The latest findings suggest that manure is helping antibiotic resistance to spread, says Joan Casey, an environmental-health scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public health in Baltimore, Maryland,
Food-borne illnesses are not always home-grownscottish cows have a bum rap. For decades, the local cattle have been prime suspects behind the country s outbreaks of drug-resistant,
food-borne illnesses. But research now suggests that humans and imported foods are the real culprits.
A team of researchers compared the genome sequences of nearly 400 samples of diarrhoea-causing Salmonella enterica collected from people and livestock in Scotland.
which strains isolated from local livestock had spread to humans. But they also found that strains could spread from humans to animals."
and in imported food probably entered the country and infected animals and humans separately, then continued to evolve
including resistance stemming from the controversial practice of giving antibiotics in feed to promote animal growth.
Scotland imports most of its red meat, but the authors say that the country does not have adequate surveillance in place to determine
whether imported food is a source of new pathogens. Both Woolhouse and the authors call for Scotland
and other countries to boost the monitoring of their food supply. Lance Price, a genomic epidemiologist at the George washington University in WASHINGTON DC, says that it is not surprising that Scottish cattle are not the source of Scottish outbreaks,
"Meat sale and meat trade across borders is making it harder to control antibiotic-resistant pathogens at a local scale
but it turns out it's a friend to coffee drinkers all the same. Research in Costa rica shows that hungry warblers
and other birds significantly reduce damage by a devastating coffee pest, the coffee berry borer beetle.
but has spread to nearly every coffee-producing region. The insect is invulnerable to most pesticides,
the team identified the yellow warbler (Setophaga petechia) and four other species as beetle eaters. Next, the researchers combined data about bird abundance, forest cover and beetle populations from six coffee plantations.
They found that beetle-eating birds were most common at sites with lots of stretches of forest nearby,
hungry birds warded off beetles from coffee beans worth around 4%of the total value of the annual crop.
in which Kepler would survey stars towards the Milky way s central bulge for signs of planets,
He has used Fermi to discover two galaxy-sized bubbles of ionized gas blowing from the centre of the Milky way,
and raises major concerns about food security. Climate change is expected to cause changes in the distributions of species around the world, with an overall shift away from the equator and towards the poles.
3. The changing climate is raising major concerns about food security in many countries, and pests may contribute to making matters worse."
where soils often lack crucial nutrients and help to increase yields. But fertilizers are costly for subsistence farmers
might help to halve the amount of fertilizer needed to bring food self-sufficiency to Sub-saharan africa, according to proponents.
Widespread use of chemical fertilizer has increased greatly food sufficiency in many countries, for example in China and India,
"We do need to increase food productivity in a sustainable way, says Ronald  Vargas, a soils and land management officer at the FAO in Rome."
Soil nutrients and soil acidity can be determined easily with readily available cheap test strips, he adds.
and organic fertilizer produced on-farm does not replenish soils with nutrients, he says.""We will need to find solutions that fit local farmers.
a judicious use of neonicotinoids could be an effective way of controlling the spread of The argentine ant."
the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology today fulfilled its threat to retract a controversial paper claiming that a genetically modified (GM) maize causes serious disease in rats,
Earlier this month, the journal s editor-in-chief Wallace Hayes threatened retraction if SÃ ralini refused to withdraw the paper.
Food and Chemical Toxicology asked me to become an associate editor in January 2013 because of my extensive experience in the area,
was added to their drinking water. See'Rat study sparks GM furore'.'At the 28 november press conference, Corinne Lepage, a Member of the European parliament and former French environment minister, said that SÃ ralini s paper asked"good questions about the long-term toxicity of GMOS GM
Conflicts of interest with the European Food safety Authority (EFSA) in Parma, Italy, which is responsible for assessing the risks of GMOS,
monitoring their spread, researching invasive mechanisms and ecological impact, and developing control technologies. This has led to an"explosion of research
A case in point is the whitefly Bemisia tabaci, an insect that feeds on plant vascular tissue called phloem.
separating individual seedlings to minimize pest spread, applying low levels of pesticides and implementing biological control with natural enemies means that"there haven t been major outbreaks since 2009,
the spread of the red turpentine beetle is mostly under control, says Sun. Fewer than 1 in 1,
California, received a green light from the US Food and Drug Administration on 14 Â November.
) Breakthrough drug The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved on 13 Â November a breakthrough therapy to treat a rare blood cancer called mantle-cell lymphoma.
But at the end of November he is scheduled to move to Australia to take charge of food, health and life sciences at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia.
the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed eliminating most artificial trans-fats forms of fat associated with increased heart risk from processed foods.
a status that allows a food additive to be used without FDA approval. A final determination will be made after a 60-day public comment period.
Label loss Voters in Washington state on 5 Â November rejected a ballot initiative to require labelling of genetically modified (GM) foods.
or limit GM foods; California voters defeated a similar proposition last year. No state currently requires labelling of all GM foods,
although Alaska has mandated labels for GM fish if they go on sale. Ivory crush The US Fish
As the young beetles feed, the nematodes leave through the insects'mouths. Once infected trees often die within a year
and lay eggs in. The pests seem to prefer certain pine forests over others, but the reason has not been clear."
says Sun. Â To examine the fungi s role in the relationship, the team fed nematodes and beetles with different types of fungus in a Petri dish.
says Sun. The researchers found that Sporothrix sp. 1 also increased the trees'production of diacetone alcohol,
"Effective ways to stop its spread are needed badly. Â In an earlier study, Sun and his team found that a chemical compound produced by beetle pupae,
Shrub genome reveals secrets of flower powera shrub with cream-coloured flowers that is the closest living descendant of Earth s first flowering plants has had its genome decoded.
Nearly everything about Amborella is fodder for a botanist s pub quiz. It grows natively in 18 known spots on the New Caledonian island of Grande terre in the South Pacific,
or an area the size of Poland and is more than three times the area estimated in 2009 by the United nations Food and Agricultural organization mainly on the basis of land-use observations from space.
so less need for animal feed, he adds. Many sites once used to produce feed could today support wheat varieties and other cereals,
Schierhorn says. If fully replanted, he estimates the region s idle land could yield some 90 million tonnes of grain per year about 35 million tonnes more than Russia s wheat production in 2013.
it would help to satisfy the rising global demand for cereals for food and animal feed projected to reach 3 billion tonnes by 2050.
The extent of abandonment in western Russia is not clear cut. Kirsten de Beurs, a geographer at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, has visited often the region,
The trend is encouraging for food production, Schierhorn says but a full reversal may not be given desirable the trade-offs.
FAOTO slow the spread, good farm hygiene, and prompt quarantine and destruction of infected plants are crucial.
believes that further spread is inevitable.""I m incredibly concerned, he says.""I will not be surprised
or so tonnes of bananas and cooking bananas (plantains) produced annually. Industrial farms growing a single Cavendish cultivar are at a high risk of Foc-TR4 infestation,
Most of the bananas important for the food supply are grown by smallholder farmers in low-income countries and consumed locally.
Food fuelled with fungiwith the planet s population booming and climate change threatening traditional breadbasket regions,
researchers are seeking ways to squeeze more food from the land. Some are taking a sideways approach:
Only in the 1970s did researchers realize that a fungus living in symbiosis with tall fescue grass was responsible for making cattle grazing on infected pastures ill.
Now some researchers are applying similar philosophies to food crops. The approach bucks a trend of sterilizing
Those findings led him to look for other endophytes optimized to tackle the problems likely to be caused to particular food crops by climate change (R.  S.  Redman et  al.
Bioensure has been approved for use by the US Food and Drug Administration and the Department of agriculture and independent tests have shown the mixture to be nontoxic.
and India are driving a global increase in meat consumption, cancelling out decreases elsewhere, according to a comprehensive study of global food consumption.
The work, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, takes a detailed look at what people eat,
a metric used in ecology to position species in the food chain. The metric puts plants and algae,
which make their own food, at trophic level 1. Rabbits, which eat plants, occupy level 2. Foxes,
which eat herbivores, sit at trophic level 3. Cod, a fish that eats other fish, claims level 4. Polar bears and orcas,
which puts us on a par with other omnivores, such as pigs and anchovies, in the global food web."
"We are closer to herbivore than carnivore, says Bonhommeau.""It changes the preconception of being top predator.
The study also looked at how eating patterns have changed over time. The researchers calculated the human trophic level for 176 countries for each year from 1961 to 2009 using a data on 102 types of food from animal fat to yams compiled by the Food and agriculture organization (FAO) of the United nations. Ref. 1globally,
the human trophic level increased by 3%from 1961 to 2009, driven largely by more meat consumption in India and China.
Over 50 years, an increase in fat and meat consumption has moved us further up the food web
with the global median human trophic level increasing 3%or about 0. 06 during the period."
An organism s trophic level is calculated by summing the trophic levels of the foods in its diet and the proportion in
"A change by 0. 1 means you are eating considerably more meat or animal-based foods, says Kastner.
But changes were not uniform across the globe. Countries such as China and India, where hundreds of millions of people have lifted themselves out of poverty
However, places such as Iceland, Mongolia and Mauritania, where traditional diets are mostly based on meat, fish or dairy, have seen their trophic levels decline as they diversified their daily fare.
the environmental impact of producing meat in terms of everything from carbon emissions to water use is typically many times larger than that of producing vegetable foods.
Rabbit rescue China s moon rover has run into major trouble, according to a report on 25 january from state-run news agency Xinhua.
The Yutu (Jade Rabbit) rover experienced a"mechanical control abnormality as it prepared to hibernate over its second lunar night (roughly equivalent to 14 days On earth)
ACT is running the only trials approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to test therapies involving embryonic stem cells.
including issues of food and water security, and climate change. 3 february The World health organization releases its Third world Cancer Report, six years after its previous publication.
saying that the government has estimated under  the threat that climate change poses to the bears food supply,
depriving grizzlies of energy-rich pine nuts. Moreover, say conservationists, invasive fish have crowded out native cutthroat trout in Yellowstone Lake at the heart of the park,
reducing another important food source for the bears.""We have unprecedented an situation with deteriorating foods,
and an ecosystem that is unravelling, says Louisa Willcox, the Northern Rockies representative at the Center for Biological Diversity in Livingston, Montana.
A report delivered in November by the US Geological Survey s Interagency Grizzly bear Study Team describes a resilient and healthy bear population that has adapted to the loss of pine nuts by eating more elk and bison
"Eating meat is hazardous on all fronts, says David Mattson, an ecologist at Yale university in New haven, Connecticut.
A reliance on meat heightens the risk that adult bears will come into contact with humans,
dried grasses and other indigestible plant matter could greatly improve the efficiency of converting waste biomass to fuel.
and diesel substitutes, can be produced from simple sugars, usually by fermentation. Most of the sugars come from foodstuffs,
including sugar cane and maize (corn). But most of the biomass produced in agriculture and forestry lies unused in more-complex chains of sugars, for example lignin and cellulose.
These tough, recalcitrant materials, which provide structural support for wood, grasses and the non-edible parts of crops, are hard to break down.
Producers of cellulosic ethanol currently spend 15-20%of their fuel costs on acids and enzymes to loosen
chemists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have invented now a process that they say easily extracts sugars from lignin and cellulose fibres."
and easily recovered from a mixture of dissolved sugars. Chemist James Dumesic, who is also part of the Wisconsin-Madison team,
the researchers will test their solvent at pre-pilot scales producing 1 litre of sugars per day says Luterbacher,
and Brazil either using enzymes to break up plant material into fermentable sugars, or applying extremely high temperatures to break down biomass into syngas (hydrogen and carbon monoxide).
Claire Curry, a bioenergy analyst at the information firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance, expects that some 50 million to 60 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol could be produced commercially worldwide this year up from just a few
Ranking choices consistently for example, in selecting food sources would seem to be one aspect of such rationality.
and energy eating a less nutritious food that s available now, or to ignore it because a better alternative might become available in a moment?
The researchers find that, for some particular choices of the nutritional values of food sources A b and C,
or vanishing in the future, an optimal choice for pairs of foods can prefer B to A c to B
who has observed violations of IIA in the food choices of a slime mould4, points out that some examples of seemingly irrational behaviour in foraging decisions are understood already to result from the animals rarely having all their options available at once."
New drug approvals The US Food and Drug Administration approved 27 Â new drugs in 2013, down from a 15-year high of 39 Â drugs the year before,
Other items include a sabre-toothed cat skull and dinosaur eggs. Rolater has agreed also to pay a $25,
when researching a vaccine against human immunodeficiency virus  1 (HIV-1) by spiking rabbit blood samples with antibodies.
in the cocktail of male goat pheromones that activates the neural pathway that regulates reproduction in females1.
When exposed to a cocktail of 18 of these chemicals the brains of female goats showed a sudden increase in the activity of the gonadotropin-releasing hormone (Gnrh) pulse generator the neural regulator of reproduction.
and the cocktail showed less of an effect when that ingredient was removed. None of the other chemicals appeared to have a statistically significant effect.
Last week, the first human case of H7n9 flu was detected in Jilin province in the far north of the country, raising a further risk of spread to North korea and Russia,
and there is no evidence of any continued human-to-human spread. But the virus is being sustained in unknown reservoirs in the poultry supply chain, making future outbreaks likely,
One year on from the first outbreak, researchers are still struggling to understand the origins and dynamics of the virus s reservoirs and spread.
which has been declared safe by the European Food safety Authority in Parma, Italy. The crop, Pioneer  1507, produces a pesticide
says a study from the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington  DC. The report, published on 12 february (see go. nature. com/annqmt),
assessed technologies that could most benefit food production in the global south. Increased funding for agricultural research also came high on the list of recommendations.
Yutu (Jade Rabbit, pictured), may yet be saved. The Chinese space agency initially said on 12 Â February that efforts to rouse the rover had failed after it experienced mechanical problems in late January before going into hibernation ahead of a two-week lunar night.
Growing fish farms Some 62%of all the seafood eaten globally will be raised farm by 2030, the World bank predicts in a report released on 5 Â February.
is a medical procedure that does not require regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. The court decided that processing the cells for use in the therapy made the end product a drug.
Although there is no food to be harvested on Himalayan peaks, the bees'adaptable flight might help them to escape predators elsewhere,
At higher elevations, reduced air density would make it harder to create lift with each wing beat,
they would have no excess capacity to tank up on nectar and pollen, he says.""And we know they re capable of carrying double their body weight in nectar and pollen.
 Altshuler agrees.""Unless there is some unknown reason why bees want to be at 8, 000 metres,
GM CROPS detected Small amounts of genetically modified (GM CROPS are increasingly being detected in traded food and feed
says the Rome-based United nations Food and Agricultural organization (FAO. In the first survey of its kind, published on 13 Â March,
Swiss grants crisis The swiss government has stepped in to offer substitute grants in the wake of a move that bars researchers in the country from applying to the European Research Council (ERC.
But unlike most ethanol factories, in which yeast feeds on sugars in foodstuffs such as maize (corn) kernels,
Thousands of tonnes of corn stover the leaves, stalks and husks left over after the maize harvest are stacked already waiting
By June, the plant will begin processing the stover into ethanol, which will be blended with petrol
and can contribute to increased food prices because the maize must be grown on land that would otherwise be used for food.
Tapping the storehouse of biomass left after the harvest is much less controversial. Ethanol made from corn stover produces at least 60%less greenhouse-gas emissions than petrol,
and making it does not require any extra farmland. Brewing such cellulosic ethanol, however, is hard.
Producers must dismember large, indigestible molecules such as cellulose and hemicellulose to yield fermentable sugars. The process requires the biomass to be ground up and pretreated with acids.
A cocktail of enzymes must then be applied to chop up the tough biological polymers inside all before the yeast is added to the resulting sugars.
And cellulosic ethanol could get cheaper with more efficient stover harvesting beefier enzymes and cheaper pretreatments.
a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel examined the science behind the technologies on 25-26 Â February.
but the crew mistakenly thought that the water came from his drinking tube. The close-call spacewalk would have been postponed
Investigators found no evidence in any of the wolves of contributing factors to the attack such as rabies disease defense of food or habituation to human food.
The next day I found a rabbit in a snare I set the day before (don't worry hippies it snapped its neck
That night while I was eating my wonderful dinner they came back again. No yelling at them this time.
Instead I took a leg off the rabbit and walked up to the big boy I thought was the alpha male
and food scarce they are preditors and they will attack. Mr. Nosowitzalthough I have not read any of your previous articles I can only assume that you are not actually a journalist.
I have seen wolves begging for food in campgrounds and chasing people on bicycles. I have sat also with a rancher
The majority of EMTS and paramedics wouldnã¢Â#Â#t know to thoroughly swab for DNA before they get to work ensuring infection doesnã¢Â#Â#t spread from the gaping scalp lacerations on a 16 year
Pandas have a really ridiculous diet. Can you believe they only eat non-nutritious bamboo?
There's also tons of food for the panda to eat! My Response: Sure it's ok to include something poor in your diet.
It's not ok to make that your sole source of nutrition. Note: The panda is still capable of eating fish eggs
and a number of other foods but it can not get them in the quantities needed to survive.)
Also the panda doesn't eat any old bamboo. It is notoriously picky. It does have a relatively wide range of actual species it can eat
but most of those are not found in the areas it inhabits. To make things even worse Bamboo species will flower
or more bamboo species or its food will disappear and it will starve. Conclusion: The pandas current diet has trapped fundamentally the panda.
This has proven disastrous for countless species . However if we stop babying them and getting them all of the bamboo they want for now they still have the ability to go back to a wider diet of more widely available food.
This would allow the panda to be more energetic travel further and to different environments allowing the species to thrive.
Its entire metabolism is vastly lower than normal due to its poor diet. Even its body shape has adjusted to use less energy.
However if they were to move off of their poor diet they could get more energy
This would let them find better sources of food and adapt to more changes in their local environment.
Too many pandas too soon would mean a huge population crash as they fight for food.
It is considered a luxury food and sell for 1000's of US dollars despite BEING ENDANGERED CRITICALLY.
It is considered a luxury food and sell for 1000's of US dollars despite BEING ENDANGERED CRITICALLY.
#TECHNOLOGY MEETS TRADITION SPONSORED ARTICLE It s not often you get an assignment from Popular Science to film a whisky distillery in Scotland especially not one as steeped in tradition as Glenfiddich.
or Glasgow our location is well off the beaten track deep in Scotland s Speyside whisky country and one of the last family-owned distilleries.
Prickly hedges rise intermittently on either side of us making driving feel like a game of chicken in Grand Theft Auto.
and pioneering spirit required to endure in this tough countryside. The distillery located just outside picturesque Dufftown sits in the shadow of Balvenie Castle.
But as we discover on our first scouting mission there is far more to its unassuming buildings and warehouses than meets the eye.
Our first stop is the mash house where malted barley begins its long journey to your whisky glass.
Next we visit is the âÂ#Âoestillã¢Â# house where beery wort is distilled into liquor.
and never emptied a technique borrowed from Spanish sherry makers. Very fitting then that the reason we are here is to use a cutting edge interactive video technology to make an immersive tour experience for those people who are not lucky enough to visit the distillery themselves a tour that reveals Glenfiddich s art and science of whisky making.
The tour app will be available on itunes November 2013 l
#Spain Considers Release Of Genetically Modified Olive Fruit Fliesa company involved in creating genetically modified mosquitos has another project nearing outdoor testing.
The male red-billed buffalo weaver is the only species of bird we know of that exhibits orgasm-like behavior according to Tim Birkhead a professor in Sheffield University's Department of Animal and Plant sciences.
The buffalo weaver a native of Sub-saharan africa has a fake penis--it has no sperm duct
but when Birkhead and his colleagues manually stimulated a buffalo weaver's mock member the bird had seemed
As Birkhead described to me via email the bird shudders its wings and clenches its feet as it ejaculates--who knows
A few rounds of beer helped the group settle on an idea: The team would build a giant interactive musical tree later dubbed the Treequencer.
North street Labs took home only cartloads of Red Bull soft drinks and leftover tools but the team s tree did attract musicians:
and converts it into commands for a MIDI interface which stores a large library of digital sounds. 4. Powera 120v power strip feeds electricity to the sensors
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