With a limited labour force but ample subsidized chemical fertilizers available in most rural areas, dumping nutrient-rich animal manure has become an easier and cheaper option than using it to fertilize crops.
And animal feed in China is loaded with additives such as antibiotics and heavy metals, making many farmers reluctant to use manure as a replacement for chemical fertilizers.
It shows that the window in which infected cattle can transmit the disease to other animals is actually shorter than previously believed and
while monitoring a complex set of data such as blood samples, temperature and lesions on the animals.
Previous estimates based on isolation of the virus from infected animals have come up with significantly longer periods of infectivity.
The paper is fantastic in terms of being one of the few studies that quantify how infectious animals are as a function of how long they've been infected and
near Coventry, UK, also points out that much of the modelling used to predict disease spread and best responses to outbreaks actually works on the level of the farm, rather than of the individual animal.
The amount of work that went into this for just eight animals being infected was enormous.
and animals living in the vicinity of the damaged power plants, but they also give researchers a unique opportunity to study the effects of radiation on populations that would be impossible to recreate in the lab. Tim Mousseau,
and the animals it houses, all survived unscathed a massive chemical explosion at a nearby plant on 14 june.
but the more likely source of the bacteria is animals. 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.
But how do pathogenic E coli arise in the first place? This is where bacteriophage come in. The bacterium in this outbreak, currently recognised as strain O104:
This strain has never been found in any animal, so it is possible that it could have come from straight from the environment into humans.
Nakanishi is coordinating seven teams to study the impact of the disaster on soil, plants, animals, fisheries and forests for the next decade,
The scientists also sequenced substantial sections of the heterozygous diploid variety RH, although due to its heterozygosity were not able to assemble it into a complete genome.
Bats are thought to have been the source of several of the nastiest viruses to jump to humans from animals during the past 40 years,
To control the increasing occurrence of diseases making the jump from animals to humans, he says,
cnidarians, worms and other animals to sort out which lineages came first. So far, he says,
Differences between living animals and ancient fossils are expected, but the differences also allow for debate. Eoandromeda fossils are excellent and very important
multicellular animals lived in the shadow of these unicellular giants. To Seilacher, the golf-ball-sized Eoandromeda looks like one of these giants.
Mcnulty also fed the five bacterial strains from the yoghurt to'gnotobiotic'mice animals raised
Microorganisms in their guts may help the endangered animals to subsist on plants despite a gut that is better suited to eating meat,
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.
despite having a carnivore's digestive system, he says. But Ruth Ley, a microbiologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New york, says that pandas still harbour fewer cellulose-digesting enzymes than even non-exclusively herbivorous species such as humans.
I see a very badly adapted animal, she says. The main way the panda has adapted to the low-quality diet is not via microbiota
like the vast majority of other animals, 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,
It warns that up to 1. 6 million animals might be used in toxicity tests for the 4
no alignment of the animals and of their herds along geomagnetic field lines could be found."
Burda s team is already looking at magneto-reception in other animals
Seven days: 4 10 november 2011: Nature Newsresearch Events Business People Policy Trend Watch Coming up Number crunch Research Fracking tremors A British energy company says that its hydraulic fracturing('fracking')project probably caused the cluster of small earthquakes
Nature Newswoolly mammoths, woolly rhinos and other large animals driven to extinction since the last ice age each succumbed to a different lethal mix of circumstances.
But there was no clear pattern to explain why the animals died off and it proved impossible to predict from habitat
Fifty thousand years ago, no fewer than 150 genera of large animals roamed the planet,
envisaged a blitzkrieg in which technologically savvy people hunted these animals to extinction. The end of an ice age and the habitat changes it wrought led other researchers to lay the blame on climate.
because researchers often used different methods and different animals spread around the world to draw general conclusions about megafaunal extinctions.
Asian and North american ranges of these animals (drawn from climate records and hundreds of fossils) and a rough approximation of their population size (based on ancient MITOCHONDRIAL DNA sequences) between 42,000 and 6, 000 thousand years ago.
and the animals'ranges changed in different ways. For instance, woolly rhinos roamed much of Europe and Asia until their extinction around 14,000 years ago,
The team found no way to predict the future extinction of a species, based on either an animal's genetic diversity or the size of its range.
when applied to modern extinctions of much smaller animals, and even plants. It's interesting
megafauna represent a minute fraction of the fauna we have.
Citizen scientists'climate-impact survey wraps upone of the biggest citizen-science projects ever conducted concludes this monthafter five years of data collection.
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
and other animals for the mutations that would provide an early warning of a pandemic
and avian viruses, creating opportunities for genetic reassortment in co-infected animals. Fouchier argues that many countries collect more and more-timely,
restrict veterinary surgeons to using the two cephalosporin drugs specifically approved for food-producing animals ceftiofur and cephapirin and ban prophylactic use.
In animals not listed in the FDA order, such as ducks or rabbits, vets will have more discretion to use the drugs.
Most antibiotic classes are used both in animals and in humans, so the FDA is also considering tightening controls on all classes of antimicrobials used on farms.
"If we want to protect large animals from these infections, then we have to test vaccines in them,
The National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) in Manhattan, Kansas, is designed to provide BSL-4 containment for large-animal studies
The site is adjacent to the KSU Biosecurity Research Institute, a BSL-3 facility that studies animal and plant pathogens.
A second is the risk of animal-borne diseases spreading to humans as population growth and dispersal puts people into greater contact with wild animals.
The two agencies responsible for monitoring disease outbreaks in animals the Food and agriculture organization (FAO) of the United nations and the World organisation for Animal health (OIE) stipulate that sequences of potentially zoonotic viruses should be deposited in public databases within 3 months
Monitoring animals falls to the FAO, which tends to focus on food security, and the OIE, which looks mostly at animal health and trade.
A bloody boon for conservationbloodsucking leeches are offering the best hope of finding one of the world s rarest animals.
only for the animal to die after a few days in captivity. In 2011, Vietnam established a small saola reserve in the animal s only known habitat,
what animals are in the area, says Gilbert. Leeches are impossible to avoid in tropical forests,
and DNA from hundreds of the animals could be combined and analysed in a single experiment.
whether a specific plant or animal is present. But mislabelling is rampant so researchers do not always know what to look for
or animals they come from. This'deep sequencing'technique has been used to characterize mixtures of microbes living in environments such as oceans and animal guts.
The researchers also found DNA from eight genera of vertebrate animals. Genetic material from the critically endangered Saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica) was present in one powder;
Nearly half of the medicine samples tested for animal DNA contained genetic material from multiple animals,
and more than three-quarters included DNA from animals not listed on the packaging, such as water buffalo, domestic cows and goats."
At the start of the study, all the animals had a medium social rank, judged by the access they got to food, water and grooming.
Typically, the first animal assigned to a group had the highest ranking and the last the lowest,
whether an animal was high, middle or low ranking with 80%accuracy, on the basis of gene expression alone.
when other animals entered the group showed that their gene expression responded rapidly, and predictably, to match their new status."It suggests a lot of plasticity in our gene expression response to our social environment,
Research has shown also the health consequences of low social status on both animals and humans. One investigation, known as the Whitehall study2, found that low-ranking British civil servants suffer higher rates of illness and death than their superiors.
and we would see evidence of TB in the slaughtered animals if this was the case,
showing that animals with preexisting tuberculosis had reduced sensitivity to the skin test when they were infected with liver fluke2.
animals that test positive are destroyed and the herd is retested. But the strategy isn t working.
which transmit the Plasmodium parasite a potent killer that claimed an estimated 655,000 lives in 2010 alone.
However, as the first company to seek approval for a disease model in a GE animal that could, in theory,
Nevertheless, the company remains hopeful that its pigs will skirt the hardships that have befallen other GE animals in the pipeline.
As early as 1999, the FDA spoke about the promise of GE animals for both food and pharmaceutical purposes.
however, FDA approvals for two GE food animals have stalled: a salmon with a gene prompting faster growth,
and environmental groups are concerned that transgenic animals might escape and interbreed with wild populations. In April, amid the delays, the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada,
Nonetheless, Swart is worried about the regulatory process for new animal drugs (NAD), which applies to all GE animals,
whether they re bred to produce food, drugs or, in Swart s case, disease.""The NAD process doesn t fit us real well,
Exemplar must ensure that no unintended consequences befall the animals themselves. But Swart points out that diseases have variable symptoms."
a handful of investigators at US universities have begun already to study how diseases develop in the transgenic animals.
If a scientist in Iowa sends tissue from one of the animals to a colleague in California,
000 years ago it would have been more lush landscape capable of supporting dairy animals. The Takarkori shelter and others nearby are home to vivid and colourful rock art depicting cattle, some with full udders,
whether the animals were kept for meat, dairying or other uses. Evershed and Dunne hoped to overcome these problems by examining fat residues left on the pottery shards.
Carbon isotopes from milk fat can also point to the sorts of food the dairy animals ate
potentially suggesting that the people milking the animals moved around a lot, Evershed says. They may even have grazed their cattle up and down mountains,
and other cloven-hoofed animals, would have devastating consequences for the US cattle industry were it to emerge in domestic herds.
which diseases in large animals can be studied. Â"I think all of us recognize the need to advance our research
explains Oliver Ryder, a geneticist at San diego Zoo in California and champion of the Frozen Zoo,
the workshop focused on its main goal of thrashing out a ten-year plan to preserve the surviving animals (see Endangered Galapagos giants).
In theory, these animals could be taken off Wolf volcano for captive breeding. Floreana has been affected heavily by habitat destruction
but without tortoises  once the island s dominant herbivore  there is a danger that some plant species could be choked out and lost.
and the Hanoi School of Public health in Vietnam, analysed 1, 000 surveys of disease covering 10 million people and 6 million animals.
For example, the study estimates that one in eight livestock animals in poor countries are affected by brucellosis,
according to a 21 june report from the United nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
a viral disease so lethal to the animals that it has been likened to Ebola. The spread of the disease comes with a heavy economic toll last year,
Scientists first encountered African swine fever in the 1920s in domestic pigs in Kenya, where the vicious haemorrhagic fever felled nearly every animal infected.
for example, exposing whole shipments of uninfected animals. Biosecurity measures, such as scrubbing trucks and decontaminating farmers before they enter
Meat from animals fed on GM CROPS would not need to be labelled. Bob Goldberg, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Los angeles, says the proposition is"anti-science,
-or shooting animals themselves.""What we need is protected for large areas to be surrounded by landscapes that allow for gene flows.
The move followed sustained campaigning from animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA),
In past decades, outbreaks ripped through herds and wiped out up to 90%of animals, often leaving famine,
the agency says that these animals are sufficient for dwindling research needs. See go. nature. com/8mkgnf for more.
reminded us of the need to monitor animals such as pigs that can host the development of dangerous viral strains.
and his colleagues have isolated a new strain of H1n2 influenza from Korean pigs that kills infected ferrets the model animal of choice for influenza work
and 15 universities issued a declaration affirming that their research involves animals only where other avenues are not possible,
The animals are among 110 Â NIH-owned chimpanzees that the agency is removing from the New Iberia Research center in Lafayette, Louisiana Officials at the 80-hectare Chimp Haven sanctuary in Keithville,
Louisiana, say that they would like to accommodate all the animals, but need an extra US$2. 55 Â million to build the necessary structures.
The teeth have provided enough information for palaeontologists to say that the animals ate insects and plants but have yielded little information on where the creatures lived.
Moreover, the trait is found almost exclusively in arboreal animals.""We really think this closes the question of where the first primates were living,
But whereas children recreating these vicious displays simply ram plastic models of the animals together in a straight line,
But the film reflects attitudes that have thwarted Van Eenennaam s research into the genetic modification of animals to reduce food costs
says Mark Westhusin, who works on GE animals at Texas A&m University in College Station."
"but good luck getting money for GE animals. Inquiries By nature reveal that fewer than 0. 1%of research grants from the US Department of agriculture (USDA) have gone to work on GE food animals since 1999, in part because of a poor public image.
In one case, James Murray, another geneticist at the University of California, Davis, was told in 2003 that the USDA had rejected his proposal to develop a goat that produces milk rich in human lysozymes enzymes that fight diarrhoeal disease
because the agency felt that"the general public would not accept such animals. Van Eenennaam once hoped to engineer a cow that produced milk rich in omega-3 fats,
but a spokesperson says that it has considered not work on GE animals to be the best use of its funding.
For GE animals that have been developed despite these hurdles market approval has stalled. On 27 september, Van Eenennaam was a panellist at a meeting in WASHINGTON DC,
which has yet to issue a decision on any GE food animal submitted for approval (see Off the table).
A brief history of some of the genetically engineered food animals submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for review.
No such animal has yet been approved.""Aquabounty has done everything they are required legally to do, and, yes or no, now we just want an official word from the FDA,
The FDA evaluates animals as strictly as it does drugs. In the 17 Â years that the salmon has been under review
More than 20 GE food animals are in development in China, he says, including a fast-growing carp and cows that produce milk with reduced allergenic potential.
because he did not have permission to speak to the press predicts that approval for the animals will lag
Even in the United kingdom where public opposition to GE plants and animals has been fierce, researchers seem to be better off than their US counterparts.
The Biotechnology and Biological sciences Research Council (BBSRC) supports work on GE food animals, including chickens engineered to be resistant to the bird-flu virus. A BBSRC spokesperson told Nature:"
and infected animals are destroyed. And, uncomfortable as it is for animal-lovers, killing large numbers of badgers does help to reduce levels of bovine TB.
Animals engineered with pinpoint accuracytwo genetically engineered farm animals reported today illustrate how far from Frankenstein s stitched-together monster animal biotechnology has come.
One of those animals, a cow, secretes milk that lacks an allergy-inducing protein because researchers accurately blocked its production using the technique of RNA interference1.
Originally, engineered animals were produced with the aim of making food safer, healthier and more abundant.
Yet despite years of investment, almost no animal has been approved by regulatory agencies around the world. Wagner says he has tasted not the milk from his special cow
so that they could work on animals all with the same genome. One set of clones was created at the National Swine Resource and Research center (NSRRC) in Columbia, Missouri,
"This shows the importance of using an animal with a relevant physiology, says Wolf. Pig models are now being developed for other common conditions,
or even having sex causes the animals to die suddenly4. It then became possible to test for the gene and select pig stocks free of it.
and many of them can also occasionally infect animals or people. Leonard has observed one other intriguing characteristic of E. rostratum in his lab:
but is also evidence that they had begun to develop a complex relationship with animals that went beyond hunting."
Discovery of goat facility adds to antibody provider's woesa herd of 841 goats has kicked up a stir for one of the world s largest antibody suppliers after US agricultural officials found the animals including 12
But evidence gathered on a 31 october inspection suggested that an additional barn roughly 14 kilometres south of the company's main animal facility had been in use for at least two and a half years,
"That s virtually unheard of in my career, says Cathy Liss, president of the Animal Welfare Institute,
or neglect to tell the inspector, about 800 animals, it begs questions about how well this company is run
but stated by e-mail that"all animals maintained at the ranch are reported annually to the  USDA,
The NIH's public health services policy on animal welfare which since 1985 has governed the use of animals
On 11 january, the Animal Welfare Institute petitioned the NIH director Francis Collins and the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare at NIH to remove this exemption.
According to an 18 december 2012 follow-up inspection by the USDA two of the 12 animals found in poor health in October have
since been euthanised as a result of their conditions, and some but not all of the sick goats are receiving appropriate medical treatment and monitoring
and sea anemones and the one containing animals with heads and rears which include slugs, flies and humans.
since animals appeared some 542 million years ago, Swalla says, the ancestor of all animals might look different from modern comb jellies and sponges.
Gene families, cell-signalling networks and patterns of gene expression in comb jellies support ancient origins as well.
mysterious organisms that appear in the fossil record before animals. Indeed, in 2011, palaeontologists claimed that one of these 580-million-year-old fossils resembled comb jellies1.
and a leader on the Mnemiopsis genome project, says that comb jellies are the only animals that lack certain genes crucial to producing microrna short RNA chains that help to regulate gene expression.
sponges and comb jellies lack other gene families that all other animals possess2, 3. If comb jellies evolved before sponges,
which animals you include, says Gert WÃ rheide, a molecular palaeobiologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany.
Although some animals, including sharks, are known to have an electric sense, this is the first time the ability has been documented in insects.
or a cell culture or a transgenic animal and using it to generate thousands more to sell again at a fraction of the original price."
furry animal scurried through the forest in search of insects. Its unassuming looks gave little hint that its descendants would one day rule the planet.
"The fact that it s a small scrambling animal isn t a surprise, she adds,
For example, grouping animals according to their anatomy alone puts physically similar species such as pangolins, anteaters and aardvarks in the same tight group,
Will we kill off today's animals if we revive extinct ones? An article by Scientific American.
the cold of the San diego's frozen zoo may be the key to ensuring that today's biodiversity makes it through the next few centuries of the Anthropocene intact.
This ark maintained at a steady-197 degrees Celsius, holds the cells of 503 mammals, 170 birds, 70 reptiles and 12 amphibians and fish out of an estimated 10 million animal
An international meeting that takes place every three years to regulate trade in endangered animals and plants has bolstered protection for a number of species. Besides agreeing to clamp down more strongly on the trade in ivory and rhino horn,
the states party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) took the unprecedented step of granting protection to sharks and various species of tropical timber tree in their final vote today.
says Thomas Stocker, a climate researcher at the University of Bern, and a co-chair of a working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
Stocker says. But with the economic crisis casting a shadow over Europe s Earth -and climate-observation plans, there is little chance of that.
"The take-home message is that social learning learning from others rather than through individual trial and error is a more potent force in shaping wild animals behaviour than has been recognized so far,
but tens of thousands of tests in poultry and other animals elsewhere have failed so far to turn up significant levels of the virus. It is far from easy to devise effective ways to sample birds and animals for testing in a country with some 6 billion domestic birds
Livestock densities are modelled numbers of animals per square kilometre standardized to 2006 national totals. Note different scale for pigs.
whether it represents a single imported case of animal-to-human transmission, an animal epidemic that has spread abroad,
Animal activism Animal-rights activists occupied an animal facility at the University of Milan in Italy on 20 april.
They demanded that all its 800 animals (mostly genetically modified mice) be transferred into their care.
After 12 hours of negotiations, the activists agreed to leave with fewer than 100 animals,
but mixed up some of the remaining animals and cage labels to disrupt experiments. Researchers say they have lost years of work.
even if it remains an infection that people catch from animals, says Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public health in Boston, Massachusetts.
We never saw this number of presumed avian/animal to human transmissions in such a short space of time.
interim head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisations's Emergency Prevention System for Transboundary Animal and Plant Pests and Diseases (EMPRES) in Rome.
But despite intensive surveillance of poultry, wild birds, pigs and other animals, the animal reservoirs remain largely unknown.
That could mean that the main reservoir of virus in animals is restricted still to the Shanghai region.
or other animals over a far greater geographical area than thought. If so, new cases will keep popping up left right and centre.
because we don't know how many animals of which species have it, how genetically diverse it is,
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