So Rice polymer scientist Rafael Verduzco was intrigued to see a material he thought he knew well perform in a way he didn't expect.
The researchers had intended to quantify results seen a few years ago by former Rice graduate student Brent Carey who subjected a nanotube-infused polymer to a process called repetitive dynamic compression.
What Verduzco and lead author/Rice graduate student Aditya Agrawal came across was a material that shows an even stronger effect.
The paper's co-authors include Carey a Rice alumnus and now a scientist at Owens corning;
and Walter Chapman the William W. Akers Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular engineering all of Rice; and Prabir Patra an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Bridgeport with a research appointment at Rice.
Verduzco is an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. The research was supported by an IBB Hamill Innovations Grant the Robert A. Welch Foundation the National Science Foundation and the National institutes of health through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases.
and what Khoury calls iconic U s. crops including sugar maple and wild rice. The rich assortment of U s. crop wild relatives came as something of a surprise to him
For one although North america is itself not a major center of crop plant diversity it abuts one--Mesoamerica--where crops like corn bean squash
#Better wheat varieties in the future? Wheat genome shows resistance genes easy to accessit's hard to go anywhere without a map--especially into the deep and complex world of genetics.
Now Kansas State university researcher Bikram Gill and an international team of researchers have developed a physical map of wheat's wild ancestor Aegilops tauschii commonly called goatgrass as they take the first huge step
toward sequencing the wheat genome--a complete look at wheat's genetic matter. A physical map of a genome shows the physical locations of genes and other DNA sequences of interest.
Scientists use them to identify and isolate genes that are responsible for different traits such as disease resistance and days to maturity.
The wheat chromosome DNA is cloned in bacteria millions of bits of DNA which are sorted by robots
Wheat has the largest genome among crop plants and this is the biggest map as yet assembled for any organism animal
Many years ago we discovered that a particular wheat ancestor--Aegilops tauschii commonly called goatgrass--is a gold mine for wheat improvement Gill said.
Wheat varieties grown in the Great plains are protected from the leaf rust disease by genes extracted from goatgrass
and from Hessian fly in the eastern U s. The physical map developed by the research team provides a roadmap for the mapping of genes that make wheat resistant to diseases heat
and can be accessed easily leading to breeding of more productive and sustainable wheat varieties. The next step in the process Gill said is to obtain funds to sequence the wheat genome
but added it's tough in the tight budgetary situation we are in. Research is expensive
and Kansas. The dollar value of U s. wheat production over the last six years (2007-2012) averaged $14. 2 billion per year according to U s. Department of agriculture data.
But the plant also differentiates between species. Maize growing beside wheat will produce deep roots to avoid those of the wheat
The results of the research which was carried out in continuous corn that was irrigated also and conventionally tilled were somewhat surprising to lead author Humberto Blanco a University of Nebraska-Lincoln soil physicist.
and tilled (disk/chisel) continuous corn have received six different rates of ammonium nitrate fertilizer (range 0 to 200 pounds/acre) for 50 years.
Growing corn continuously under conventional tillage and with high inputs of water and fertilizer may seem outmoded
but this management system is not uncommon as demand for corn grain and crop residues grow Blanco says.
or pieces of grain. By analysing macrofossils we can learn a lot about Stone age farming and how important farming was in relation to livestock ranching'says Axelsson.
The results of the first grain analyses have now been presented and besides revealing that both barley
and wheat were farmed at the site they point to elevated levels of the isotope N15 (nitrogen 15).
The elevated levels may indicate that fertilisers were used in the area of Karleby already 5000 years ago.'
In the initial study the researchers provided each of two groups of wild monkeys with a box of maize corn dyed pink and another dyed blue.
The blue corn was made to taste repulsive and the monkeys soon learned to eat only pink corn.
Two other groups were trained in this way to eat only blue corn. A new generation of infants were offered later both colours of food--neither tasting badly
--and the adult monkeys present appeared to remember which colour they had preferred previously. Almost every infant copied the rest of the group eating only the one preferred colour of corn.
The crucial discovery came when males began to migrate between groups during the mating season.
The researchers found that of the ten males who moved to groups eating a different coloured corn to the one they were used to all but one switched to the new local norm immediately.
because the Amazon is poised for large increases in nitrogen fertilizer use as double-cropping (soybeans plus corn) becomes more prevalent Neill says.
Rotating bean and corn crops to take advantage of the nitrogen beans deposit in the soil has long been a global farming tradition.
#Residential lawns efflux more carbon dioxide than corn fields, study findsmore carbon dioxide is released from residential lawns than corn fields according to a new study.
versus corn fields in Lancaster County Pennsylvania. His co-author Erin Johnson was an undergraduate at the time of the study
and soil temperature were higher in residential lawns than in corn fields. Additionally temperature had the most influence on the levels of carbon dioxide efflux followed by the type of land use.
The research focused the state of Mato grosso the epicenter of an agricultural revolution that has made Brazil one of the world's top producers of soybeans corn cotton and other staple crops.
The silica grain he found is too small to be seen with the unaided eye but the microprobe can magnify it 20000 times to about the size of a chocolate chip.
and to his delight one of them was a silica grain But this one was enriched in oxygen-18
He knew that another graduate student in the lab had found a silica grain rich in oxygen-18.
Xuchao Zhao now a scientist at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing China found his grain in a meteorite picked up in Antarctica by the Chinese Antarctic Research Expedition.
#Fertility needs in high-yielding corn productionalthough advances in agronomy breeding and biotechnology have increased dramatically corn grain yields soil test values indicate that producers may not be supplying optimal nutrient levels.
Researchers with the University of Illinois Crop Physiology Laboratory have been reevaluating nutrient uptake and partitioning in modern corn hybrids.
They separated them into their different fractions (leaves stems cobs grain) to determine season-long nutrient accumulation utilization and movement.
or total uptake and the amount of that nutrient that accumulates in the grain. Study results indicated that high amounts of nitrogen (N) potassium (K) P
Moreover adequately accounting for nutrients with high harvest index values the proportion of total nutrient uptake present in corn grain) such as N P S
and Zn which are removed from production fields via the grain is vital to maintaining long-term soil productivity.
In Illinois it is common to apply all the P in a corn-soybean rotation prior to the corn production year.
Although farmers in Illinois fertilize on average approximately 93 pounds of P2o5 per acre for corn the estimated 80 percent of soybean fields receiving no additional phosphorus would have only 13 pounds per acre remaining for the following year
and utilization is critical to maximize the inherent yield potential of corn concluded Bender. Story Source:
The Mediet is characterized by a high consumption of fruits vegetables legumes olive oil nuts and whole grain;
or less to water seeds of peas beans and wheat on a weekly basis. Treating the seeds less often reduced the effect
With wheat all the seeds germinated in one to two days instead of four or five and with peas and beans the typical 40 percent rate of germination rose to 60 to 70 percent.
Dooley recently has applied hydrogen sulfide treatment to corn carrots and soybeans with results that appear to be similar to earlier tests.
#Ricebag to treat soft tissue injuriesuniversity Teknology MARA researchers investigated the effects of rice barley
Rice displayed superior quality in maintaining heat and can act as a substitute to ice packs or heat gels in treating these injuries.
Hence this rice bag has been invented as an alternative. Local rice grains were used as raw material and covered with a special woollen fabric that is similar in strength to that of an icepack and is also able to sustain heat simultaneously.
Rice barley and mung beans were used in this study. The grains and beans were washed and dried in sun light
and sterilization method began with these grains and beans which were roasted on a hot plate to prevent germination.
Rice displayed superior characteristic compared to barley and mung beans. In terms of fabric the rib fabric which was used to make the bag is able to retain
and maintain heat (5min+155°C). The study proved that rice covered with fabric displayed similar characteristic of an ice
Methane is emitted at a wide range of concentrations from a variety of sources including natural gas systems livestock landfills coal mining manure management wastewater treatment rice cultivation and a few combustion processes.
The new approach takes cellulose from non-food plant material such as corn stover converts about 30%to amylose
Corn stover consists of the stem leaves and husk of the corn plant remaining after ears of corn are harvested.
However the process works with cellulose from any plant. This bioprocess called simultaneous enzymatic biotransformation
#Without adequate funding, deadly wheat disease could threaten global food suppliesdisease-resistant wheat developed over the past half century helped ensure steady world food supplies
It threatens food supplies for millions of people who depend on wheat and other small grains.
Scientists have developed new wheat varieties with some resistance to the deadly disease but the disease evolves
#High levels of lead detected in rice imported from certain countriesrice imported from certain countries contains high levels of lead that could pose health risks particularly for infants
and adults of Asian heritage who consume large amounts of rice scientists said in New orleans on April 10.
Tsanangurayi Tongesayi Ph d. who headed the analysis of rice imported from Asia Europe and South america pointed out that imports account for only 7 percent of the rice consumed in the United states. With vast rice fields in Louisiana California Texas Arkansas
and Mississippi the U s. is a major producer and exporter of the grain. However imports of rice and rice flour are increasing#by more than 200 percent
since 1999#and rice is the staple food for 3 billion people worldwide he added.
Such findings present a situation that is particularly worrisome given that infants and children are especially vulnerable to the effects of lead poisoning Tongesayi said.
For infants and children the daily exposure levels from eating the rice products analyzed in this study would be 30-60 times higher than the FDA's provisional total tolerable intake (PTTI) levels.
Asians consume more rice and for these infants and children exposures would be 60-120 times higher.
For adults the daily exposure levels were 20-40 times higher than the PTTI levels.
Tongesayi's team which is with Monmouth University in N. J. found that levels of lead in rice imported into the United states ranged from 6 to 12 milligrams/kilogram.
They detected the highest amounts of lead in rice from Taiwan and China. Samples from the Czech republic Bhutan Italy India and Thailand had significantly high levels of lead as well.
Analysis of rice samples from Pakistan Brazil and other countries were still underway. Because of the increase in rice imports into the United states Tongesayi said that rice from other nations has made its way into a wide variety of grocery stores large supermarket chains and restaurants as well as ethnic specialty markets and restaurants.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by American Chemical Society. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length n
Outbreaks of Salmonella associated with dried foods such as nuts cereals spices powdered milk and pet foods have been associated with over 900 illnesses in the last five years.
Doctoral student Megan Szyndler entomologist Catherine Loudon and chemist Robert Corn of UC Irvine and entomologists Kenneth Haynes and Michael Potter of the University of Kentucky collaborated on the new study.
but foster Gulf of mexico Dead Zonenew ORLEANS April 9 2013#The most serious ongoing water pollution problem in the Gulf of mexico originates not from oil rigs as many people believe but rainstorms and fields of corn and soybeans a thousand
Just as fertilizer makes corn and soybeans grow it stimulates the growth of plants in the water#algae in the Gulf.
alvarez@rice. eduthe extraordinary properties of some nanomaterials offer leapfrogging opportunities to develop next-generation applications for drinking water disinfection
Unlike the simple starch-based glucose sugars in corn and other grains the sugars in cellulosic biomass are complex polysaccharides that must be extricated from a tough polymer called lignin
and corn has advantages for growing microalgae especially their abundance and relatively low cost Rakitsky said.
or corn stover may take over as those technologies reach the right scale and cost structures.
We will need another'Green revolution'to feed the world by 2050 said John Floros Ph d. referring to the development of high-yield disease-resistant breeds of grain
That will mean scientific innovations such as new strains of the big three grains--rice wheat
and corn--adapted for a changing climate and other conditions. It also will require action to reduce a terrible waste of food that gets too little attention.
That waste can occur due to spoilage from improper storage of grain during transportation or from pests.
and branches corn stalks and cotton fibers and it is the main component of paper and cardboard.
The rice grain-sized insect has already wiped out an area of B c. lodgepole pine forest five times larger than the size of Vancouver Island.
and cereals and constitutes one of the most economically important plant families in the modern world. It is the first of the grass subfamily Pooideae to have sequenced a genome
and it is used widely as a model plant for structural and functional genomic studies of grasses and cereals.
#Verifying that sorghum is a new safe grain for people with celiac diseasestrong new biochemical evidence exists showing that the cereal grain sorghum is a safe food for people with celiac disease who must avoid wheat
Paola Pontieri and colleagues explain that those gluten proteins present in wheat and barley trigger an immune reaction in people with celiac disease that can cause abdominal pain and discomfort constipation diarrhea and other symptoms.
The only treatment is lifelong avoidance of gluten. Sorghum they note has emerged as an alternative grain for people with celiac disease.
Recently U s. farmers have begun producing sorghum hybrids that are a white grain known as food-grade sorghum.
#Feeding corn germ to pigs does not affect growth performanceinclusion of corn germ in swine diets can reduce diet costs depending on the local cost of corn germ and other ingredients.
Recent research conducted at the University of Illinois indicates that corn germ can be included at up to 30 percent in diets fed to growing pigs.
In previous research we had seen that pigs do very well on diets containing 10 percent corn germ
if higher inclusion rates can be used said Hans Stein professor of animal sciences at Illinois. The corn germ used in this study came from the ethanol
This product is different from the corn germ produced from the wet milling industry which contains 30 to 40 percent fat.
Stein's team tested diets containing 0 percent 10 percent 20 percent and 30 percent corn germ.
They tested each inclusion level of corn germ in diets containing 30 percent distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS) as well as in diets containing no DDGS.
or backfat quality as increasing amounts of corn germ were added to the diets regardless of the inclusion level of DDGS.
The results of this work demonstrate that pig growth rate will not be changed by the inclusion of up to 30 percent corn germ in the diets
the diets containing more corn germ also contained more fat. As a result the bellies of pigs fed diets with no DDGS were softer as corn germ levels increased.
Producers may have to reduce the inclusion rate during the final three to four weeks before slaughter Stein concluded.
whether reducing the inclusion rate of corn germ in late-finishing diets would ameliorate the negative effects on belly quality might be warranted.
The study Up to 30 percent corn germ may be included in diets fed to growing-finishing pigs without affecting pig growth performance carcass composition
Corn and cotton have been modified genetically to produce pest-killing proteins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt for short.
We tested the underlying assumptions of the models in lab experiments with a major pest of corn and cotton.
#Gene responsible for short stature of dwarf pearl millet identifiedwhile pearl millet is a major food staple in some of the fastest growing regions On earth relatively little is known about the drought-hardy grain.
which gene controls the dwarfing trait will help plant breeders create more efficient sustainable varieties of millet that have the short stature some farmers and ranchers want.
In the longer term the knowledge gained in pearl millet will help to develop semi-dwarf lines with high agronomic performance in other cereal crops she said.
and millet will grow to its full height about 10 feet. If it is off the millet plant may only grow to be 3 to 5 feet in height.
Parvathaneni and Devos'team first found which region of the pearl millet's genome contributed to growth
Sorghum is a grain related to pearl millet and a complete map of its genome recently was released by Devos'UGA colleague Andy Patterson.
The next step for Devos'team is to work with researchers in other states to understand more fully how auxin transport differs in tall and dwarf millet plants
However where millet is cultivated intensively dwarf millet allows farmers to harvest the grain with mechanical threshers.
Ranchers like dwarf millet as a forage plant because it has a high leaf-to-stem ratio Devos said.
Knowing more about the plant in general is key to broadening production of the very drought-resistant hardy grain.
and Africa and will likely gain interest from drought-prone regions of the developed world as an alternative to corn in animal feed Parvathaneni said.
This is just the first step in our effort to better engineer a process for capturing CO2 from flue gas at power plants said George Hirasaki the lead researcher of Rice's CO2-capture research team The researchers hope to reduce the costs of CO2 capture by creating an integrated
Rice's new study found that in cases where waste is available it may be used to capture CO2.
Hirasaki Rice's A j. Hartsook Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular engineering said employing waste heat is just one example of a number of ways that Rice's team is looking to improve upon a tried-and-true technology for CO2 capture.
It has been estimated that the use of current technology for CO2 capture would drive up the cost of electricity by 70 to 100 percent said Rice graduate student Sumedh Warudkar a co-investigator on the Rice university team.
The research suggests that two elements of Rice's design--optimized amine formulation and the use of waste heat--can reduce parasitic power loss from about 35 percent to around 25 percent.
One serving of whole wheat pasta plus two servings of fruits or vegetables provides about 7 grams of fiber researchers said.
The kryptonite to this Superman of materials is in the form of a seven-atom ring that inevitably occurs at the junctions of grain boundaries in graphene where the regular array of hexagonal units is interrupted.
Calculations by the Rice team of theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his colleagues in China were reported this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters.
The lines in polycrystalline sheets are called grain boundaries and the atoms at these boundaries are forced occasionally to change the way they bond by the unbreakable rules of topology.
These are the end points of grain boundaries between the islands and are ongoing trouble spots the researchers found.
In the past people studying what happens at the grain boundary looked at it as an infinite line Yakobson said.
and good old mathematical analysis that in a graphene quilt the grain boundaries act like levers that amplify the tension (through a dislocation pileup) and concentrate it at the defect either where the three domains meet or where a grain boundary between two domains ends.
and they propagate like cracks in a windshield said Vasilii Artyukhov a postdoctoral researcher at Rice
Yakobson said that conceptually the calculations show what metallurgists recognize as the Hall-Petch Effect a measure of the strength of crystalline materials with similar grain boundaries.
Xu is a former researcher in Yakobson's group at Rice. Yakobson is Rice's Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Mechanical engineering and Materials Science and professor of chemistry.
The Air force Office of Scientific research and the National Science Foundation supported the work at Rice. The National Natural science Foundation of China the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific research Program and Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information science and Technology of China supported the work at Tsinghua.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Rice university. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Pyrogallol commonly found in smoked foods is also found in cigarette smoke hair dye tea coffee bread crust roasted malt
and fats more often than those parents with a higher level of education who feed their children more products of a higher nutritional quality including vegetables fruit pasta rice and wholemeal bread.
Their diet should include cereals fruit vegetables dairy products lean meats fish poultry eggs and nuts.
#Latest genomic studies of wheat sheds new light on crop adaptation and domesticationthe advanced online publication version of Nature today presents two manuscripts that provide an unprecedented glimpse into the adaptation
and domestication of wheat. The two projects sequenced and analyzed two ancestral wheat genomes of Triticum urartu
and Aegilops tauschii respectively throwing light on the biology of the world's primary staple crop
and providing valuable new resource for the genetic improvement of wheat. Wheat is a globally important crop due to its enhanced adaptability to a wide range of climates and improved grain quality for the production of baker's flour.
Major efforts are underway worldwide to increase its yield and quality by increasing genetic diversity and analyzing key traits related to its resistance to cold drought and disease.
However the extremely large size and polyploid complexity of the wheat genome has to date been a substantial barrier for researchers to gain insight into its biology and evolution.
and BGI presents the genome of Bread wheat (T. aestivum AABBDD) the progenitor of the Wheat A genome.
For example they found the T. urartu homolog of Osgasr7 might be a useful candidate for improving wheat yield.
Around 8000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent it crossed with the tetraploid wheat T. turgidum (AABB) in rare hybridization events that resulted in the hexaploid wheat T aestivum.
Remarkably a higher number of genes for the cytochrome P450 family were identified in Ae tauschii (485) than sorghum (365) rice (333) Brachypodium (262) and maize (261.
and breeders to comprehensively understand wheat's genetic diversity and evolutionary history. The two studies also represent a major step forward for improving this vital crop in the face of global climate change growing human population and bioenergy.
Inheritance behavior in corn breaks accepted rules of geneticsnew research explains how certain traits can pass down from one generation to the next--at least in plants--without following the accepted rules of genetics.
Scientists have shown that an enzyme in corn responsible for reading information from DNA can prompt unexpected changes in gene activity--an example of epigenetics.
Researchers bred 10 generations of corn and found that one particular gene's activity persisted from one generation to the next
The gene in question affects pigmentation in the corn plant. As a result of these experiments the researchers were able to change yellow kernel corn to a blue kernel variety by compromising the activity of the enzyme in each male parent.
This is the first example where somebody has been able to take an epigenetic source of variation
In corn however Hollick's lab had discovered previously that the absence of Pol IV creates clear problems in the plants such as growing seeds in the tassel.
and crossed the plants derived form these different kernel classes to create additional new generations of corn.
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