milestone is for the drug to gain approval from the US Food and Drug Administration before the end of March 2014.
despite a gut that is better suited to eating meat, finds an analysis published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
Pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) are among the pickiest eaters in the animal world. In the wild, they eat more than 12 kilograms of bamboo each day and little else.
although bamboo contains proteins, sugars and fats among other nutrients, most of its calories are locked in hard-to-digest cellulose fibres that make up plant cell walls.
Most herbivores have developed ways to break down cellulose into sugars; for example, cows and other ruminants have complicated digestive systems involving multiple stomachs filled with microbes that process plants many times to extract the maximum nutrition.
But pandas are bears, a generally carnivorous family, and neither produce the enzymes necessary to digest cellulose nor harbour the same microbes as ruminants.
A broad survey of animal gut microbes found that pandas'microorganisms resembled those of black bears, polar bears and other meat-eaters3.
Although wild and captive pandas have different diets and lifestyles the captive pandas eat a more diverse diet that includes fruit and milk they tended to harbour similar microbe species in their guts.
Wei's team found that samples from both groups contained previously unknown genes produced by Clostridium bacteria,
which resembled known genes for enzymes that break cellulose into simpler sugars. The microbial enzymes may help giant pandas to extract extra energy from the small amount of bamboo that they manage to process
but by eating 15 hours per day.
Ancient greek ships carried more than just wine: Nature Newsa DNA analysis of ancient storage jars suggests that Greek sailors traded a wide range of foods not just wine,
as many historians have assumed. The study, in press at the Journal of Archaeological Science1, finds evidence of vegetables,
herbs and nuts in nine jars taken from Mediterranean shipwrecks. The researchers say DNA testing of underwater artefacts from different time periods could help to reveal how such complex markets developed across the Mediterranean.
Archaeologist Brendan Foley of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts and geneticist Maria Hansson of Lund University, Sweden, retrieved DNA from nine amphorae the storage containers
The researchers found grape DNA as would be expected for containers of wine in only five of the nine jars,
Other'hits'included DNA from legumes, ginger, walnut and juniper and from herbs such as mint, thyme and oregano.
Some of them contain residues of food, such as olive pits and fish bones, but the vast majority of them are discovered empty and unmarked.
Foley says historians tend to assume that these containers were used mainly to transport wine in a survey of 27 peer-reviewed studies describing 5
860 amphorae, he found that 95%of the jars were described as having carried the beverage.
but it yielded only a Carling Black Label beer can from the 1950s. So they gained permission from Greek authorities to test amphorae that had been held in storerooms in Athens since their retrieval as many as 20 years ago.
and that they may have contained more complex foodstuffs than previously imagined, incorporating herbal flavourings or preservatives.
Mark Lawall, a specialist in ancient Mediterranean trade at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg,
He says the team's results fit with other archaeological and written evidence suggesting wine
as well as fruit, fish, meat and resin. He says the DNA approach offers great promise for advances in terms of analysing amphora contents from archaeologically documented wrecks,
Brazil cooks up transgenic bean: Nature Newspaired with rice or steeped in feijoada stew, beans are an essential feature of Brazilian cuisine.
So great is Brazil's love of legumes that demand often outstrips domestic supply, forcing the country to import beans from Argentina, Bolivia and China.
But this relationship could face the ultimate test as Brazilian scientists roll out a transgenic pinto bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) engineered to fend off one of the crop's most devastating enemies:
Environmental groups and a presidential advisory panel, the National Council for Food security and Nutrition, have called for more transparency in biotechnology science and decision-making,
) Degraded lands A rapid expansion of agricultural production over the past 50 years has left 25%of the planet's land resources'highly degraded',according to a United nations assessment of resources for food and agriculture.
said that global food production would need to rise by 70%by 2050 to feed the growing population;
The fish used in the study were an indigenous carp species that is considered a delicacy,
And insects attracted to the plants provided extra food for the fish. More from Scidev.
and food security that can be used across tropical regions. The practice can generate twice as much income compared with growing just rice,
this approach will be increasingly important for ensuring that food production provides people with enough protein.
has no specific provisions for addressing agricultural greenhouse-gas emissions. The scientists recommend that parties to the UNFCCC establish a programme to develop a global sustainable agriculture strategy,
and food to poor households in exchange for labour on projects to improve soil quality,
one-third of the food produced for human consumption is lost to inefficiencies in production, storage and transport,
The US Food and Drug Administration had planned to mandate graphic health warnings on packets from September 2012,
because some of the pastures are on slopes or near high-voltage power lines, for example, or because the images are too poor to make out cattle,
"Sheep, horses, hay bales, rocks, cows with unsatisfactory resolution, cows near a track, settlement or feeder, were taken not in the analysis. SÃ nke Johnsen, who studies magneto-reception at Duke university in Durham,
and Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. Policy Drug approvals rise The US Food and Drug Administration approved more innovative drugs this year than in any year of the past decade,
¢â presents recommendations for avoiding future food crises. ccafs. cgiar. org/commission Number crunch $131 bn Lifetime sales of Pfizer's cholesterol-lowering drug
because researchers often used different methods and different animals spread around the world to draw general conclusions about megafaunal extinctions.
Many of the world s forests are valuable sources of food or income for indigenous people.
'such as medicine and food. Results from the survey published earlier this year1 show that about one-third of such forests are vulnerable to climate change.
F. KRAUSTINIEST frogs This tiny adult female frog (Paedophryne dekot) is the world's smallest tetrapod, according to Fred Kraus at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu
California, filed an application to the US Food and Drug Administration to sell its two-in-one antiretroviral medication Truvada (emtricitabine/tenofovir disoproxil fumarate) to people not infected with HIV.
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