#98%forward, 125%back: Chinas economic boom thwarts its carbon emissions goalsefforts to reduce China's carbon dioxide emissions are being offset by the country's rampant economic growth according to new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA.
In fact losses of wheat rice and maize to fungal pathogens per year are the same as the annual spend by US Department of Homeland Security--some 60 billion US dollars.
#Novel phenolic compounds discovered in barley, beernovel forms of phenolic compounds have been discovered from barley and beer.
The results will open new interesting possibilities for evaluation of possible health benefits of barley and beer.
The study published in Journal of Cereal Science by MTTÂ's senior research scientist Juha-Matti Pihlava shows that the diversity of chemical defense compounds typical to barley namely hordatines
and their precursors is much larger than previously thought. These compounds are found in barley grains
but also in beers brewed from barley malts. Japanese research teams have linked previously beer hordatines to some physiological effects.
Hordatines in beer may stimulate gastrointestinal motility by binding to certain reseptors in smooth involuntary muscles.
However even at this point these findings could be utilized in development of new barley based functional products says Pihlava.
The grain-of-rice-sized insects are responsible for killing pine trees over tens of millions of acres in the Western U s. and Canada over the last decade.
By measuring the grain size after performing friction stir processing with and without the Al2o3 nanoparticles the team showed that the nanoparticles contributed to the reduction in grain size.
The best nanoparticle distribution and smallest aluminum alloy grains were obtained after passing the rotating tool through the sheet four times.
alfalfa canola corn cotton soybean and sugar beet. Food-producing animals such as cows pigs goats chickens
Like all cereals and other members of the grass family maize plants defend themselves with chemistry.
and reduced greenhouse gas emissions said lead author Rebecca Barnes an assistant professor of environmental science at Colorado College who began the research while serving as a postdoctoral research associate at Rice.
In the new study biogeochemists at Rice conducted side-by-side tests of the water-holding ability of three soil types--sand clay and topsoil--both with and without added biochar.
which was derived from Texas mesquite wood was prepared to exacting standards in the lab of Rice geochemist Caroline Masiello a study co-author to ensure comparable results across soil types.
Study co-author Brandon Dugan assistant professor of Earth science at Rice said We hypothesize that this is likely due to the presence of two flow paths for water through soil-biochar mixtures.
The study is the latest from Rice's interdisciplinary Biochar Research Group which formed in the wake of Hurricane Ike in 2008
The Rice Biochar Group won the $10000 grand prize in the city's Recycle Ike contest
since support from the National Science Foundation the Department of energy Rice's Faculty Initiative Fund Rice's Shell Center for Sustainability and Rice's Institute of Bioscience and Bioengineering.
Study co-authors include co-first author Morgan Gallagher a former Rice graduate student who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Rice and an associate in research at Duke university's Center for Global Change and Rice graduate student
The groups had comparable scores on intakes of whole grains refined grain total dairy total protein fatty acid and sodium.
and his team used a mutant corn plant that could not produce the green leaf volatiles mown-grass smell when cut or torn.
The properties of the lattice are affected significantly by these grain boundaries said Amin Salehi-Khojin UIC assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering and principal investigator on the study.
In many applications grain boundaries are considered faults because they scatter electrons and may weaken the lattice.
They created a micron-sized individual graphene grain boundary in order to probe its electronic properties and study its role in gas sensing.
Their first discovery was that gas molecules are attracted to the grain boundary and accumulate there rather than on the graphene crystal making it the ideal spot for sensing gas molecules.
A grain boundary's electrical properties attract molecules to its surface. A theoretical chemistry group at UIC led by Petr Kral was able to explain this attraction and additional electronic properties of the grain boundary.
The irregular nature of the grain boundary produces hundreds of electron-transport gaps with different sensitivities.
It's as though we have multiple switches in parallel said graduate student Poya Yasaei first author on the paper.
Gas molecules accumulate on the grain boundary; there is a charge transfer; and because these channels are paralleled all together all the channels abruptly open or close.
We can synthesize these grain boundaries on a micrometer scale in a controlled way Kumar said.
We can easily fabricate chip-scale sensor arrays using these grain boundaries for real-world use.
Salehi-Khojin said it should be possible to tune the electronic properties of graphene grain-boundary arrays using controlled doping to obtain a fingerprint response
With the grain boundary's strong attraction for gas molecules and the extraordinarily sharp response to any charge transfer such an electronic nose might be able to detect even a single gas molecule Salehi-Khojin believes
and the corn stalks were bending almost double. From the perspective of an animal living in the corn we thought'That's got to have a big effect.'
'Wind speeds in the Midwest are expected to decline as much as 15 percent during the 21st century.
#Using genetic screening to improve Korean white wheatvisiting scientist Dae Wook Kim hopes to develop a line of Korean wheat that does not sprout
It is part of his country's effort to increase wheat production. Korean farmers raise white winter wheat planting in October and harvesting in June;
however the country's rainy season begins in June explained Kim. If the rains hit before the crop has been harvested the grain begins to sprout in the head.
Korean white winter wheat is particularly susceptible to preharvest sprouting according to Kim. Preharvest sprouting reduces the quality of the grain and the yield added Rohila.
Last summer SDSU spring wheat breeder Karl Glover provided Kim with 40 lines of South dakota wheat--half tolerant and half susceptible to preharvest sprouting.
Kim compared these lines to determine which genes and proteins account for tolerance. When Kim returned in July for his second three-month stay he brought seeds from two Korean lines--Sukang
which has more sprouting tolerance and Baegjoong which is susceptible. Looking at both lines he identified 33 proteins that are expressed differentially in the tolerant cultivar.
His work at SDSU will decrease the time it takes to improve preharvest sprouting tolerance in Korean white wheat.
and led to global wheat prices rising dramatically. It also suggests this could possibly be linked with the political upheaval in the middle East with Egypt's hungry protestors suffering the most.
Overall the flooding is estimated to have led to an 80%rise in wheat and rice prices in 2010.
The drought-affected people of East Africa did not receive international or domestic aid for six months partly due to the risks posed by armed groups.
Food prices reached record levels in several markets including wheat in Ethiopia maize in Kenya
and red sorghum grain in Somalia says the report. It notes that children under five accounted for over half of all deaths in Somalia.
#Domestic violence issue possible red zone fumble for NFLTWICE as many women as compared to men are of the strong opinion that Ray Rice former Baltimore ravens running back should never play in the NFL again according to a new survey
and subsequently filed an appeal of Rice's indefinite suspension and corporate sponsors have joined the swelling crowd of critics.
and Gregg both sport management faculty asked NFL fans their thoughts on Rice's future
and its corporate partners that 25 percent of women stated the handling of the events surrounding the Rice incident would discourage them from not only attending NFL games but also from the consumption of league-related media content.
The vast majority of women surveyed--56 percent--strongly agreed that Rice should never play again in the NFL.
and energy crops worldwide including staples such as maize rice soybeans and wheat. They simulated the impact of climate change on agricultural production over the course of the 21st century
#Boosting global corn yields depends on improving nutrient balanceensuring that corn absorbs the right balance of nitrogen phosphorus
which corn plants took up key nutrients at specific ratios--nitrogen and phosphorus at a ratio of 5-to-1 and nitrogen and potassium at a ratio of 1-to-1. These nutrient uptake ratios were associated with high yields regardless of the region where the corn was grown.
The agricultural community has put a lot of emphasis on nitrogen as a means of increasing yields
We will not be able to continually boost global corn yields and achieve food security without providing adequate and balanced nutrients.
While corn producers in the U s. have relied long on nitrogen fertilizers to improve yields they should not overlook other nutrients such as potassium
Corn's demand for nitrogen and potassium is similar. We need to focus on the nitrogen-potassium balance
The main obstacles to closing corn yield gaps--that is reaching the potential yield projected for a particular soil
which corn is grown said Ignacio Ciampitti assistant professor of agronomy at Kansas State. On the global scale the potential yield response to balanced nutrient applications is said big he.
In cases where no additional nitrogen fertilizers were applied U s. corn took up an average of 120 pounds of nitrogen per acre--compared with about 52 pounds of nitrogen per acre in regions outside the U s. The high level of indigenous
and the use of superior corn hybrids Vyn said. But despite the higher nitrogen content of U s. soils corn plants in the U s. were not more efficient at absorbing nitrogen fertilizers from the soil than those in other regions.
Nitrogen recovery efficiency the measure of how much applied nitrogen the above-ground portion of a plant absorbs from the soil was the same--48 percent--for the U s. and other parts of the world.
The more fertilizer applied the more difficult it becomes to extract the same percentage of the nutrients in the corn.
and developing alternate nitrogen sources may improve the recovery efficiency of U s. corn production systems he said.
which individual corn plants absorbed and used nitrogen potassium and phosphorus stayed relatively consistent despite plants being grown at much higher densities.
On a per-plant basis corn plants are not taking up more nutrients than they were said in the past Ciampitti.
The new work by Rice chemist James Tour and his colleagues could keep glass surfaces from windshields to skyscrapers free of ice
A o. Raji/Rice Universitylast year the Rice group created films of overlapping nanoribbons and polyurethane paint to melt ice on sensitive military radar domes
A o. Raji/Rice Universityin the previous process the nanoribbons were mixed with polyurethane but testing showed the graphene nanoribbons themselves formed an active network when applied directly to a surface.
Rice graduate student Abdul-Rahman Raji is lead author of the paper. Co-authors are Rice graduate student Errol Samuel and researcher Sydney Salters a student at Second Baptist School Houston;
Rice alumnus Yu Zhu now an assistant professor at the University of Akron Ohio; and Vladimir Volman an engineer at Lockheed martin. Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of materials science and nanoengineering and of computer science.
He is a member of the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology.
#Mystery of cereal grain defense explainedcrop scientists at Washington state University have explained how genes in the barley plant turn on defenses against aging and stressors like drought heat and disease.
Professor Diter von Wettstein and assistant research professor Sachin Rustgi showed that specific genes act as a switch that enables barley to live longer
and offers hope for the production of grain crops able to thrive during unpredictable weather and climate change.
Cereal grains such as wheat barley corn and rice need an essential amount of growing time to produce abundant yields.
Von Wettstein and Rustgi discovered that two barley genes called JIP60 and JIP60-like play a major role in the protective actions triggered by a key plant defense hormone called jasmonate or JA.
The findings are important for grain farmers around the world. This year was said a good example Rustgi.
and June just when winter wheat was flowering. It actually affected the long-term grain yield by causing injury to the plants.
In India and Pakistan he said that very hot temperatures--up to about 135 degrees Fahrenheit--cause heat injury to wheat barley and rice.
It is a problem for farmers who have small plots and are very poor. Any hit causes a significant loss of income.
#Most famous wheat gene discovered, clears way for non-GMO breedingwashington State university researchers have found the most famous wheat gene a reproductive traffic cop of sorts that can be used to transfer valuable genes from other plants
to wheat. The discovery clears the way for breeders to develop wheat varieties with the disease
-and pest-resistance traits of other grasses using a legion of genetic tools that can reduce crop losses
For some 35 million years the wild ancestors of wheat routinely traded genes as they accidentally crossbred with each other.
But with the rise of agriculture and cultivated wheat 10000 years ago the plant's genetic structure changed.
and most other living things it became polyploid with in the case of bread wheat seven sets of six related chromosomes.
Starting in 1958 just five years after the discovery of DNA's double-helix structure researchers suspected that a specific gene controls the orderly pairing of wheat chromosomes during reproduction.
Because of this gene wheat can be fertile. Without this gene it would be more like sugar cane where it is a mess in the nucleus
But the gene also prevents wheat from breeding with related ancestors that can contain a vast array of traits preferred by growers.
This gene would not allow rye chromosomes to pair with wheat said Gill. We cannot get a single gene transfer into wheat
as long as this gene is present. Interest in the gene called Ph1 has spawned scores of research papers making it
what Gill called the most famous wheat gene. In 2006 British researchers writing in the journal Nature said they identified the gene.
and other chromosomes pair with wheat and transfer genes by a natural method into wheat without calling it GMO Gill said.
Their first effort involves transferring a gene from jointed goatgrass a wild relative of wheat to confer resistance to stripe rust.
The fungus is considered the world's most economically damaging wheat pathogen costing U s. farmers alone some $500 million in lost productivity in 2012.
If we let wheat evolve for another few millions years in the wild maybe it will develop enough variation
The single-walled carbon nanotubes in new fibers created at Rice line up like a fistful of uncooked spaghetti through a process designed by chemist Angel Martã and his colleagues.
Left to their own devices carbon nanotubes form clumps that are perfectly wrong for turning into the kind of strong conductive fibers needed for projects ranging from nanoscale electronics to macro-scale power grids Earlier research at Rice by chemist
A process revealed last year by Martã and lead authors Chengmin Jiang a graduate student and Avishek Saha a Rice alumnus starts with negatively charging carbon nanotubes by infusing them with potassium a metal and turning
Co-authors are Rice graduate student Colin Young alumnus Daniel Paul Hashim former visiting researcher Carolyn Ramirez and Pulickel Ajayan the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson
On the other hand fracked gas requires less than a hundredth the water of corn ethanol per unit of energy.
#Corn spots: Study finds important genes in defense responsewhen corn plants come under attack from a pathogen they sometimes respond by killing their own cells near the site of the attack committing cell suicide to thwart further damage from the attacker.
This cell sacrifice can cause very small often microscopic spots or lesions on the plant.
and cellular processes that appear to control this so-called hypersensitive defense response (HR) in corn.
The findings which appear in PLOS Genetics could help researchers build better defense responses in corn and other plants;
This mutation causes a corn plant to inappropriately trigger this hypersensitive defense response causing spots on the corn plant as well as stunted growth.
The researchers examined the entire corn gene blueprint--some 26.5 million points in the 2 to 3 billion base pair genome--to find the genes most closely associated with HR.
The study also assessed the potential for less commonly implemented strategies including gene therapies to treat human disease the breeding of climate change proof crop varieties such as flood tolerant rice
For example farmers in the United states and Australia have used planting of pest-friendly refuges to delay evolution of insect resistance to genetically engineered corn and cotton.
#Unusual host preference of a moth species could be useful for biological controla team of Iranian researchers from the Rice Research Institute of Iran have discovered that Gynnodomorpha permixtana a well-known moth species from Europe
The importance of this adaptation for biological control of problematic weeds in rice fields and the biology of the moth on new host plant have been described in the open access journal Nota Lepidopterologica.
Arrowheads are groups of problematic perennial broadleaf weeds that thrive in rice fields and waterways.
Favorable climatic condition after rice harvesting results in continued activity and thriving populations throughout the year.
The economic importance of this weed has prompted researchers from the Rice Research Institute of Iran to seek for possible solutions for the management of arrowhead.
'commented the lead author of the study Atousa Farahpour Haghani a Phd student from Rice Research Institute of Iran.'
and luckily for rice crops the problematic arrowheads present the best choice for G. permixtana.'
On the other hand the amount of omega-6 fat in mother's milk--fats that come from vegetable oils such as corn
Thanks to two heavily government-subsidized crops--corn and soybeans--the average U s. diet is heavy in the bad omega-6 fatty acids
In a presentation today at the Association for Computing Machinery's Mobicom 2014 conference in Maui Hawaii researchers from Rice's Wireless Network Group will unveil a multiuser multiantenna transmission scheme for UHF a portion
The holy grail of wireless communications is to go both fast and far said lead researcher Edward Knightly professor and chair of Rice's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Rice's technology combines several proven technologies that are used already widely in wireless data transmission. One of these is multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) a scheme that employs multiple antennae to boost data rates without the need for additional channels or transmitter power.
or vice versa said Rice graduate student Narendra Anand the lead author of the new study. Imagine that the Wifi access point in your home
Knightly Anand and Rice graduate student Ryan Guerra designed the first open-source UHF multiuser MIMO test system.
Based on Rice's wireless open-access research platform or WARP the system allowed the team to perform a side-by-side comparison of multiuser MIMO for UHF and for both 2. 4 gigahertz and 5. 8 gigahertz Wifi.
and termites) and about 60%comes from human activities like cattle breeding rice agriculture fossil fuel exploitation landfills and biomass burning.
In a paper in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters the Rice team analyzed the properties of elemental bonds between semiconducting phosphorus atoms in 2-D sheets.
and a Rice alumnus now a postdoctoral researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory These bonds would not trap
As in 2-D phosphorus grain boundaries in silicon don't cause band-gap changes. However point defects in silicon can change its properties unlike point defects in phosphorus. This suggests 2-D phosphorus could also be a candidate for high-performance electronics.
The paper's co-authors include graduate students Fangbo Xu and Ziang Zhang and research scientist Evgeni Penev all of Rice.
Yakobson is Rice's Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Materials Science and Nanoengineering a professor of chemistry and a member of Rice's Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology.
and administered by Rice's Ken Kennedy Institute for Information technology as well as NSF's XSEDE and the Department of energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center supercomputers.
and maintain 28 globally important crops including rice wheat soybean sorghum banana apple citrus fruits grape stone fruits
and millet. 42%of these wild plant species known as crop wild relatives (CWR) occur nowhere else in the world.
Oryza rufipogon a wild relative of rice utilised to confer tolerance to drought and aluminium toxicity;
For example the crop wild relative of the wheat crop Aegilops tauschii is resistant to Hessian fly
and the United states. He found that 13 agricultural products--wheat soybean palm oil maize sugars and others--make up 80 percent of the world's diet and food trade.
Growing wheat and corn on it wouldn't pay. So I started making a study on
Archeologists have a good understanding of domestication--conscious breeding for traits preferred by people-of annual plants such as grains (rice wheat etc.
U s. tons) of India's wheat rice soybean and cotton crops in 2005. India could feed 94 million people with the lost wheat
and rice crops about a third of the country's poor according to Sachin Ghude an atmospheric scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune India and lead author of the new study.
There are about 270 million Indians that live in poverty according to the study. Wheat--one of the country's major food sources--saw the largest loss by weight of the four crops studied in the new paper with ozone pollution damaging 3. 5 million metric tons (3
. 8 million U s. tons) of the crop in 2005. Another major food source rice saw losses of 2. 1 million metric tons (2. 3 million U s. tons) according to the new study.
Cotton--one of India's major commercial crops--lost more than 5 percent of its 3. 3 million metric ton (3. 6 million U s. tons) annual output in 2005 costing
It could also help India a country with a high rate of poverty as the country implements a new law that subsidizes grain for two-thirds of the country's residents he said.
The new food security bill requires the country to provide 61.2 million metric tons (67.5 million U s. tons) of cereal grains--that include wheat and rice--to India's poor each year at a subsidized rate.
The new study found that the 5. 6 million metric tons (6. 2 million U s. tons) of wheat
and rice lost to ozone pollution was equal to 9. 2 percent of the new law's subsidized cereal requirement.
The (amount of lost wheat and rice) are surprised what me said Veerabhadran Ramanathan a professor of climate
Under the new law residents who qualify to receive cereal at the subsidized rate can purchase 60 kilograms (132 pounds) of grain per year.
Based on these numbers the 5. 6 million metric tons (6. 2 million U s. tons) of wheat and rice lost could
Declines in rice and wheat crops made up the majority of the loss accounting for a combined $1. 16 billion in losses according to the new research.
A Franco-Kenyan research team has managed to do just that for sorghum one of the main cereals in Africa.
and Tharaka peoples making it possible to compare the influence of their different agricultural practices and traditional knowledge on the diversity of sorghum a very important cereal in this area.
which is the growth of the fungus spores on some wheat or sorghum. The product obtained is spread on the substrate (contained in plastic bag)
Foods such as oat cereal yogurt and dairy products green leafy vegetables grapes apples blueberries and walnuts were associated with reduced diabetes risk.
As part of the process Rice organic chemist K c. Nicolaou and structural biologist Yousif Shamoo and their colleagues created
Three years of effort led the chemists working at Rice's Bioscience Research Collaborative to find a structure that not only matches that of natural viridicatumtoxin B
That's what makes our collaborations at Rice so welcome and fruitful. The interface between chemistry and biology is the key to success in discovering drugs.
Co-authors of the JACS paper are graduate students Christopher Hale Lizanne Nilewski and Kathryn Beabout and postdoctoral fellows Christian Nilewski Heraklidia Ioannidou and Abdelatif El Marrouni all of Rice
and Tim Wang a Rice undergraduate student and Rice Century Scholar. Hale Ioannidou El Marrouni and Christian and Lizanne Nilewski came to Rice from the Scripps Research Institute where they initiated the project in Nicolaou's lab;
Lizanne Nilewski is now a second-year graduate student in the lab of Rice Professor James Tour.
Shamoo is Rice's vice provost for research and a professor of biochemistry and cell biology.
Nicolaou is the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor of Chemistry. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Rice university.
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