the molecular decoy somehow impedes the virus from infecting others. The findings are published today in Science1.
says Laurence Tiley, a molecular virologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, and lead investigator for the study.
which are a reservoir of biodiversity and carbon, he adds. More a confirmation than a surprise was that in the past 15 years
as well as seed firm Monsanto, based in St louis, Missouri, are also working on transgenic maize varieties, hoping to tap into a multibillion-dollar market (see Nature 466,548-551;
incorporating a gene from the variety currently under development by Monsanto. Meanwhile, CIMMYT recently partnered with the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable agriculture,
Rare-earth quotas Tensions over trade in rare-earth elements rose after China's ministry of commerce cut export quotas.
and said that it would levy new export duties on rare-earth elements and alloys. Rare-earth elements are quite plentiful,
but China controls more than 90%of their supply. They are used as catalysts and in technology including magnets,
car batteries, wind turbines and mobile phones. Business watch In 2011 and 2012, the drug industry will face the worst effects of its'patent cliff'
Policy Emissions control The US Environmental protection agency's first controls on greenhouse-gas emissions came into effect on 2 january.
Its authority to regulate greenhouse-gas pollution (under the Clean Air Act) is being challenged by opposition in Congress and by litigation.
'Blue carbon'plan takes shape: Nature Newsan international effort to protect coastal wetlands by assigning them carbon credits kicked off last week in Paris. The aim is to do for some wetland plants mangroves, seagrasses and salt marshes
-what carbon credits have done for trees. Wetland plants and forests act as carbon sinks, locking away substantial amounts of carbon absorbed from the atmosphere.
The ocean absorbs some 25%of the world's carbon-dioxide emissions, and in its watery depths are acres of seagrass meadows that use about 15%of the dissolved carbon to grow.
Mangroves and salt-marsh vegetation similarly accumulate carbon and when they decompose their carbon is locked away in watery, peaty sediments for millennia.
Yet the world's coastal wetlands have been in continuous decline over the past century and now cover just 2%of the seabed1.
Between 1980 and 2005, nearly 35,000 square kilometres of mangroves were cleared so that coastal land could be used for agriculture, aquaculture and beach resorts.
When coastal wetlands are drained, the soil is oxidized and carbon dioxide is released into the air, contributing to climate change.
The'blue carbon'concept aims to protect some of the most endangered wetlands by assigning credits to their stored carbon2.
The credits can then be traded on a carbon market explains Emily Pidgeon, director of the marine climate change programme at Conservation International,
the environmental group in WASHINGTON DC that has been promoting the concept alongside the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland,
For starters, no one knows how much carbon is stored by wetlands around the world-largely because no one knows exactly how many seagrass beds
and cannot tell the difference between the desirable grasses that store carbon, sea lettuce that stores little carbon and algae attached to rocks.
Data from Landsat satellites revealed the true extent of mangroves only last year. The survey found that in 2000,
protecting wetlands may not make a huge difference to anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions. Oceanographer Christoph Heinze at the University of Bergen, Norway, points out that the carbon sequestration abilities of wetland plants are
quite literally, a drop in the ocean compared with Earth's other carbon sinks. But Crooks points out that marine carbon circulation models have tended to consider wetlands'current carbon sequestration abilities,
yet ignore the impact of releasing thousands of years of stored carbon when the lands are dried out.
Pidgeon acknowledges that a financial system such as blue carbon credits is at least a decade down the line.
But pilot carbon credit projects will begin this year, she says, in parallel with further efforts to quantify the scale of Earth's wetlands
and how much carbon they hold.
Seven days: 11 17 february 2011: Nature Newspolicy Business Events Research People Trend watch Coming up Policy EU funding reform The European commission has launched a public consultation on the future of Europe's main research-funding mechanism.
The current system, the 7-year, ¢ 50.5-billion (US$68. 3-billion) Seventh Framework Programme, will end in 2013.
A green paper released on 9 february asks what the next programme might be called, and how it might be restructured to broaden participation, lower administrative burdens and mesh with national policies.
Business Biofuel offering Gevo, a company that genetically modifies microbes to produce chemicals from plant sugars,
Egyptian-born scientist Ahmed Zewail, winner of the 1999 Nobel prize in Chemistry, told state television that he would present a plan to overhaul research and education.
People Stolen secrets A former research chemist at the chemical giant Dow was last week found guilty of stealing trade secrets,
when the chemical was discovered in many water supplies. Perchlorate interferes with the production of thyroid hormones and mainly leaches into the environment from its use in the manufacture of rocket fuel and explosives.
Gas bubbles in the 3, 330-metre-long core, the final section of which was extracted on 28 january,
Under the agreement, 21 forestry companies and 9 environmental groups are discussing ways to preserve large sections of Canada's northern forest a big storehouse of carbon and a crucial habitat for the threatened woodland caribou
and Ruddiman, of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, argues that it is no coincidence the clearing of land and expansion of irrigation released huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
and recent studies have raised serious questions about early anthropogenic carbon and methane emissions. But rather than backing down,
The result is roughly double the carbon emissions compared with earlier estimates. Ruddiman also took issue with a high-profile Nature study3 published in 2009 by a team at the University of Bern,
The study takes advantage of the fact that plants preferentially take up the isotope carbon-12,
subtly altering the ratio between carbon-12 and carbon-13 in the atmosphere. Stocker and his team analysed an Antarctic ice core
if carbon from cleared vegetation were released back into the atmosphere. But that study underestimated the amount of carbon-12 taken up by peatlands
say Ruddiman and Kaplan. It assumed that just 40 gigatonnes of carbon were buried in peatlands during the late Holocene,
whereas other estimates come in at 280 gigatonnes or more. That number would have to be offset by terrestrial emissions to maintain the atmospheric carbon isotope ratio.
In an e-mail to Nature, Stocker said that Ruddiman's latest paper merely reiterates in extenso all of the points made earlier.
he cited a recent analysis by his institute suggesting that carbon emissions from land-use change are neither sufficient nor properly timed to explain the rise in CO2 levels in the Holocene4.
trying to figure out exactly how much of any one particular decline is due to greenhouse gases is not necessarily helpful,
the harder it is to link single events to greenhouse-gas-driven global climate change.
To say whether the extreme dryness was caused by rising greenhouse gases requires looking at the region as a whole and asking
you will have a harder time making the greenhouse-gas link and you probably just shouldn't try.
Counting the carbon cost of peatland conversion: Nature Newsup to 6%of carbon-rich peat-swamp forests had been cleared in Peninsular Malaysia
and on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra to make way for oil-palm plantations by the early 2000s,
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, the study is the first attempt to systematically assign a value to the carbon loss due to peatland destruction in Southeast asia that can be attributed directly to conversion to oil-palm plantations.
Like most forests, peat-swamp forests store large amounts of carbon above ground as biomass
They also store large amounts of carbon in their soils, as dead organic matter decomposes slowly under marshy conditions.
Koh and his colleagues calculate that this conversion led to the release of about 140 million tonnes of carbon from biomass above ground
and 4. 6 million tonnes of carbon from peat oxidation below ground. Indonesia is among the largest contributors to carbon emissions,
says Koh. And a quarter to a third of global greenhouse-gas emissions are the result of land-use change in forests,
he says. Peat-swamp forests are home to a number of endemic species, some of which have been affected by the changes, according to the new study.
Between 70%and 80%of agricultural greenhouse-gas emissions, such as nitrous oxide, come from the production and use of nitrogen fertilizers.
Push for carbon tax Australia's prime minister Julia Gillard has proposed placing a fixed tax on carbon dioxide from July 2012,
It is the third time that Australia's government has vowed to tax carbon emissions to tackle climate change;
Gillard's predecessor Kevin Rudd twice failed to get a carbon-cutting bill past his Senate.
Lab death Michele Dufault, a 22-year-old undergraduate student, was found dead after an accident at Yale university's Sterling Chemistry laboratory on 13 april.
Nobel chemist dies William Lipscomb, who won the 1976 Nobel prize in Chemistry for his work on chemical bonding,
Lipscomb (pictured) helped to elucidate the nature of bonding between molecular clusters of boron and hydrogen atoms 墉 called boranes 墉 which did not obey principles known at the time.
which delivers extra Vitamin a; it hopes that the rice will receive regulatory approval in the Philippines in 2013 and in Bangladesh in 2015.
which contains extra Vitamin a, iron and protein. The centre hopes the enhanced cassava will gain approval in Kenya and Nigeria by 2017.
which is fortified with Vitamin a, in the Philippines and Bangladesh, and Biocassava Plus, a tuber fortified with Vitamin a, iron and protein in Kenya and Nigeria.
In rich countries, people generally have access to a diverse diet and to foods that have been fortified with various essential nutrients,
It's no surprise then, that vitamin and mineral deficiencies affect more than two billion people worldwide,
which released orange sweet potato containing 50%of the daily Vitamin a requirement in Uganda and Mozambique in 2007,
Carbon-rich mangroves ripe for conservation: Nature Newsmangrove forests in tropical regions of the Indian and Pacific oceans store more carbon than previously recognized,
according to a study published today in Nature Geoscience1. The findings indicate that much of the carbon in such forests is found in the surrounding soil,
which is rich in organic material. Cutting down mangrove forests, which occupy less than 1%of tropical forest area,
could therefore contribute up to 10%of global carbon emissions from deforestation. Although carbon reserves in other types of tropical wetland forest have been assessed,
the amount of carbon in mangroves has been ignored largely, even though they are present in more than 100 countries.
For example, it is estimated that clearing of tropical peatlands, which also contain carbon-rich soils, produces about a quarter of all deforestation emissions.
The extent of mangrove forests has declined by as much as 50%over the past half century because of development, over-harvesting and aquaculture,
so estimating their carbon reserves will be important for future strategies to reduce climate change. To estimate the abundance of carbon in mangroves, lead investigator J. Boone Kauffman, an ecologist at the Northern Research Station of the US Forest Service in Durham
New hampshire, and his team sampled 25 mangrove sites across a broad territory that included Micronesia, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
Kauffman and his team assessed aboveground and belowground carbon pools in mangrove sites occupying estuaries and oceanic settings, such as island coasts.
They found that these forests hold much more carbon than do boreal, temperate or tropical upland forests especially in an organic-rich'muck layer'of soil more than 30 centimetres below the surface.
accounting for more than 70%of total carbon stores in estuarine mangroves and upwards of 50%in those in oceanic zones.
the researchers predict that worldwide carbon reserves in mangrove forests may be as high as 25%of those in tropical peatlands,
and understanding the significant pool of carbon in mangrove ecosystems, says Shimon Anisfeld, an expert in coastal ecology at Yale university in New haven,
and the effect of land-use changes on carbon release from soils. They may even be overestimates,
referring to an international plan to pay developing countries to preserve forests in a bid to help reduce global carbon emissions.
Mangrove forests are important for diversity, for coastal stability and for carbon, based on this paper. It gives another justification for preserving mangrove forests.
showed that agriculture was responsible for 43.7%of the total chemical oxygen demand (COD) a measure of organic pollutants in water.
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.
making many farmers reluctant to use manure as a replacement for chemical fertilizers. Consequently, livestock has become the largest contributor to run off pollution being responsible for 98%
Nature Newsa scheme to pay people in developing countries to curb carbon emissions from deforestation is plagued by'leakage'trees that aren't cut down in one forest are just cut down in another to provide people with the resources they would have foregone.
To be smart about using money to store carbon you should do it in a way that addresses the drivers inherently,
and thereby keeping carbon in the trees. The programme is currently providing support to 13 countries,
carbon payments that simply compensated people for the money they would lose by not converting forest to farmland fell short of people's needs.
which is half the price of carbon set by the European union's Emission Trading Scheme (about $24 per tonne).
It might be possible to increase safe carbon increase food security and have a positive impact on biodiversity for a pretty low cost,
Radioecologists with The french Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety (ISRN) in Cadarache converted concentrations of radioisotopes measured in the soil and seawater into the actual doses that various groups of wildlife were likely
The french team reckons that about 50 radioisotopes have been released, with iodine-131 and caesium-137 being the most abundant (see'Radiation release will hit marine life').
which organisms absorb radioisotopes, such as a species'cellular characteristics and metabolism. The dose rate (measured in milligrays per day) specifies how much radiation is absorbed per kilogram of organic tissue per day
Carbon targets On 17 may Britain extended existing pledges to limit greenhouse-gas emissions beyond 2020.
The establishment of such targets is required under 2008 legislation that mandates setting'carbon budgets'for consecutive five-year periods to 2050 墉 by
The 23 may study from the Climate Commission, The Critical Decade, urges immediate action to cut carbon emissions.
There has been made a lot of progress on how disease affects honeybees at the molecular level, says Christina Grozinger, director of Pennsylvania State university's Center for Pollinator Research in University Park, one of the conference organizers.
They suggest that production of the more colourful pigments consumes antioxidant molecules that would otherwise confer protection against radiation damage,
and that this molecular trade-off is shaping bird populations around the former nuclear power plant.
but they have a chemical cost. Making phaeomelanin consumes large amounts of a tripeptide called glutathione (GSH) which is an antioxidant molecule that can also protect tissues from radiation damage by mopping up free radicals.
Glutathione is needed not to make eumelanin. So the team decided to compare the effects of the presence of eumelanin
Cut black carbon Curbing ground-level ozone pollution and emissions of black carbon (soot particles) could cut half a degree from the global warming that is projected by 2030,
save tens of millions of lives and protect agricultural crops, according to a scientific assessment released on 14 june.
the report says that black-carbon emissions from vehicles, cooking stoves and other sources could be reduced,
and that emissions of methane 墉 a precursor to ozone and itself a powerful greenhouse gas 墉 could be cut from agricultural waste
and oil and gas operations Ethanol subsidies The US Senate has voted to end costly federal subsidies for producing ethanol from maize (corn).
The judgment, on 20 june, rules out the use of such lawsuits at the federal level to limit greenhouse gases.
and the animals it houses, all survived unscathed a massive chemical explosion at a nearby plant on 14 june.
Smashing data The Large Hadron Collider has passed a key data milestone as it increases its rate of particle-smashing.
welcomed the study's contribution to ensuring that forests are seen not by governments and the international community as just stocks of carbon.
Massachusetts, studying the molecular pathogenesis of Shiga-toxin-producing E coli in the 1990s. He says they saw Shiga-toxin-producing phage transfer between E coli in response to sub-therapeutic levels of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin in vitro and in the intestines of mice.
They infect bacteria by binding to a protein called Bama on the surface of many bacterial cells,
which codes for a protein called intimin, an adhesion protein that allows the bacteria to attach to cells in the gut.
Eae-negative E coli have been associated specifically with adult infections before although it is still unclear why this particular protein is more effective in adult guts than in those of children.
Gad Frankel, a microbiologist at Imperial College London, suspects that the genome of this strain will reveal more information about the adherence mechanisms of E coli.
It is possible that the strain has evolved a combination of adhesion proteins that makes it particularly hard to remove from food,
carbon storage in the trees and soil, and recreational value. Woodlands are clustered around the Cambrian Mountains in central Wales.
But when non-market factors such as carbon storage are taken into account, the Cambrian Mountains are almost perfectly the wrong place to plant trees,
which stores high levels of carbon in the soil. Planting trees here would disrupt the peat carbon sink
and result in more carbon being emitted than is locked up in the trees. The report's authors call on the government to use their findings
and value analyses to guide future policy-making. Steve Albon, an ecologist at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, UK,
They have created a digital catalogue of the chemical and optical properties of some 4, 700 plant species in different conditions.
The system will allow Asner to build on earlier work cataloguing forest carbon stocks in support of efforts to reduce deforestation (see'Taking stock of global carbon),
and the compounds that plants use to protect themselves against the Sun and predators. In specimens from one region of the Amazon rainforest in southern Peru, Asner and his wife, Robin Martin, identified 21 spectral traits that provided identifying signals for 90%of the species. A lot of people look at trees
The heart of the CAO's US$8. 3-million sensing system dubbed the Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System (ATOMS) is a spectroscopic imager designed by engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL
but Asner's information will provide unprecedented detail on the chemistry of leaves in the canopy.
The hypothesis is that those trees that have suffered during the drought also have different canopy chemistry,
the array of chemical traits in these upper canopies is amazing and radically under-appreciated,
foreign genes can be fired into plant cells on metal particles shot from a'gene gun'.
and particle bombardment is less predictable, often yielding multiple, fragmented insertions of the new gene.
Their first results, to appear in the Japanese journal Radioisotopes in August, paint a surprisingly optimistic picture.
and potatoes that were planted a few weeks after rains showered the field with radioisotopes from Fukushima.
and could be washed off, suggesting that the plants were not absorbing dangerous levels of radioisotopes directly from the soil.
Despite this good news, the team's data also show that the radioisotopes seem to be stuck firmly to the soil,
This might prevent the radioisotopes from entering groundwater, but suggests that cleaning up the more radioactive public spaces in Fukushima prefecture will not be easy.
arguing that such phyto  remediation would absorb only small amounts of radioisotopes. Chihiro Inoue
Its genome comprises more than 39,000 protein-coding genes, and it is a highly heterozygous autotetraploid this means that it has four copies of every chromosome,
especially in developing countries, says Sarah Gurr, a molecular plant pathologist at the University of Oxford, UK,
they've got more protein and more fibre than rice, with no fat, says Gurr.
They've also got more Vitamin c, Vitamin b complexes and trace elements. And the researchers are wasting no time in getting started.
Most of the people in the group are now asking how we can use information from the sequencing to learn about some of the traits we work on, such as disease resistance, tuber dormancy,
Mosquitoes score in chemical war: Nature Newskey weapons in the fight against malaria, pyrethroid insecticides, are losing their edge.
Deforestation causes some 15%of global greenhouse-gas emissions and 75%of Brazil's. Rousseff's predecessor, Luis In ¡
He says that the government needs to start investing in schemes to protect forest carbon
because even molecular biologists are flocking to learn more about how the genes and processes they study function in natural environments.
although bamboo contains proteins, sugars and fats among other nutrients, most of its calories are locked in hard-to-digest cellulose fibres that make up plant cell walls.
whereas some other GM CROPS produce unfamiliar proteins that could in theory cause an allergic reaction when eaten, the GM pinto bean produces only small snippets of RNA,
and there is no evidence that this common molecular warfare is dangerous to humans. With approval secured, EMBRAPA must now conduct a further round of field trials to ensure that the transgenic bean produces yields comparable to those of existing varieties.
Montreal impasse Although 108 countries now support a movement to amend the Montreal Protocol to regulate hydrofluorocarbons (HFCS) as greenhouse gases,
and were introduced to replace chemicals that destroy stratospheric ozone. As potent greenhouse gases, their regulation falls under the United nations climate framework,
but many argue that they would be phased out faster and more cheaply using the Montreal ozone treaty (see Nature 479,5-6;
The crop, MON 810, is made by US biotech firm Monsanto, based in St louis, Missouri; the European union has approved it for planting.
organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts were originally free-living bacteria before they were absorbed by another cell.
Chemicals data gap Companies are failing to provide the safety data required by Europe's expansive chemicals law REACH, according to a study by the Centre for Alternatives to Animal Testing at the University of Konstanz in Germany.
and found basic information missing on chemicals'developmental and reproductive toxicity. It warns that up to 1. 6 million animals might be used in toxicity tests for the 4
's carbon market. But after prices on the market plunged (see chart), such credits would have raised only  2. 3 billion as Nature went to press.
as the problems behind the slump weak economic conditions and an oversupply of carbon credits are likely to persist.
COMING UP4-8 december The triennial World Petroleum Congress the'Olympics of the oil and gas industry'meets in Qatar.
The Deepwater horizon disaster, shale-gas fracking and Arctic exploration are all on the agenda. www. 20wpc. com5-9 december Research on the magnitude 9. 0 earthquake that struck Japan
000 power stations and industrial plants that produce half of Europe s total carbon emissions but it is struggling in the economic downturn (see'European carbon market plummets'.
'Alberta s scheme, called the Specified Gas Emitters Regulation, was passed by the Alberta legislature in 2007.
It sets limits on the intensity levels of greenhouse gases emitted by Alberta facilities oil sands operations and coal-fired power plants,
Not all greenhouse-gas emissions are measured in the same way or with the same level of accuracy.
continuous emissions-monitoring systems can directly monitor flue gases for CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
Alberta facilities can receive carbon credits by investing in a variety of Alberta-based projects.
These range from paying farmers to adopt low-till or no-till agricultural practices thereby turning fields into carbon sinks to the collection and combustion of landfill gas.
For example, Tokyo's greenhouse gas emitters can purchase credits from outside Tokyo, but are limited in how many they can apply against their emissions.
Lax verification for carbon-offset projects has been a problem for several schemes. For the credit-creating projects to be effective at reducing overall greenhouse-gas emissions,
the scheme operators are supposed to approve only projects that would otherwise not have gone ahead. The auditor-general criticized the Alberta Department of Environment
and Water for allowing carbon credits for emissions-reducing activities that have become common practice.
which store contaminated water, clay, sand and bitumen from oil-sands processing. Many opponents of emissions trading programmes also argue that companies are likely to purchase carbon offsets instead of reducing emissions by adopting new technologies
or changing their operating practices. Discussions about how to improve emissions trading schemes have focused often on better measurement, reporting and verification.
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