The explosion generated several Suns'worth of radioactive nickel-56 and vast quantities of other lighter elements, such as carbon and silicon.
These new particles don't exert the same outward pressure on the star as their photon parents,
including molecules that mimic standard petrol, and could be expanded to work on tougher cellulosic materials, the researchers say.
The company has been working to convert sugars into tailored molecules for several years, says co-author Stephen del Cardayre, LS9's vice-president for research and development.
and then short-circuited E coli's internal machinery for producing large fatty-acid molecules, enabling them to convert precursor molecules directly into fuels and other chemicals.
The team then inserted genes from other bacteria to produce enzymes able to break down hemicellulose.
says Mike Bruford, a molecular ecologist at Cardiff University, UK, who worked on that study2. The giant panda genome,
Carbon credits proposed for whale conservation: Nature Newsbiological oceanographer Andrew Pershing wants carbon credits for whale conservation.
That's because whales, he says, are like trees. Like any animal or plant, they are made out of carbon.
And whales are so big they each store a lot of carbon, he says. Pershing, of the University of Maine in Orono and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, Maine, calculates that
even though some whale species are now recovering from the effects of factory whaling, total whale biomass today is less than one-fifth of
Oregon, could eventually sequester 9 million tonnes of carbon in their combined biomass. He compares it to planting trees.
Whales take carbon out of the system through their food, then incorporate that carbon in their tissues.
Whaling, by contrast, is like cutting down trees for firewood. You're taking whales out of the population
and putting their carbon somewhere else. In the early days of whaling Pershing explains, that carbon was going straight into the atmosphere through the burning of whale oil in lamps, for example.
More recently, he says, the carbon is released through the consumption of whale meat by humans,
but you're still taking carbon out of the whale and putting it into something that's going to respire it.
Furthermore, when whales die naturally, they usually sink to the bottom of the ocean, carrying their carbon with them.
Back in 1900, when whale numbers were high, that would have totalled about 200,000 tonnes of carbon per year,
Pershing estimates. Even though benthic creatures eventually eat the whale carcasses (see'Bone-devouring worms discovered),
'the carbon will remain in the depths, Pershing says, staying out of the atmosphere for potentially hundreds of years.
By comparison, 9 million tonnes is only a small fraction of the 7 billion tonnes of carbon entering the atmosphere each year from human activities,
It's also comparable to the amount of carbon involved in forest-management schemes being proposed for buying
and selling carbon credits, he said. People would pay a lot to preserve an area of forest that big.
Pershing's research may actually understate the degree to which whales could sequester carbon. The iron in whale faeces is an important micronutrient that is often in short supply in waters such as the Southern Ocean,
the indirect benefits of iron fertilization from whale faeces might remove more carbon from the atmosphere by boosting algal growth than the growth of the whales themselves.
And even though all of these animals'biomass combined represents a small fraction of total human carbon emissions,
they could still sequester many tonnes of carbon. You could use carbon as one of the incentives to rebuild the stores of these large organisms
Pershing says.
News briefing: 25 february 2010: Nature Newspolicy Business Research Events People Business watch The week ahead Number crunch Sound bites Policy Stem-cell lines:
Chandrayaan-1 and Chang'e-1. go. nature. com/QIBPPZ 3-5 march The International Emissions Trading Association joins with various United nations agencies to host the second Africa Carbon Forum
Nature Newsthe burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil releases carbon dioxide that alters the balance of carbon isotopes naturally found in the environment an effect that is now being found in food,
Modern methods for tracking the origins of processed foods use isotopes atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons.
Of the most common naturally occurring isotopes of carbon carbon-12, with six neutrons, and carbon-13, with seven the heavier carbon-13 isotope is rarer.
In many plants, 108 out of 10,000 carbon atoms are carbon-13. However in plants such as sugar cane and maize (corn),
which use a different type of photosynthesis, 110 out of 10,000 atoms are carbon-13.
Tracking these ratios is a key part of how food regulatory bodies determine if low-cost sweeteners,
Because sweeteners from sugar cane and maize have a higher proportion of carbon-13, the carbon isotope ratio of the final product will be skewed.
As part of an undergraduate project intended to show how isotope analysis works, geochemist William Peck at Colgate university in Hamilton,
New york, got his students to analyse maple syrup from different parts of the northeastern United states. Our intent was really just to see
if isotope values varied by geography or if anyone was putting in sweeteners, says Peck.
All of the isotope values that the class collected were much the same, but when the group compared their values to isotope values of maple syrup in papers from the late 1970s and early 1980s,
they noted that there were significant differences. Their analysis revealed that the relative amount of carbon-13 in maple syrup seemed to have gone down since the 1970s.
This got Peck wondering if it was possible that baseline isotope ratios might be shifting because of environmental changes.
To work this out Peck and his student co-author, Stephanie Tubman, obtained maple syrup samples from producers in the states of New york
if the mould might change the isotope ratio of the syrup, recalls Peck. Fortunately, it did not.
and Food Chemistry1 that maple syrup isotope ratios have shifted over the years. Samples of 1970s syrup had 108.7 carbon-13 isotopes per 10,000 carbon atoms
whereas the 2006 average was 108.5 carbon-13 isotopes per 10,000 carbon atoms. So syrup carbon-13 values are approaching the average 108 value that maple trees
and most plants should have, explains Peck. The reason, he suggests, is released that carbon from the burning of oil or coal,
which has very little carbon-13 compared to that found naturally in the atmosphere, is shifting environmental carbon isotope ratios accordingly.
Atmospheric data show that isotope ratio changes correlate directly with the changes in the maple syrup isotopes over the course of the 36 years studied
Peck says. We've known that atmospheric carbon isotope values were changing, but nobody was applying this to food science,
says geochemist John Valley at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Clearly, food-monitoring studies need to start taking atmospheric isotope data into account.
The findings raise the possibility that producers of foods that are monitored for carbon isotope ratios might be able to add cheap sweeteners without being caught.
Yet Peck doubts this is the case. The producers that could cheat have not had the necessary information do so effectively,
he says. And the findings apply to more than just food. Isotope analysis of human tissue is being considered in some countries to help determine where immigrants have come from.
I think this maple syrup study demonstrates the danger of tissue testing. If we are making serious decisions about peoples'lives with isotope analysis,
we must remember that there are numerous effects that determine the final values, says Valley. As for whether isotope ratios change the taste of maple syrup, for the moment, that remains a mystery.
We had a pancake party in class at the end to celebrate the findings, says Peck. Nobody was brave enough to try syrups from the 1970s.
Future funding for agricultural research uncertain: Nature Newsfinancial donors to a global network of 15 agricultural research centres want changes to the way the influential group plans to reshape its research programme.
In another, climate policies result in a world full of forest plantations that are created solely to store the greatest possible amount of carbon, with no regard for preserving biodiversity.
The term geoengineering covers everything from mundane methods for increasing carbon storage in plants soils
Keith is developing a method to use aircraft to release fine sulphur particles that will stay aloft for years in the stratosphere.
in that the microflora and yeast living on the truffles played a vital role in releasing volatile compounds,
Despite the recent Court of Appeal ruling in Agresearch's favour, Barry Scott, head of the Institute of Molecular Biosciences at Massey University in Palmerston North, New zealand,
that focuses on forest policy, warns that funnelling support into existing protected areas through REDD may be tricky because of the ongoing debates about what constitutes a carbon saving.
but rather the amount of forest carbon they prevent from being deforested and released to the atmosphere a concept called additionality.
says Mark Stitt at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam, Germany.
however, is unlikely to be funded, according to Parag Chitnis, deputy director of the NSF's Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences.
Nature Newsoxygen isotopes in clamshells may provide the most detailed record yet of global climate change,
says William Patterson, an isotope chemist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and lead author of the study1.
and the levels of different oxygen isotopes in their shells vary with the temperature of the water in
The colder the water, the higher the proportion of the heavy oxygen isotope oxygen-18.
isotope ratios in each of these shells provided a two-to-nine-year window onto the environmental conditions in
which measured the isotopes in each layer. From those, the scientists could calculate the conditions under which each layer formed.
The two probable dust particles found so far could mark the beginning of an analysis of
The grains were far harder to catch than the comet particles. Not only was the flux much lower,
but the interstellar particles were smaller than the comet grains and were moving several times faster up to 30 kilometres per second.
who adds that the researchers must conduct more tests to ensure that their particles are truly interstellar grains,
rather than micrometeorites or even pieces of the spacecraft knocked loose by debris. It took four years of searching to identify the two potential interstellar dust particles,
The researchers carefully extracted the first particle and sent it to three microprobe facilities around the world for analysis. The results offered hints of a glassy,
Carbon trading: Greenhouse-gas emissions from around 11,000 factories and power plants under the 27-nation European union (EU) trading scheme fell by 11%in 2009, according to preliminary,
The fall due to the recession meant that the EU handed out an excess of 60.6 million carbon credits (free permits to emit a tonne of carbon dioxide),
They base this interpretation on an analysis of stable carbon isotopes in preserved soil or'palaeosol',at the site;
oxygen and carbon isotopes in the enamel of mammalian teeth; the small-mammal fossils present;
It contains mechanisms intended to stabilize carbon prices and make costs predictable for industry (see go. nature. com/2mpfsn).
given mounting evidence that boreal forests are important carbon stores. Protecting these forests and their soil,
which has enormous amounts of carbon, is a hugely important step forward, says Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke university in Durham, North carolina,
which constantly recycle atmospheric carbon through phases of growth and decay, boreal forests experience less decay and instead tend to pool carbon in soil and peat.
A recent study led by Sebastiaan Luyssaert, a biologist at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, found that mature boreal forests remain active carbon sinks rather than becoming carbon-neutral ecosystems as they mature (S. Luyssaert et al.
Nature 455 213-215; 2008). ) As long as they're alive, they keep accumulating carbon, says Luyssaert.
The northern circumpolar permafrost region, which includes most of the boreal forests earmarked for protection,
contains approximately 50%of the estimated global belowground organic carbon pool, according to a study co-authored by Josep Canadell, director of the Global Carbon Project in Canberra, Australia (C. Tarnocai et al.
Global Biogeochem. Cy. 23, GB2023; 2009). ) Canadell says that cutting down forests sometimes results in the drying out of wetlands and peat bogs and the release of their huge carbon stores
which hold an average of 7, 800 tonnes of carbon per hectare, far more than any other ecosystem.
But Werner Kurz, a senior researcher at the Canadian Forest Service in Victoria, British columbia, isn't sure that forest conservation is going to slow down warming.
and sequester carbon. We're still not sure exactly how useful these forests are going to be in mitigating global warming,
who heads the Canadian Carbon Program. That's why it makes sense to keep them intact until we figure it out.
Essentially all of the carbon in fossil fuels winds up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide after combustion,
One of the best estimates for global carbon emissions comes from CDIAC, which collects information from the United nations,
In Europe, scientists are pushing forward with the Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS), which aims by 2014 to convert a series of about 50 independent monitoring stations into a single network with uniform monitoring capabilities;
researchers are developing new tools to differentiate between'natural'and fossil-fuel carbon in the atmosphere.
One technique relies on the radioactive isotope carbon-14, which occurs in trace amounts in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
This isotope is released taken up and by plants, but fossil fuels have no carbon-14 because it has a relatively short half-life
and they have been buried for millions of years. By taking air samples and measuring their carbon-14 content,
researchers can work out how much of the carbon dioxide comes from the biosphere and how much from fossil-fuel emissions.
Levin has been regularly measuring carbon-14 content in air samples from Germany using a version of a Geiger counter,
which included Tans, recommended ramping up annual carbon-14 measurements to 10,000 worldwide at a cost of $5 million to $10 million.
Such detailed monitoring should help scientists calibrate measurements from carbon-monitoring satellites. At present US and Japanese scientists are busy interpreting initial data from a Japanese satellite,
and NASA is planning to launch a second version of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory by 2013 (a rocket failure sent the first one hurtling into the Pacific ocean in February 2009).
gases such as methane, nitrous oxide and various fluorine-containing compounds have a powerful warming effect and must be monitored as well.
A molecule of SF6 has nearly 24 000 times the warming power of a carbon dioxide molecule and remains in the atmosphere for around 3, 200 years,
which means that essentially all the SF6 ever emitted by humans is still in the atmosphere.
But a report by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) concluded in 2009 that the compound posed significant health risks.
There's not a lot of wiggle room for error with a compound like this. There are non-chemical alternatives to soil fumigants including planting strawberries alongside mustard or broccoli,
which keeps carbon sequestered in native soils, savannahs and forests (J. A. Burney et al. Proc.
whether the carbon savings from land use would outweigh the increased agricultural emissions, says David Lobell,
and the carbon savings are quite large. All other things being equal, the researchers found that agricultural advances between 1961 and 2005 spared a portion of land larger than Russia from development
Averaged over the study period, investments in agricultural yields reduced carbon emissions at a cost of around $4 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent,
less than a quarter of the going price for emissions permits under Europe's carbon-trading scheme.
and medicine for his work on molecular mechanisms of pain. The mathematics prize went to Jean Bourgain of Princeton university for his work in mathematical analysis.
a major carbon storehouse. The debate began with a 2007 study1 that used data gathered by NASA's Terra satellite to argue that the canopy of the Amazon rainforest grew
not only boosts growth and carbon uptake, but could also offset reductions in precipitation thus increasing resilience to drought, says Peter Cox of the University of Exeter, UK,
the London-based think tank. The report's authors suggest that fighting illegal logging is a cheap way to prevent carbon emissions produced
Such decreases may have cost as little as $2. 50 per tonne of carbon, as compared to a cost of $18 per tonne in the European union carbon trading scheme.
The reasons for the decline vary by country. In Cameroon, donor countries insisted that an independent observer of forests be installed.
Illegal logging may be more cost-effective than carbon trading, but we should not forget that energy efficiency
Protein-coding MESSENGER RNA molecules serve as templates for the production of proteins in cells, while a variety of non-coding RNA molecules are known that do not produce protein
but are known either to regulate gene expression directly or to carry out other functions in the cell.
suggests that more of these mysterious RNA molecules could produce peptides too small to be considered true proteins
and fuel wood and in some cases to earn money from selling carbon credits under the Clean Development Mechanism established in 2001 as part of the Kyoto Protocol.
They are only good to store carbon, he says. This distinction between native and nonnative trees is important for an accurate picture of the state of the world's forests,
Laurance says he is hopeful that the United nations'REDD+initiative to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation
which reads off DNA sequences at single-molecule resolution in real time (see Nature 465,145; 2010). ) It would also use the money to boost marketing,
and environmental disasters including the risk of radioactive particles being released from contaminated land around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
This has raised fears that radioactive particles could be released into the atmosphere. Goldammer told Nature that he received unconfirmed reports on 11 august that 200 hectares in the region are alight.
Most of the radioactive particles are in the soil rather than in the flammable leaf litter and trees,
where the land is unlikely to be contaminated with à Â-particle-emitting isotopes potentially the most damaging if inhaled.
says Raghuram, a molecular biologist at Indraprastha University in Delhi. The academies have a total lack of social sensitivity, objectivity and public honesty,
Dahl's team looked at the concentration of molybdenum and the ratios of its isotopes atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons and different masses in oceanic rocks for clues to the concentration of oxygen in the seas
In oxygenated water, the lighter of the two main molybdenum isotopes 95mo and 98mo is absorbed into the seabed
leaving the heavier isotope in solution. Sea water gets lighter and heavier as a measure of the balance between oxic
Dahl's study uncovered two periods when heavy molybdenum isotopes show up in the shale records
All that sugary food means that the stressed-out insects are ingesting foods richer in carbon and poorer in nitrogen than their calmer,
The result is a body that is made of significantly more carbon and less nitrogen and thus makes poorer fertilizer
Taking molecular snaps of ancient crops: Nature Newsarchaeologists interested in the genetics of ancient organisms have a new molecular tool at hand RNA.
Two teams of scientists have decoded RNA from ancient crops in the hope of understanding the subtle evolutionary changes that accompanied the process of plant domestication.
RNA molecules offer a snapshot of the activity of a cell, indicating which genes are turned on and off, and to what extent.
says Sarah Fordyce, a molecular biologist at the University of Copenhagen, who presented the RNA transcriptomes (the whole set of RNA molecules present) of 700-850-year-old maize (corn) seeds at a conference there last week.
Ancient RNA is also a lot more likely to catch evolution in action than DNA, says Robin Allaby, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Warwick, UK,
it isn't an obvious molecule to study in ancient specimens. RNA is notoriously difficult to work with
Oliver Smith and their colleagues examined small regulatory RNA molecules in 500-year-old barley seeds from Egypt.
thinks that RNA molecules are the right place to look for the molecular changes that underlie domestication.
but he still questions the molecule's hardiness. The problem is going to be which samples have RNA survival.
A study published in Science last year suggests that the drought reduced cumulative carbon storage in affected areas by some 1. 6 gigatonnes3.
and assess the broader impacts of drought on carbon storage. Having a second set of data to analyse certainly won't hurt.
This form of personalized medicine tailors treatments on the basis of the molecular and genetic characteristics of a patient's cancer cells
These data could reveal how drugs targeting one molecular pathway are affected by mutations in another gene
It can really change the landscape of how molecular testing is being done for cancer, he says.
And if the carbon sample removed for analysis actually contains material from more than one source,
Money will be raised by selling 300 million carbon credits from the European union's emissions trading scheme for greenhouse gases;
a team of astronomers declared last week that they had discovered two gargantuan'bubbles'of ray-emitting particles extending north and south of our Galaxy's centre (M. Su et al.
or a jet of energetic particles from the black hole at the Galactic Centre. First asteroid dust The Hayabusa space explorer has picked up dust from the Itokawa asteroid, from
and as such it fetches a high price on the carbon market. The London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) estimates that Europe will have spent roughly 6 billion euros on payments for HFC-23 destruction by 2012 75 times more than the 80 million euros companies receiving
Meanwhile, the executive board of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) the emissions-trading scheme to meet the greenhouse-gas reduction targets set by the Kyoto Protocol in August put a hold on issuing carbon credits
which helps to move chloride ions across cell membranes. Scientists don't know why damage to the gene leads to reduced IGF1 levels,
They performed carbon-isotope analyses on soil layers and studied fossilized plant materials to work out how the land was used.
Curry says, on the subject of atmospheric aerosols that is, particles such as dust and soot that affect cloud formation.
The alkaline sludge, a by-product of bauxite production, contains high concentrations of heavy metals, including arsenic, cadmium and mercury,
east of Chernobyl the site of the nuclear power plant that exploded in 1986 could cause radioactive particles in the soil to be released into the atmosphere.
among other things, scientists will use the data collected to track how much carbon is released taken up
which at a stroke outlawed much useful molecular biological research and introduced lengthy bureaucratic approval procedures for each experiment that involved genetic manipulation.
to hunt for the elusive Higgs particle at the collider's current collision energies. The plan is likely to be agreed by CERN's management and council in January.
In the late 1980s, he developed electrospray ionization, a way to gently separate clumped proteins into a fine spray of individual molecules.
were developed by start-up firm Ion Torrent in Guilford, Connecticut, which was bought by Life Technologies in August.
and forest degradation (known as REDD) and augmenting the carbon stocks locked up in forests. Collectively, the programme is called REDD-plus.
a molecular plant pathologist at Imperial College London, UK, and his team found that B. graminis genes responsible for infection
Developing a better grip on the molecular make-up and evolution of plant pathogens, current control methods can be targeted better slowing the chances that they evolve resistance,
Debra Brock, a molecular biologist at Rice university in Houston, Texas, who led the study, attributes this gap in our knowledge to the fact that very few labs work on wild Dictyostelium.
Fotis Kafatos, a molecular entomologist at Imperial College London who was the first president of the ERC,
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
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,
'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,
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.
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