But around the city of Gumi, about 280 kilometres south of Seoul, blighted branches still bore a shroud of brown, withered leaves reminders of the chemical accident that shook the region some three months earlier.
On 27 september 2012, about eight tonnes of highly toxic hydrogen fluoride (HF) gas, which dissolves in the moisture in air to form droplets of corrosive hydrofluoric acid, burst from the Hube Global chemical plant in Gumi.
The leak killed five workers and injured at least 18 others, including plant employees and emergency personnel.
In the wake of the incidents, experts are raising questions about safety in the country s research-intensive chemical and microelectronics industries,
including education of factory workers, firefighters, medical doctors and public servants about the risks of toxic chemicals.
and in 2011,545 Â companies were registered as producers or distributors of the gas. A mistake by Hube Global workers may have caused the Gumi disaster.
Several workers at the Hube Global chemical plant died in a massive hydrogen fluoride leak. The disaster was compounded by the regional government s response."
who runs the consulting company Advanced Chemical Safety, based in San diego, California. Some firefighters failed to use chemical-protective clothing
and self-contained breathing apparatus because they did not initially understand the threat posed by HF. Almost a day passed before they began using calcium hydroxide to neutralize the acid,
an occupational and environmental physician at Soon Chun Hyang University Hospital in Gumi, is leading a follow-up study of those exposed to the gas."
and hydrate the escaping gas; within 20 minutes, a 0. 8-kilometre evacuation zone was established.
and South korea s government has promised to establish a centre that will work with local branches of the environment ministry to oversee the use of dangerous chemicals.
"Most chemical plants are located out of Seoul, so it s too late to wait for government agents coming from the capital to deal with an accident.
100 Â tonnes of crops and trees killed by the gas, leaving the scene of the accident even more barren than before."
Fungi and roots store a surprisingly large share of the world's carbonthe largest fraction of carbon held in the soils of northern forests may derive from the living
By some estimates, the planet's soils contain more than twice the carbon in the atmosphere.
and contain around 16%of total soil carbon. Until the last decade or so, most scientists had presumed that much of the decomposed organic matter, or humus
But when Lindahl and his colleagues carbon-dated samples taken at various depths throughout the soil on 30 islands in two Swedish lakes near the Arctic circle,
they found that accumulation of organic material on top of the ground alone could not explain the rates at which soil carbon built Up on islands larger than 1 hectare,
each square metre of soil accumulated in the past 100 years holds about 6. 2 kilograms of carbon.
But on islands smaller than 0. 1 hectare, the past century of soil contains a whopping 22.5 kilograms of carbon per square metre.
The difference in carbon-sequestration rates, the researchers report in Science1, can be explained entirely by carbon derived from the roots of trees and shrubs and their symbiotic fungi.
Whereas about 47%of the soil carbon on the large islands came from roots and ectomycorrhizal fungi
It is unclear why the small islands built up a larger fraction of root-and fungi-derived carbon in the past century,
while that trees divert carbon to their ectomycorrhizal fungi, but having 70%of soil carbon derive from them is much more than we could have expected,
she says. Benjamin Turner, a soil scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama, says that the findings are a"great example of how analyses of sequences of soils of different ages contribute to the understanding of processes that wouldn t
It is not clear how the results might affect estimates of how carbon sequestration in a warming climate
and a loss of soil carbon as carbon dioxide wafts into the atmosphere. But at the same time, he suggests,
as well as their roots and fungi, causing an ovrall increase in carbon sequestration
Will we kill off today's animals if we revive extinct ones? An article by Scientific American.
Tropical forests unexpectedly resilient to climate changetropical forests are unlikely to die off as a result of the predicted rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases this century,
In the most extensive study of its kind1, an international team of scientists simulated the effect of business-as usual emissions on the amounts of carbon locked up in tropical forests across Amazonia, Central america, Asia and Africa through to 2100.
rainforests across the three regions retained their carbon stocks even as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration increased throughout the century.
for every 1 °C rise in temperature, around 50 billion tonnes of carbon would be released from the tropics.
That tropical forests will retain their carbon stocks long term gives a major boost to policies aimed at keeping forests intact,
The Biomass project aims to take radar measurements of global forest biomass to assess terrestrial carbon stocks and fluxes.
and the failure of the agency s Orbiting Carbon Observatory and the solar monitoring and aerosol mission Glory (see Nature http://doi. org/bqjhn7;
But data on global forest biomass a major store of land carbon and a key indicator of biodiversity are no less important,
satellite observations are needed to quantify global carbon emissions for tropical forests, for which no reliable ground inventories exist.
"we need to better understand how the atmospheric circulation responds to rising greenhouse-gas concentrations.
While working at the Pasteur institute in Paris, he identified regulatory proteins that bind to DNA,
Jacob explained how feedback from the cell s environment changes the activity of the regulatory proteins.
thus lowering greenhouse-gas emissions. Energy spending Investment in renewable energy technologies still falls short of the level needed to clean up the global energy system
Thomson Reuters Point Carbonprices for allowances to emit a tonne of carbon dioxide on Europe s carbon-trading market are likely to remain low until 2020,
This means that the market is unlikely to spur investment in low-carbon energy, one of the scheme s key goals when it was launched in 2005.
according to Carbon Tracker, even though burning them would cause a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. 24-25 april On World Malaria Day (25 april),
The European commission then proposed a two-year ban on the use of these chemicals in such crops.
Some scientists say that there is insufficient evidence to implicate these compounds. Ecotoxicologist James Cresswell, who studies pollination at the University of Exeter,
Experiment aims to steep rainforest in carbon dioxideone of the wild cards in climate change is the fate of the Amazon rainforest.
A dying rainforest could release gigatonnes of carbon into  the atmosphere, accelerating warming; a  CO2-fertilized forest could have the opposite effect,
sucking up carbon and putting the brakes on climate change. Climate modellers trying to build carbon fertilization into their forecasts have had  precious few data to go on."
"The number one question is, how will tropical forests react if we put more CO2 into the atmosphere?
Because of the sheer volume of carbon cycling through the tropics, the fertilization effect has a massive impact on the amount of carbon that forests take up globally and on how much remains in the atmosphere.
Options include buying the gas from a local beer and soft-drinks factory and producing it independently,
or to maintain a road for the large trucks that would deliver the gas. So daunting are the challenges that the team plans to ask the engineering arm of the Brazilian military for help.
Organic pollutants poison the roof of the worldtoxic chemicals are accumulating in the ecosystems of The himalayas and the Tibetan plateau,
Persistent organic pollutants (POPS) are based carbon compounds that are resistant to break-down. Some originate from the burning of fuel or the processing of electronic waste,
"Their levels correlate well with human use of those chemicals, says Wang Xiaoping, an environment scientist at the ITP who was lead author of that study.
and Tibetan plateau are rife with those toxic compounds. To trace the sources of those pollutants
Xu and his colleagues correlated meteorological measurements with chemical compositions of air parcels sampled at 16 locations across the region.
The results"are another warning of the way we use chemicals, says David Molden, director of the Integrated Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Kathmandu.
Because some persistent compounds accumulate at the top of the food chain, humans can be exposed to POPS by eating meat and fish.
"They do not emit any of those toxic compounds, says Xu, "but are forced to shoulder the burden of their impact
) A key component the haemagglutinin (H) protein on the surface of the virus already contains mutations known to shift its binding preference from bird cells to those of mammals.
Wild weather can send greenhouse gases spirallingclimate change has a disconcerting tendency to amplify itself through feedback effects.
Land plants create a huge carbon sink as they suck CO2 out of the air to build leaves
That lowers annual carbon uptake by 150 Â million tonnes equivalent to more than 15%of Europe s annual man-made CO2 emissions.
The most extreme events can turn forests and grasslands from carbon sinks to sources. In 2003 alone, a record-breaking heatwave in Europe led to the release of more CO2 than is locked up normally over four years1.
Researchers have presumed that this triggered a large carbon release but such responses are hard to predict.
which stores carbon in leaves, roots and soil. It had a smaller effect on soil respiration,
which releases carbon, so the net result was a decline in carbon uptake. The experiments also showed that plants
and soils keep a memory of disturbances, says Michael Bahn, an ecologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria who oversees a grassland experiment.
and found that later ones had a larger effect on net carbon release. Existing biosphere models do not capture such effects,
The world s soils contain almost 100 Â gigatonnes of carbon twice as much as the entire atmosphere.
and swapping coal for natural-gas in power generation. Climate change More than 80%of Americans believe that the planet is warming
Patent blocked India s Supreme court ruled on 1 Â April against an attempt by Swiss drug company Novartis to patent the anticancer drug Gleevec (imatinib mesylate.
The patent claim by Basel-based Novartis on a modified version of Gleevec"fails in both the tests of invention and patentability,
Delaware, will pay Monsanto, based in St louis, Missouri, at least US$1. 75 Â billion over the next decade for the right to offer two herbicide-tolerant lines of soya bean.
Monsanto will gain access to some Dupont patents covering disease resistance and maize (corn) defoliation.
Canagliflozin blocks sugar reabsorption in the kidneys by inhibiting the sodium/glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) protein
/wiozbm7-11 april Plenary talks about the sustainability of the world s food system feature at the American Chemical Society s Spring Meeting in New orleans,
two that encode the haemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N) proteins that stud the surface of the virus,
and six that code for internal proteins. In the three human cases, the genes coding for the internal proteins seem to come from H9n2 viruses a class that is endemic in birds,
including poultry, in Asia and elsewhere. More specifically, the sequences appear similar to recent H9n2 viruses found in China and South korea.
The gene for the N protein, says Tashiro, seems to be similar to avian H11n9 viruses that were found in South korea in 2011;
The gene for the H protein especially critical, because this protein allows the virus to bind to host cells seems to belong to a Eurasian group of H7 avian flu viruses.
In other words, the new virus seems to stem from a reassortment of three virus strains that infect only birds.
A striking feature of the novel virus is that its H protein is structurally similar to that of viruses that don t cause severe sickness in birds,
scientists say that it seems clear from the sequence that the novel virus has acquired key mutations that permit the H protein to latch onto receptors on mammalian cells in the airways instead of onto avian receptors.
which makes a protein that helps build the receptor molecules that sense many smells. A series of experiments showed that without the Orco protein
the mosquitoes struggled to distinguish the smell of honey from that of glycerol (an odourless liquid of similar consistency),
Laurence Zwiebel, a molecular entomologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, says that Vosshall's study shows that DEET does not work by simply blocking the smells that are conveyed by Orco,
Zwiebel s team is developing molecules that overactivate the protein2, in an attempt to see
so a chemical that targets the gene could help to keep pests away from economically important crops."
Shale-gas exit Two energy firms Talisman Energy, headquartered in Calgary, Canada, and Marathon Oil, based in Houston, Texas decided last week to cease shale-gas exploration activities in Poland.
The pull out raises further questions about Poland s shale-gas production, which is yet to begin.
In a 2011 review, the US Energy Information Administration estimated that Poland had 5. 3 Â trillion cubic metres of shale gas,
but a 2012 study by the Polish Geological Institute revised this figure to less than 800 Â billion cubic metres.
agricultural technology giant Monsanto, based in St louis, Missouri. Indiana farmer Vernon Bowman argued that Monsanto s patents did not apply to seeds he purchased from a grain elevator (storage tower) that contained a mixture of surplus crops,
including Monsanto s herbicide-resistant soya beans. The court disagreed, saying that US patent law"provides no haven for propagating crops from such seeds.
See go. nature. com/uil764 for more. Source: HEIDI LARSON/LANCET INFECT. DIS. An online media surveillance tool can track concerns
That isotope was relatively easy to work with because it is long-lived. Other putatively pear-shaped peers are highly unstable and difficult to handle.
and his colleagues fired a high-energy proton beam at a piece of uranium carbide in the ISOLDE isotope mass separator facility at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland."
"A whole cauldron of isotopes is made when you splat protons onto the target, says Butler.
and predicts that the lighter isotopes of radium should be more strongly pear shaped than the heavier ones.
Germany, analysed the spectrum of ultraviolet light emitted by cadmium ions, which is influenced subtly by the shape of the nucleus. Cadmium nuclei are nearly spherical,
The latest result confirms that radium isotopes should be a good place to look for for electric dipoles,
and that some isotopes of thorium and uranium might be even better.""I believe that this will eventually lead to results of much broader impact than this experiment alone,
) Helium sales US legislators voted on 26 Â April to continue selling federal helium gas reserves.
The move follows warnings of a looming shortage in the supply of the gas that researchers and electronics manufacturers use for cooling.
once it had paid off debts of $1. 3 Â billion with revenues from the gases sale.
The ozone-depleting chemicals, which are also powerful greenhouse gases, are used in applications such as refrigeration.
The deal, announced on 22 Â April, makes China party to an existing 2007 global agreement to accelerate the phase out of HCFCS.
The bulk of these studies suggest the half-life of these chemicals is between one and four years
If you apply these chemicals once a year on crops, they will accumulate. Goulson's review also cites earlier studies suggesting that grain-eating birds such as partridges may be dying after eating as few as five seeds treated with neonicotinoids.
a Vitamin d deficiency that causes bones to become soft and even deformed. What s more, the disease was partially a result of the privileged upbringing these children enjoyed,
which triggers Vitamin d production. To understand why the Medici children had this avoidable illness, the researchers analysed the nitrogen isotopes found in bone collagen,
which reflect the main source of protein in the diet. They found that most of the children were weaned not until they were 2, in keeping with Renaissance custom.
Historical texts suggest that at that time, breast milk was supplemented with'paps'made of soft bread and apples.
Neither cereals nor breast milk contain much Vitamin d and fruit contains none. Sixteenth-century thinking also dictated that infants be swaddled heavily.
although they should have received all the Vitamin d they needed before birth from their mothers. The researchers argue that the mothers themselves might have had a low-level Vitamin d deficiency because of the heavy makeup worn by high-status women,
or as a result of their frequent childbearing. Medici wife Eleanor of Toledo for example, bore 11 children in 14 years.
But the identification of a molecular mechanism that controls penis loss in birds goes some way to solving this conundrum.
Chickens showed increased levels of Bmp4 a protein that promotes cell death near the tip of the tubercle."
Researchers were able to stave off genital cell death in chickens by treating one side of the tubercle with Noggin, a protein that blocks Bmp activity.
of which is affected also by Bmp proteins. Bob Montgomerie, an evolutionary biologist at Queen's university in Ontario, Canada, disagrees.
Brazil reports sharp drop in greenhouse emissionsbrazil s greenhouse-gas emissions fell nearly 39%between 2005 and 2010,
a far cry from the time when tree felling drove roughly two-thirds of the country s greenhouse gas output.
Agriculture now accounts for the largest share of Brazil s greenhouse-gas output. Emissions from the sector increased 5. 2%from 2005 to 2010,
Chemical forensics confirm French wine had early rootsfrance is renowned for its mastery of winemaking, but when did the country begin its love affair with the vine?
Using a battery of chemical techniques, including mass spectrometry and infrared spectroscopy, the researchers analysed residues inside Etruscan
and Massaliote amphorae that had been retrieved from excavations in Lattara s merchant quarters. Michel Py, l'Unitã de Fouilles et de Recherches Archã ologiques de Lattesthisâ pressing platform from the Gallic town of Lattara, in southern France
"The combination of botanical and chemical evidence makes a pretty tight argument that wine was being produced at Lattara,
Carbon tax scrapped Australia will shift from a carbon tax to an emissions trading system for greenhouse gases one year ahead of schedule, announced Prime minister Kevin Rudd on 16 Â July.
The move is expected to lower the price of carbon from about US$23 a tonne to around $6 a tonne beginning in July 2014,
At the EPA, Mccarthy will oversee regulations to limit greenhouse-gas emissions and to improve water and air quality.
owing to concerns that the chemical is contributing to the drastic decline in Europe s bee population.
GM CROPS dropped Agricultural biotechnology giant Monsanto has abandoned efforts to win regulatory approval for the cultivation of new genetically modified (GM CROPS in the European union (EU). The company confirmed last week
Monsanto drops GM in Europeeuropean researchers have expressed regret but little surprise at last week s announcement by the agriculture giant Monsanto that it will no longer be seeking approvals for genetically modified (GM CROPS now under review for cultivation in the European union (EU). As anti-GM campaigners celebrated,
advocates warned that Europe risks becoming a scientific backwater as the rest of the world increasingly adopts the technology."
Four crops in limbo three varieties of maize (corn) and one of soya bean are Monsanto products.
Monsanto says that it will abandon applications for all of them except for one GM maize, MON810.
Monsanto will now focus its European efforts on its conventional agriculture business and on enabling the import of GM CROPS for use as animal feed,
which is modified to produce a protein called Bt that is harmful to insect pests, is one of only two GM CROPS approved for cultivation in the EU. The other is a high-starch GM potato called Amflora that is intended for industrial applications such as paper production.
But in 2012, its makers, BASF Plant science in Limburgerhof, Germany, announced that, because of hostility to GM products in Europe,
Maurice Moloney, director of Rothamsted Research, an agricultural-research centre in Harpenden, UK, says that the Monsanto move is a"perfectly reasonable business decision,
after scientists warned that production of some biofuels drives land clearance that can lead to greater greenhouse-gas emissions than from fossil fuel (see Nature 499,13-14;
which targets the amyloid-Ã Â protein, will be tested in a large-scale phase III trial. In 2012, the company reported lacklustre results in two previous trials,
and Chemistry of the Earth s Interior. go. nature. com/9cbgun  21-25 july Current research in viral ecology,
developed by the agricultural company Monsanto, based in St louis, Missouri. Monsanto killed the project in 2005 over farmers worries that overseas customers would not buy US wheat if it contained transgenic varieties.
No GM wheat has yet been approved to be grown commercially in the United states. The company says that all seed from the field trials conducted on more than 400 hectares in 16 states (see Sifting for GM wheat) was accounted for and either secured or destroyed.
Monsanto has made already clear its favoured explanation for the contamination: sabotage.""There are folks who don t like biotechnology
and both say that Monsanto kept a close watch over the experiments.""We had to account for pretty much every seed in and every seed out, down to the gram, recalls Van Acker.
and sugar cane in the hope of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet for more than half a decade, scientists have warned that many food-based fuels might actually be boosting emissions relative to fossil fuels.
require a 6%drop in the carbon footprint of transport fuel by 2020, by which time renewable energy must fuel 10%of the transport sector.
peatlands and wetlands rich in sequestered carbon causing large emissions of carbon dioxide.""It s kind of obvious if you think about it,
The numbers are different for different crops (see Carbon conundrum. But overall, when land-use effects are taken into account,
The effect wipes out more than two-thirds of the carbon emissions that Europe s renewable-energy policy was supposed to save by 2020,
a hint that the official carbon footprint of Europe s transport fuel might eventually incorporate that science.
The root of the different immune responses lies with the mushroom-shaped haemagglutinin protein found on the outside of influenza-virus particles
The protein occurs in all types of flu, but the make-up of its cap and stem vary between strains.
But some of those antibodies also targeted the stem of H1n1 s haemagglutinin protein, helping that virus fuse to cell membranes.
Much of the work to develop a universal flu vaccine has targeted the stems of haemagglutinin proteins
it altered the plant s gene expression by changing the pattern of chemical groups added to its DNA rather than changing the DNA sequence itself.
Agricultural giants Monsanto, based in St  Louis, Missouri, and Syngenta, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, are vying to license the technology."
and other molecules that account for as much as 35%of a plant s mass. The genetic-modification technique used, for instance, in the Roundup Ready crops made by the biotechnology giant Monsanto,
based in St louis, Missouri typically involves inserting genes into a crop s genome to boost EPSP-synthase production.
GM rice row Protesters uprooted a field of genetically modified (GM) golden rice at a Philippines Department of agriculture compound in Camarines Sur on 8 Â August,
The crop is engineered to contain à Â-carotene and helps to mitigate vitamin  A deficiency which causes malnutrition
and affects 1. 7 million children in the Philippines. The nonprofit International Rice Research Institute,
NOAAINCREASED emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane drove atmospheric greenhouse gases to their highest recorded levels in 2012, according to the US Â National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration (NOAA.
In May, atmospheric concentrations of the gas surpassed 400 Â parts per million at NOAA s Mauna loa Observatory in Hawaii (see Nature 497,13-14;
Northern forests rev up carbon cyclenorthern forests are not just surviving but thriving, despite concerns about droughts, wildfires and bark beetles surging as the world warms.
Ecosystem productivity is rising at high latitudes, with a roughly 50%increase in the amount of carbon cycling through northern landscapes since the 1950s,
Boreal forests in particular have shown marked increases in carbon uptake during summer.""Something quite massive is taking place on large parts of the landscape that are impacted not directly by humans,
Instead, it seems to be driven primarily by a significant increase in carbon uptake by boreal forests to the south during the prime growing months of June and July.
storing fats and using sugars more efficiently. This in turn, is thought to make them better able to withstand food scarcity later in life,
which advises on carbon pricing and emissions cuts, and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, a green bank that was due to invest Aus$10 Â billion (US$9. 4 Â billion) over the next five years in renewable-energy projects.
Tang tested the health benefits of Golden Rice genetically modified to produce a Vitamin a precursor on children in China s Hunan province (see Nature http://doi. org/nv9;
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