Swine specialists and molecular diagnosticians at the Kansas State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory have developed tests to detect which virus is infecting the pigs.
In the course of the research which has been echoed by the journal Molecular Breeding tobacco plants of the Virginia Gold
What is more when the tobacco is integrated into a biorefinery it is possible to extract interesting by-products like proteins (they constitute up to 30%of the dry weight of the plant
and have a greater protein efficiency rate than those from cow's milk or soya so they could be used to feed humans
or animals solasenol (used to produce vitamins E and K) and xanthophylls (an additive in chicken feeds).
Research suggests cooling action will clean airever-rising greenhouse gas emissions and the potential need to deploy untested and expensive climate engineering technologies are just two of the many bits of bad news in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's new report on Mitigation
One of the main causes of greenhouse gas emissions is coal power Hertwich says. Coal-fired power plants produce a lot of pollution so any measures that will reduce our combustion of coal will also help us to fight air pollution.
what humankind is doing to the climate by burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
nevertheless quick to point out that the past decade has seen an unprecedented rate of increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere as a result of a global rise in emissions.
what we call the carbon budget he says. The world's scientists have calculated a carbon budget for the planet which tells us how much CO2 we can put into the atmosphere before we reach concentrations above which we will unacceptably warm the planet.
If we continue to emit greenhouse gases at current rates we risk overshooting the carbon budget with dire consequences.
We understand now if we do not want to overshoot we need to bring emissions down to basically zero over the next 50-60 years he said.
If humankind does not control the growth in greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade it increases the likelihood that we will need negative-emissions technologies such as bioenergy with CO2 capture
Nitrogen is emitted as a short-lived compound NOX which causes ground-level ozone the main ingredient in smog
and relates to compounds that are the detergent of the atmosphere. Sources of NOX include smokestacks
and other chemicals change in the atmosphere and also provide a measure of global human emissions.
and the chemistry in the past atmosphere is a longstanding question in the ice-core community said lead author Lei Geng a UW postdoctoral researcher in atmospheric sciences.
Unlike other gases short-lived NOX can't be measured directly from air bubbles trapped in ice cores.
Within a day or two most of the NOX changes into nitrate a water-soluble molecule essential to life that gets deposited in soil and snow.
The detailed measurements of nitrate NOX and sulfur show the nitrogen isotope ratio leveling off in 1970
and suggests that ratio is sensitive to the same chemicals that cause acid rain. This shows that the relationship between emissions and the isotopes is less direct than we thought
and the final signal recorded in the Greenland ice cores is actually not just the nitrogen emission
The different forms or isotopes were measured in UW's Isolab. Geng's work showed that the long-term decrease in the nitrogen-15 isotope
since 1850 and its leveling off in 1970 are linked to changes in air chemistry. Airborne nitrate can exist as a gas
or a particle and nitrate with lighter isotopes tends to exist as a gas. But he found that the total fraction of nitrate present as gas
or particle varies with the acidity of the atmosphere and the acidic air causes more of the light isotopes to exist as a gas.
The isotope records really closely follow the atmospheric acidity trends said co-author Becky Alexander a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences.
You can really see the effect of the Clean Air Act in 1970 which had the most dramatic impact on emission of acid from coal-fired power plants.
What's more airborne nitrate dissolves in water and falls at the poles as snow.
While that snow sits on the ground sunlight bouncing off the surface triggers chemical reactions that send some of it back into a gas form.
Acid air can also influence the reactivity of nitrate in snow and thus the preservation of nitrate in ice cores.
Other ice core records might also be affected by acidity in air Alexander said. No effect would be expected for stable gases like carbon dioxide
and oxygen or for the water molecules used to calculate temperature variations through time. But acidity in air could influence deposition
and preservation of other volatile compounds such as chlorine mercury or organic materials in ice cores.
Eventually better understanding of the air chemistry during formation of the layers could allow researchers to correct for the effect extracting better information of the past from these compounds in the geologic record.
Two separately stored chemicals are mixed in a reaction chamber in the beetle's abdomen. An explosion is triggered with the help of catalytic enzymes.
The hollow spaces are filled with one of two chemicals: hydrogen peroxide or manganese dioxide. The two separate films are stuck then on top of each another.
A layer of clear lacquer separates the two films filled with the different chemicals. When subjected to an impact the interlayer is destroyed causing the hydrogen peroxide and manganese dioxide to mix.
Whereas enzymes act as catalysts in the bombardier beetle manganese dioxide has proven to be a less expensive alternative for performing this function in the lab. The researchers report that the product of the reaction in the film is more of a foam than a spray
Just as in nature very little mechanical energy is required in the laboratory to release a much greater amount of chemical energy--quite similar to a fuse
or cash transports write the researchers in their paper published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A. In ATMS banknotes are kept in cash boxes
In a similar earlier project ETH researchers developed a multi-layer protective envelope for seed that normally undergoes complex chemical treatment.
and other heavy metals as well as new molecules such as perfluorinated compounds that are also accumulating in the Antarctic.
Their contribution to this global greenhouse gas is considerable. So far the assumption had been that camels with similar digestion produce the same amount of the climate-damaging gas.
However researchers at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich have shown now camels release less methane than ruminants.
Ruminants produce more of the gas per amount of converted feed than other herbivores. The only other animal group that regularly ruminates like ruminants are camels.
Olestra is a fat that passes through the body and remarkably it has revealed a potential health benefit of removing PCBS.
Olestra's effect on PCB removal is apparently the result of solubilizing fat-soluble compounds like PCBS in the intestine
and the solubilization reduces absorption of these compounds into the body says Jandacek who was the principal investigator on a 2005 study that found that olestra removed toxins from animals.
The regime that used fewer chemicals resulted in more than 50 percent reductions in the amount of nitrogen that escaped into groundwater and rivers with crop yields close to those of standard management.
The no-till and reduced chemical regimes also mitigated greenhouse warming by taking up greenhouse gases from the atmosphere in contrast to standard management
The zero-chemical regime mitigated greenhouse warming enough to compensate for the emissions produced under standard management.
a smaller number were willing to pay for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Robertson and his colleagues argue that in coming decades human population
We have discovered the first metal catalyst that can produce appreciable amounts of ethanol from carbon monoxide at room temperature
and pressure--a notoriously difficult electrochemical reaction said Matthew Kanan an assistant professor of chemistry at Stanford and coauthor of the Nature study.
and water is converted to oxygen gas at one electrode (the anode) and hydrogen gas at the other electrode (the cathode).
That means 57 percent of the electric current went into producing these two compounds from carbon monoxide.
because this represents a more than 10-fold increase in efficiency over conventional copper catalysts. Our models suggest that the nanocrystalline network in the oxide-derived copper was critical for achieving these results.
Carbon neutralthe Stanford team has begun looking for ways to create other fuels and improve the overall efficiency of the process.
In the experiment Kanan and Li found that a slightly altered oxide-derived copper catalyst produced propanol with 10 percent efficiency.
The team is working to improve the yield for propanol by further tuning the catalyst's structure.
For the process to be carbon neutral scientists will have to find a new way to make carbon monoxide from renewable energy instead of fossil fuel the primary source today.
which in turn would be fed to a copper catalyst to make liquid fuel. The CO2 that is released into the atmosphere during fuel combustion would be reused to make more carbon monoxide
but the missing piece was the efficient conversion of carbon monoxide to a useful fuel that's liquid easy to store and nontoxic Kanan said Prior to our study there was a sense that no catalyst could efficiently reduce carbon monoxide to a liquid.
or develop a new catalyst that converts carbon monoxide to fuel. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Stanford university.
Natural compound from green tomatoes increases muscle, protects against muscle wastingas unlikely as it sounds green tomatoes may hold the answer to bigger stronger muscles.
Using a screening method that previously identified a compound in apple peel as a muscle-boosting agent a team of University of Iowa scientists has discovered now that tomatidine a compound from green tomatoes is even more potent for building muscle and protecting
and the health care system in general says Christopher Adams M d. Ph d. UI associate professor of internal medicine and molecular physiology and biophysics.
More muscle less fatin a new study published online April 9 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry Adams searched for a small molecule compound that might be used to treat muscle atrophy.
Interestingly although mice fed tomatidine had larger muscles their overall body weight did not change due to a corresponding loss of fat suggesting that the compound may also have potential for treating obesity.
Designing healthier foodsan attractive aspect of tomatidine is that it is a natural compound derived from tomatoes.
Adams and his team previously used this same research strategy to discover that ursolic acid a compound from apple peels promotes muscle growth.
We are interested now very in the possibility that several food-based natural compounds such as tomatidine
The isolates are being identified using techniques such as molecular typing and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization using time of flight or MALDI-TOF.
We are approaching this very systematically using the latest technology says Anand. The researchers are investigating ways to either kill the microbes
which chemicals are effective on each species of organism and then will analyze those results to develop a better cleaning protocol to knock out these microbes.
#Black carbon is ancient by the time it reaches seafloora fraction of the carbon that finds its way into Earth's oceans--the black soot
and charcoal residue of fires--stays there for thousands for years and a new first-of-its-kind analysis shows how some black carbon breaks away
and hitches a ride to the ocean floor on passing particles. The study by scientists from Rice university the University of California Irvine and the University of South carolina offers the first detailed analysis of how black carbon gets into deep ocean sediments as well as an accounting of the types
and amounts of black carbon found in those sediments. Our previous work showed that the black carbon in ocean sediments is said ancient lead investigator Ellen Druffel the Fred Kavli Professor of Earth System Science at UC Irvine.
It's anywhere from 2000 to 5500 years older than the organic carbon in the same sediments.
That means that it either stays dissolved in the water for a long time before it's deposited
or it stays trapped somewhere else--like the soil--for thousands of years before it enters the ocean.
This new study offers the most complete picture yet of how black carbon finds its way into deep ocean sediments.
The environmental fate of black carbon is understood not well said study co-author Caroline Masiello a Rice biogeochemist who began studying black carbon with Druffel in the 1990s.
It's extraordinarily stable and though we don't fully understand how nature breaks it down
Virtually all black carbon results from combustion. Soot the airborne version of black carbon is a key element of smoke.
Charcoal is another form of black carbon. Each form is produced naturally by wildfires as well by industry and other human activities.
Druffel and colleagues said their study did not aim to answer questions about how much black carbon people are producing today
or how human-produced black carbon is affecting global climate. Our aim was to show how the black carbon cycle likely works in the ocean Druffel said.
We are looking for the baseline which is an important thing for others to have to do future studies about anthropogenic change.
Scientific interest in black carbon is high. On the one hand a comprehensive 2013 study found that soot is a far more important player in global climate than was believed previously.
On the other there is a growing global movement among gardeners farmers and others to use another form of black carbon--biochar--to both boost crop yields and to counter greenhouse emissions by locking
carbon in soil for centuries. Sediment traps like this one being deployed from the research vessel New Horizon were used to sample black carbon in particles that sank to the bottom of the Northeast Pacific.
Credit: E. Druffel/UC Irvinewhether you come at this from the point of view of reducing soot in the atmosphere
or of using biochar to counter global warming it's important to have a better understanding of where black carbon goes how it gets there
and types of black carbon found in seafloor sediments. This helps us narrow down the role of the ocean as a sink for both soot and charcoal.
Black carbon's journey to the bottom of the ocean begins when the material enters the water.
The researchers used radiocarbon dating and other techniques to examine the black carbon that was buried in seafloor sediments in the Northeast Pacific that dated to about 20000 years ago.
and amounts of black carbon that were dissolved in seawater trapped in sediments and contained in oceangoing particles tiny specs of matter that gradually sink to the seafloor.
We found that black carbon is taken up by particles that are produced in the water column said Coppola.
One example would be fecal pellets that are excreted by organisms. Another is a sticky'marine snow'that falls slowly downward to the bottom
Coppola said black carbon tends to stay dissolved in seawater and only occasionally gets snagged by a passing marine particle.
I'm surprised that given how much black carbon is produced most of it remains in the ocean for thousands of years Coppola said.
It's very interesting that only a relatively small amount with a certain type of chemistry is removed to the ocean floor.
The National Science Foundation funded the study. Co-authors include Lori Ziolkowski of the University of South carolina.
#Scalable CVD process for making 2-D molybdenum diselenidenanoengineering researchers at Rice university and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have unveiled a potentially scalable method for making one-atom-thick layers of molybdenum
The method for making two-dimensional molybdenum diselenide uses a technique known as chemical vapor deposition (CVD)
and is described online in a new paper in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.
and materials industries to make thin films of silicon carbon fibers and other materials. This new method will allow us to exploit the properties of molybdenum diselenide in a number of applications said study leader Pulickel Ajayan chair of Rice's Department of Materials Science and Nanoengineering.
and nanoengineering and of chemistry at Rice Characterizing both the structure and function of a material as we have done in this paper is critical to such advances.
because they have an atomic structure similar to graphene the pure carbon wonder materials that attracted the 2010 Nobel prize in physics.
because they are only one atom thick. Graphene has extraordinary electronic properties. For example its electron mobility is tens of thousands of times greater than that of TMDCS.
#Synthetic gene circuits pump up cell signals in study of neurodegenerative diseasessynthetic genetic circuitry created by researchers at Rice university is helping them see for the first time how to regulate cell mechanisms that degrade the misfolded proteins implicated in Parkinson's Huntington
The Rice lab of chemical and biomolecular engineer Laura Segatori has designed a sophisticated circuit that signals increases in the degradation of proteins by the cell's ubiquitin proteasome system (UPS). The research appears online today in Nature Communications.
The UPS is essential to a variety of fundamental cellular processes including the cell cycle DNA repair immune response cell death and the degradation of misfolded and damaged proteins.
ubiquitin molecules that tag misfolded proteins for degradation and proteasomes that latch onto the tagged proteins and break them down into harmless peptides.
or they don't function properly misfolded proteins that remain floating in the cytoplasm can aggregate.
The overall goal is to develop a technology to screen for molecules that would enhance
or activate degradation said Segatori Rice's T N. Law Assistant professor of Chemical and Biomolecular engineering and an assistant professor of biochemistry and cell biology.
and chops up misfolded proteins. We know how to inhibit degradation but we want to find ways to activate it
because we think that will be useful to help prevent accumulation of misfolded proteins and aggregation
it essentially mimics a misfolded protein. Normally enhanced degradation would dampen the output signal but this genetic circuit makes it possible to link enhanced degradation to an increase in output.
The lab's immediate goal is to create assays for the rapid detection of small molecules
This will help us rationally design compounds or strategies that could enhance degradation not only for the study and treatment of misfolding diseases but also for a variety of other applications.
They are the bottleneck in the high-yield production of recombinant proteins for example in cells engineered to crank up expression of a protein of interest Segatori said.
To trace the sugars the scientists first had to add a radioactive tag to these molecules.
The tag they used was a positron-emitting isotope of carbon carbon-11 incorporated into carbon dioxide.
When they administered this labeled CO2 to plant leaves the plants incorporated the radioactive carbon into sugars via photosynthesis. The scientists then tracked the labeled sugars throughout the plant using detectors placed along the plant stem.
This finding supports the idea that sugar--not auxin--is the key signaling molecule for this immediate response to clipping.
Only a few labs in the world have the capability using the carbon-11 radioisotope to do the type of experiment that we did to see rapid changes in carbon allocation immediately following a treatment such as shoot tip removal Babst said.
or displace animal protein as well as bad fats such as trans fat in a dish or meal.
Some study participants reported stomach upset such as bloating gas diarrhea or constipation but these symptoms subsided over the course of the study.
The methodology assigns financial value to ecosystem services such as the provision of clean water carbon storage
field study showsfor the first time a field test has demonstrated that elevated levels of carbon dioxide inhibit plants'assimilation of nitrate into proteins indicating that the nutritional quality of food crops is at risk as climate change intensifies.
but this is the first study to demonstrate that elevated carbon dioxide inhibits the conversion of nitrate into protein in a field-grown crop he said.
because plants use nitrogen to produce the proteins that are vital for human nutrition. Wheat in particular provides nearly one-fourth of all protein in the global human diet.
Many previous laboratory studies had demonstrated that elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide inhibited nitrate assimilation in the leaves of grain and non-legume plants;
At that time carbon dioxide-enriched air was released in the fields creating an elevated level of atmospheric carbon at the test plots similar to
A fast-forward through more than a decade found Bloom and the current research team able to conduct chemical analyses that were not available at the time the experimental wheat plants were harvested.
In the recent study the researchers documented that three different measures of nitrate assimilation affirmed that the elevated level of atmospheric carbon dioxide had inhibited nitrate assimilation into protein in the field-grown wheat.
which showed that there are several physiological mechanisms responsible for carbon dioxide's inhibition of nitrate assimilation in leaves Bloom said. 3 percent protein decline expectedbloom noted that other studies also have shown that protein concentrations in the grain
When this decline is factored into the respective portion of dietary protein that humans derive from these various crops it becomes clear that the overall amount of protein available for human consumption may drop by about 3 percent as atmospheric carbon dioxide reaches the levels anticipated to occur during the next few
and increased emissions of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide he said. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of California-Davis. Note:
#A balanced carbon footprint for the Amazon Riverconsidered until now a source of greenhouse gas emissions capturing the CO2 fixed by the tropical forest through the soils of the watershed to release it into the atmosphere the Amazon river actually has balanced a carbon footprint.
and EPOC laboratories (OASU CNRS Universitã Bordeaux 1) and published in the journal Nature changes the order for global carbon footprints.
Until now researchers thought that rivers were supplied with carbon by trees and other land plants through the soils of the watershed.
This carbon was transformed then into CO2 and released by outgassing into the atmosphere. Watercourses and in particular the giant Amazon were considered
All emissions covered by the wetlandsthe Amazon emits some 200000 tons of carbon per year through outgassing.
half of this carbon in the form of dissolved CO2 and biodegradable organic matter is transferred directly to the river.
This quantity of CO2 is equivalent to the 200000 tons of carbon outgassed annually. Therefore the carbon footprint of the river system in the central Amazon region is close to equilibrium:
its waters release the same quantity of carbon into the atmosphere as is fixed by its vegetation.
Nevertheless this study highlights the very heavy contribution of inland waters to CO2 emissions. It sheds light on the need to consider the specific properties of wetlands in global carbon footprints.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Institut de Recherche pour le DÃ veloppement (IRD.
Likewise when cows were fed protein contaminated with bovine prions many of them developed mad cow disease. On the other hand transmission of prions between species for example from cows sheep or deer to humans is--fortunately--inefficient and only a small proportion of exposed recipients become sick within their lifetimes.
Prions are misfolded toxic versions of a protein called Prp which in its normal form is present in all mammalian species that have been examined.
they can induce existing properly folded Prp proteins to convert into the disease-associated prion form.
The scientists introduced into mice the gene that codes for the normal bank vole prion protein thereby generating mice that express bank vole Prp but not mouse Prp.
and biofuel a breakthrough that will mean using fewer chemicals less energy and creating fewer environmental pollutants.
Currently the lignin must be removed a process that requires significant chemicals and energy and causes undesirable waste.
and fewer chemicals and ultimately recovering more wood carbohydrate than is currently possible says Mansfield.
and used in other applications such as adhesives insolation carbon fibres and paint additives. Genetic modificationthe genetic modification strategy employed in this study could also be used on other plants like grasses to be used as a new kind of fuel to replace petroleum.
Trees and plants have enormous potential to contribute carbon to our society. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of British columbia.
Natural processes are working hard to keep the carbon cycle in balance by absorbing about half of our carbon emissions limiting the extent of climate change.
In July 2014 NASA will launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) to study the fate of carbon dioxide worldwide.
but the future is said fundamentally unknown Paul Wennberg a professor of atmospheric chemistry at the California Institute of technology in Pasadena.
and is managed by NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena Calif. Carbon dioxide is both one of the best measured greenhouse gases
Forests remove carbon from the air during photosynthesis and store it in wood and roots making these forests
what scientists call carbon sinks. But droughts and wildfires can turn forests into carbon sources releasing the stored carbon back into the atmosphere.
We don't know when and how often forests cross the line from sink to source.
Like all other molecules carbon dioxide molecules absorb only certain colors of light producing a unique pattern of dark features in the spectrum.
The intensity of the dark features increases as the number of carbon dioxide molecules increases in the air that the spectrometer is looking through.
Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are measured in parts per million the number of molecules of carbon dioxide there are in every million molecules of air.
or two carbon dioxide molecules out of the 400--an unprecedented level of precision and one that scientists think will be adequate to detect changes in natural sources
but that number will still yield 100 to 200 times as many measurements as the currently observing Japanese Greenhouse gases Observing SATELLITE (GOSAT) mission.
and other conditions the OCO-2 data will allow modelers to better locate carbon sources
so that organizations and individuals throughout the world can make better-informed decisions about carbon. For more information about OCO-2 visit:
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