furry-tailed insect eater that weighed between 6 and 245 grams. It gave birth to blind, hairless young, one at a time.
colonize roots and gain nourishment from the plants while helping their hosts to absorb water and nutrients from the soil.
Whereas about 47%of the soil carbon on the large islands came from roots and ectomycorrhizal fungi
swallowed its eggs, transformed its stomach into a womb and vomited up its young once sufficiently grown.
and others like it into hundreds of eggs from a closely related species. Last February we saw a miracle starting to happen,
Wildlife trade meeting endorses DNA testing of seized ivoryif you go into a bar in Bangkok tonight,
a humpback slapping the surface of the water with its tail fluke before proceeding with a standard bubble feed.
Although the risk factors for the spread of H7n9 are known not, voluminous research on its cousin,
density in 2010), pigs (B), chickens (C) and ducks (D) in China and Asia in general.
An international team of researchers compiled maps for Nature showing the population densities of chickens, pigs, ducks and humans in many parts of China and throughout Asia.
They calculate that 131 million people, 241 million domestic chickens, 47 million domestic ducks and 22 million pigs live within a 50-kilometre radius of each of the 60 H7n9 human cases that had occurred up to 16 april.
Map supplied by A j. Tatem, Z. Huang and S i. Hay (2013. Unpublished data. A j. T.,University of Southampton, UK;
) There has been no evidence of sustained human-to-human spread of H7n9 so far. But what if it did happen?
an animal epidemic that has spread abroad, or the international spread of a partially or fully human-adapted virus. Maps presented are for data-visualization purposes only;
boundaries and names shown do not express any opinion on the legal status of any country, territory or the delimitation of territory boundaries
which provide nutrients to the soil below. It says that sustainable intensification of African agriculture will produce higher yields and more nutritious foods while reducing reliance on fertilizers and pesticides,
thus lowering greenhouse-gas emissions. Energy spending Investment in renewable energy technologies still falls short of the level needed to clean up the global energy system
On 17 april, the corporation filed a court brief arguing that Canadian anti-dumping regulations do not apply to"ocean pasture replenishment and restoration.
But a growing body of research suggests that sublethal exposure to the pesticides in nectar
In January, the European Food safety Authority in Parma, Italy, Europe s food-chain risk-assessment body, concluded that three commonly used neonicotinoids clothianidin,
Conducted by an agency within the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs (DEFRA), it exposed 20 Â bumblebee colonies at three sites to crops grown from untreated,
although the long-term response varied depending on the availability of nutrients in the soil, such as nitrogen4.
although other nutrients, such as phosphorus, could be limiting factors. The idea of conducting a FACE experiment in the tropics has been around for years,
Another challenge is developing tools to track nutrient cycles in the soil and to monitor the peculiar growth dynamics of tropical forests.
Options include buying the gas from a local beer and soft-drinks factory and producing it independently,
There is still no evidence of any sustained human-to-human spread of the H7n9 virus
But with H7n9, it is only the appearance of new human cases that shows where the silent spread in birds
interim head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisations's Emergency Prevention System for Transboundary Animal and Plant Pests and Diseases (EMPRES) in Rome.
so long as the virus does not start to spread among humans the potential number of human cases can be curtailed by taking urgent tough measures such as keeping poultry flocks away from wild birds
"Their levels increase in orders of magnitude as they move further along the food chain, says Xu.
Because some persistent compounds accumulate at the top of the food chain, humans can be exposed to POPS by eating meat and fish.
And the mountain communities are hit hardest, researchers say.""They do not emit any of those toxic compounds,
the H7n9 virus was found in chickens, pigeons and ducks in live bird markets in Shanghai and Hangzhou making markets the leading suspected source.
Researchers know that H7 flu viruses mainly infect wild birds such as ducks, geese, waders and gulls,
"It s likely wild ducks and geese that are carrying it, he suggests. But this H7n9 virus has not yet been detected in wild birds in the area."
and to acquire the ability to spread between people. That does not seem to have occurred yet.
then that would imply human spread; if viral sequences are more diverse, it would imply that each person had picked separately up infections from birds.
"further spread may be inevitable, warns Tashiro. Humanity has never been exposed widely to H7 or N9 flu viruses,
On 29 march, the Food and Drug Administration approved canagliflozin (Invokana), which was developed by Johnson & johnson, headquartered in New brunswick, New jersey.
Canagliflozin blocks sugar reabsorption in the kidneys by inhibiting the sodium/glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) protein
increasing the amount of sugar patients excrete in their urine. Companies have been racing to bring an SGLT2 inhibitor to market;
/wiozbm7-11 april Plenary talks about the sustainability of the world s food system feature at the American Chemical Society s Spring Meeting in New orleans,
There's no obvious indication of human-to-human spread, so we should not overreact, but neither should we be complacent.
if any human spread is occurring, it is not happening easily. Chinese researchers have moved swiftly to decipher the new virus. THE WHO Chinese National Influenza Center in Beijing has sequenced isolates from each of the three cases,
and spread between, humans. Analyses suggest that the virus is a novel virus that has been generated by reassortment
But it could also indicate that the virus doesn t spread as easily as one that affects the nose and throat
But on landing, instead of settling in for a blood meal, they fled, suggesting that DEET can deter mosquitoes not just via its smell but also via direct contact.
After mating, the females cut slits into tree branches and lay their eggs there. By the time the eggs hatch
in six to ten weeks, the ground will be littered with the bodies of their parents. The new generations of nymphs will fall to the ground,
If you have a diet of potato and milk, you don t need anything else. The disappearance of that staple had devastating consequences,
New york. It spread through potato fields like wildfire in Ireland and other countries where potatoes were grown intensively."
similar to the magnetic field of a bar magnet. If that is so, pear-shaped nuclei should have the strongest electric dipoles,
Seafood diet killing Arctic foxes on Russian islandan isolated population of Arctic foxes that dines only on marine animals seems to be slowly succumbing to mercury poisoning.
is that the Mednyi foxes have no other options for food. Bering Island is bigger than Mednyi, with small mammals such lemmings and voles,
The Icelandic coastal foxes, likewise, have the option of moving inland to vary their diet."
"It s not so much what they are eating, as where they are eating, says Greenwood."
"The Mednyi foxes may be more susceptible to increasing global mercury levels. But Dominique Berteaux, an Arctic ecologist at the University of Quebec in Rimouski, Canada, cautions that the team has not definitively proved a link between mercury contamination
"We eat marine food too, she says.""Maybe they will stop and think,'what can we do to keep the oceans clean
it could be marketed as a niche food oil. Bussmann, who happens to have a bottle of P. huayllabambana oil in his office,
says it is excellent in salads: the taste is nutty and green, evoking the flavours of peanut and cucumber.
Bussmann's work to develop crops from Plukenetia species seems to go beyond the traditional role of a scientist.
GM salmon Genetically modified (GM) salmon have moved one step closer to US grocery stores. On 26 april, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) closed a public consultation on its finding that the engineered fish pose no significant environmental concern.
The FDA must now evaluate the comments before finalizing its decision. See page 17 for more.
Last week marked the end of the public s opportunity to weigh in on a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) draft assessment of the salmon.
Aquabountythe US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been slow to approve a genetically modified (GM) salmon made by Aquabounty of Maynard, Massachusetts.
Environmental groups are preparing to take the battle to consumers by fighting the sale of the fish in grocery stores across the country.
says Gregory Jaffe, director of biotechnology at the Center for Science in the Public interest, a consumer group in WASHINGTON DC that monitors the regulation of GM foods.
Aquabounty has had to demonstrate the food s safety, and gauge the environmental risk of the sterile fish escaping its tanks and successfully mating with wild salmon.
Following FDA approval, Aquabounty hopes to sell its salmon eggs to farmers and expand to markets in Argentina, Canada, Chile and China.
but because the food safety of the fish has already been vetted, the approval process would require only an environmental evaluation,
In March, several speciality grocery stores, including Whole Foods, an inter  national chain based in Austin,
Aquabounty s long struggle has discouraged other US companies from producing GM animals for food. Mark Walton, chief marketing officer at Recombinetics, an animal-biotechnology company in St paul, Minnesota, says that his company will focus initially on medical applications   using modified farm animals as disease models
for example rather than on livestock for food. Medical applications of GM technology do not stir consumer passions in the same way as GM foods,
and there is a regulatory precedent: in 2009, the FDA approved a goat that makes an anti-clotting drug in its milk.
Yet Stotish says that GM animal products will inevitably find their way to grocery stores. He points to heavy investment in the technology in China,
"I think we will end up eating genetically modified animals of a variety of species, says Stotish."
because invertebrates are an important part of the food web. Emma Rosi-Marshall, an aquatic ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook
Goulson's review also cites earlier studies suggesting that grain-eating birds such as partridges may be dying after eating as few as five seeds treated with neonicotinoids.
The insecticide is applied most often as a seed dressing to crops such as maize and soya beans.
Rickets is prevented easily by eating foods such as eggs and cheese, and by spending short amounts of time exposed to sunlight,
which reflect the main source of protein in the diet. They found that most of the children were weaned not until they were 2, in keeping with Renaissance custom.
breast milk was supplemented with'paps'made of soft bread and apples. Neither cereals nor breast milk contain much Vitamin d
as pilot culls to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis begin. As protesters descended on the nation s capital last week, the chief scientific adviser of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs (Defra),
Ian Boyd, talked to Nature about why he thinks the cull is scientifically sound, what else will be needed to control this disease and
How the chicken lost its penisthe case of the missing bird penis is a longstanding mystery in evolutionary biology.
Male chickens, which possess only a rudimentary phallic nub, pump their sperm into females using a'cloacal kiss'a move that presses together the male and female cloacas,
a developmental biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, looked for differences between developing duck and chicken embryos.
The scientists watched penile development through tiny windows cut into duck and chicken eggs. They found that chickens initially form penises similar to those of ducks
but that on about the ninth day of development, the nascent chicken penis called a genital tubercle stops growing
and begins to shrink.""We expected to find some critical outgrowth factor was missing, says Cohn,
but the team discovered that many of the same genes that drive penis growth in ducks continued to be expressed strongly in chickens.
Chickens showed increased levels of Bmp4 a protein that promotes cell death near the tip of the tubercle."
Researchers were able to stave off genital cell death in chickens by treating one side of the tubercle with Noggin, a protein that blocks Bmp activity.
Treating one side of growing duck tubercles with Bmp4 resulted in localized cell death and penis shrinkage, mimicking normal genital development in male chickens.
The results suggest that genital growth in birds is controlled by a common programme that has been customized by evolutionary tweaks in Bmp signalling
But the data do not explain why chickens shed their penises. Cohn suggests that phalluses may have been lost as a secondary consequence of evolution in other body parts such as limbs and teeth, the development
female chickens and other birds may have selected males with smaller penises in part to escape forced copulation.
a sign that Brazilian farmers and ranchers are producing more food on less land, says Nobre.
or sleeping more deeply at night, is sleep deprivation reducing their cognitive abilities or shortening their life spans?
but that undercuts the market for timber that is sustainably produced, says Doug Boucher, head of the tropical-forestry programme for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts."
Chemical forensics confirm French wine had early rootsfrance is renowned for its mastery of winemaking, but when did the country begin its love affair with the vine?
A chemical analysis of archaeological artefacts finds evidence that wine was being produced in the south of France by the fifth century bc."
A thousand years later, Greek and Phoenician merchants had begun shipping wine throughout the Mediterranean region, each in their own distinctively shaped jars called amphorae.
By 600 bc, the Etruscans of central Italy were trading their wine along The french Mediterranean coast.
wine-loving Greeks established a colony at Massalia (present-day Marseilles, France. A team led by Mcgovern has investigated now items from the ancient coastal town of Lattara,
which occurs in grapes, in all of the jars strong evidence that they once contained wine.
as well as herbs such as rosemary and basil, which may have served as flavourings or preservatives, or added to give the wine medicinal properties.
A limestone platform (see picture), dated to about 425-400 bc, also carried tartaric acid residues.
Archaeologists had thought once that it may have been used for pressing olives, but the platform looks remarkably similar to a grape press depicted on a contemporaneous piece of Greek pottery (see picture at top).
"The combination of botanical and chemical evidence makes a pretty tight argument that wine was being produced at Lattara,
"There s been a lot of hypothesizing about shipping wine across the Mediterranean, he adds.""But it s never been shown chemically.
Archaeologists already knew that the people of Massalia had been distributing local wine in their own amphorae
Although no wine presses have been found at Massalia, Dietler thinks that it is only a matter of time before one turns up.
This indicates that they were used for carrying wine, he says, because the pitch would have dissolved in oil
The European Food safety Authority in Parma, Italy, concluded in May that maize (corn) seeds treated with fipronil pose a high acute risk to honeybees. ips trial approved On 19 july, Japan s health minister,
since 1982, causing substantial economic losses to pork producers. The virus can spread quickly by a faecal-oral route
The US Department of agriculture (USDA) had tried to keep PEDV and other diseases out of the country by restricting imports of pigs and pork products from certain nations, such as China.
the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Iowa State university in Ames confirmed that PEDV had infected pigs in Iowa, the leading producer of US pork.
US Department of agriculture"It s a real threat, says Lisa  Becton, a veterinary surgeon and director of swine health information at the National Pork Board, an industry group in Des Â
The National Pork Board has approved $800, 000 to fund research and education. But PEDV must first be grown in labs a notoriously difficult exercise
or cordgrass, a fiercely invasive salt-marsh grass that is native to eastern North america. In 1979, the plant was introduced to China
For example, without the ebb and flow of tides, the sea bulrush (Scirpus mariqueter), a native intertidal grass bearing fruit and stalks that are key food sources for many birds
Cordgrass"will continue to eat up the tidal flats and spread to other parts of the reserve
"It s bad news for Europe, for European farmers and for global food security, says Jonathan Jones, who uses both GM and conventional approaches to study disease resistance in plants at the Sainsbury
Crops must first be deemed safe by the European Food safety Authority (EFSA) in Parma, Italy. The European commission must then produce a draft decision within three months,
and on enabling the import of GM CROPS for use as animal feed, a widespread EU practice that is less controversial than cultivating the crops in European fields.
And it identified some crops, such as sorghum and bananas, that have few, if any, relatives secured in collections.
12 18 july 2013biofuels brake Biofuels made from food crops are on course to be curbed in Europe after an 11 Â July vote by the environment committee in the European parliament.
Politicians moved to limit food-based fuels to 5. 5%of transport fuel by 2020,
along with then-provost Vistasp Karbhari, sought police protection for themselves from biologist Amy Bishop, without warning or protecting others.
On 12 Â February 2010, Bishop shot six colleagues during a faculty meeting, killing three.
and threaten their food supply. They worry about becoming dependent on the willingness of the international community to swiftly provide them with needed vaccines."
EU debates U-turn on biofuels policythe European union (EU) has spent the past 10 years nurturing a  15-billion (US$20-billion) industry that makes transport fuel from food crops such as soya beans
Yet for more than half a decade, scientists have warned that many food-based fuels might actually be boosting emissions relative to fossil fuels.
Now the EU could change course by setting a cap on the use of food-based biofuel,
so far, most of that fuel has come from food crops, helping to generate a thriving bio  fuels industry based mainly on biodiesel.
Europe is even importing rapeseed and vegetable oil to meet demand. But the original accounting for biofuel emissions was all wrong,
says David Laborde, a researcher at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in WASHINGTON DC,
In October 2012, the commission finally proposed that food-crop fuel quotas be capped at only 5%of transport fuel by 2020 half of the 10%renewables target effectively allowing existing facilities to continue recouping investment,
On 20 Â June, its energy committee voted to push the cap on food-crop fuels up slightly,
the committee proposed gradually increasing mandates for use of advanced biofuels not made from food crops."
and is pushing to incorporate land-use change numbers to distinguish between better and worse food-crop biofuels.
Lead author Hana Golding, a microbiologist at the US Food and Drug Administration in Bethesda, Maryland, agrees
when rising land prices, coupled with fears of food shortages and attractive government incentives, compelled them to set up camp in the arid Great American Desert,
which swap genes to form versions that can spread to chickens and to humans. Better surveillance of Chinese bird populations is needed to monitor the emergence of dangerous viruses such as H7n9,
The researchers collected throat and intestinal swabs from 1, 341 birds, including chickens, ducks, geese, pigeons, partridges and quails, plus 1, 006 water and faecal samples from bird markets.
The scientists think that those viruses swapped genes in domestic ducks before spreading to chickens, where they traded genes with a common chicken virus, H9n2.
That improved the viruses'ability to spread in chickens, which live in close contact with humans.
suggesting that a spread to humans is possible. It really shows that the emergence of these types of viruses can happen at any time,
They fathered twice as many lambs as those with two copies of the short-horned allele,
is trying to use genes from grape varieties to engineer a wine grape that is resistant to Pierce s disease a condition caused by a bacterium that has made it difficult to grow wine grapes in the state.
Sally  Mackenzie, a plant biologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, contacted APHIS about the high-yield offspring of a transgenic sorghum grass plant
which is really important to conserve, could be threatened because the genotype with the transgene would outcompete the normal species,
joins a growing body of research that describes how changes in climate are affecting iconic foods.
such as wine grapes and the sugar maple trees used to make maple syrup.""Climate changes are impacting the everyday lives of real people,
Fruit-tree specialist Toshihiko Sugiura of the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan,
Gregory Jones of Southern Oregon University in Ashland, who studies the effects of climate change on wine grapes,
and preserve food are deemed often officially safe by experts with financial ties to the manufacturers,
or hired consultants of food companies made 35%of the 451 Â determinations classifying food additives as safe in the United states between 1997 and 2012.
The authors have called on the US Food and Drug Administration to bar the practice. See go. nature. com/jqccur and page 253 for more.
but could have spread to humans through one or more intermediate hosts. Researchers reported on 9 Â August that of 50 Â Omani camels sampled,
and the fact that it is produced widely as a staple food make it a good vehicle for delivering the antibody.
It can also be stored for years without changes in its edibility, she says. More from Scidev. netwhile the initial results are promising,
The results contradict an often-cited hypothesis about the effects of prenatal under-nutrition. The predictive adaptive response (PAR) hypothesis posits that people who are deprived of food during prenatal development
or infancy compensate physiologically, storing fats and using sugars more efficiently. This in turn, is thought to make them better able to withstand food scarcity later in life,
and it has been suggested that these traits would be passed on to their offspring. The PAR hypothesis could offer one explanation for the high rate of metabolic diseases such as high blood pressure,
obesity and diabetes among people who experience food scarcity early in life. It proposes that
if these individuals encounter plentiful food resources when they are older, they are more apt to store abdominal fat and gain weight, leading to a plethora of metabolic disorders.
Instead, the Finnish study which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1,
such as low food or high population density around the time that you re developing, is essentially bad for your fitness,
says Jonathan Wells, an expert in paediatric nutrition at University college London, who was involved not in the research.
would be whether poor early-life nutrition protected the Finnish populations against later starvation or malnutrition.
the study underscores the"incredible importance of nutrition during early development
Seven days: 20 26 september 2013space mission dead After a 7. 6-billion-kilometre journey, NASA s comet-hunting Deep Impact spacecraft is no more.
GM-rice fallout Guangwen Tang, a nutrition scientist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, has been banned by the university from conducting human research for two years owing to ethics violations in a study
the Food and Drug Administration and the National institutes of health (NIH) announced on 19 september. More than $273 Â million may be invested over the next five years to help the programme to develop
In October, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to issue a rule that affirms it has the authority to regulate e-cigarettes,
The use of vapour flavourings such as vanilla, could also be seen as an attempt to prolong use
and appeal to younger consumers. Other scientists, such as Hajek, say that regulating e-cigarettes as medical devices would be a disaster.
On 13 september, researchers announced that they have bred a tropical pasture grass that can significantly suppress greenhouse-gas emissions.
Rising food demand is increased driving fertilizer use, and the problem is expected to get worse: nitrous oxide emissions will be 50%higher in 2020 than in 1990, according to the US Environmental protection agency."
says Henry Janzen, a soil biochemist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Lethbridge, and co-author of the chapter about agriculture in a 2007 report on climate mitigation by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
"It s a massive undertaking to reduce these emissions while making more food. The solution, says Michael Peters,
The team found similar activity in a few other plants, including sorghum, but Brachiaria grasses were best.
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