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.
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 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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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,
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
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
especially in developing countries, says Sarah Gurr, a molecular plant pathologist at the University of Oxford, UK,
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.
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.
'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.
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 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.
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,
and Water for allowing carbon credits for emissions-reducing activities that have become common practice.
Many opponents of emissions trading programmes also argue that companies are likely to purchase carbon offsets instead of reducing emissions by adopting new technologies
The report also praises Australia's Carbon Farming Initiative the world's first national legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions from farming and forestry,
and investors to generate and trade carbon credits from farming and forestry projects, and could serve as a model for similar projects in other countries.
Future medicine The US National Research Council (NRC) has called for a network that would connect patients'health records with layers of data on molecular tests, genetics,
would enable treatments to be personalized for patients, ushering in a new taxonomy of human disease based on molecular origins rather than on physical signs and symptoms.
Carbon tax Australia will introduce a tax on carbon dioxide emissions from 1 july 2012, after the legislation passed its final barrier 墉 approval by the Senate 墉 on 8 november.
and release carbon, one of the least understood aspects of the global carbon cycle. Earthwatch has recruited more than 2,
and analyse soil samples to estimate how much carbon is captured. Forests play a huge role in regulating climates at global scale
"There are no long-term monitoring studies on biodiversity as well as carbon stocks, and very limited modelling studies on climate-change impacts, he says
All flights to or from Europe will have to buy carbon credits under the region's emissions trading scheme.
Mining molecular gastronomydieter Heinemann/Westend61/Corbisshrimp and tomato are paired often together in North american cuisine, because they share certain flavour compounds.
Ahnert, himself an amateur molecular gastronomist, was intrigued by the anecdotal suggestion that the reason some foods go well together is
because they contain the same flavour molecules. He and his team therefore developed networks to link flavour compounds with the ingredients found in one Korean
and two American online recipe databases, grouping recipes into North american, Western European, Latin american, Southern European or East Asian cuisine.
But in East Asian and Southern European recipes, the trend was the opposite the ingredients were less likely to share flavour compounds.
for example share flavour compounds with many other foods. Once these foods were removed from the analysis
when the team removed the most common ingredients that shared the least flavour compounds (beef, ginger, pork, cayenne, chicken and onion) from the analysis,
"It s clearly something different from shared compounds, he says.""To get a clearer idea of
I want to look at better data on flavour compounds. He has contacted therefore the owners of professional databanks to find out how much of each flavour compound is present in an ingredient.
but not the same flavour compounds, are used together. Other studies into ingredients and recipes have been conducted.
and are now demanding that poor countries sacrifice economic development to make carbon cuts. But other developing countries, acknowledging that most future emissions growth will come from once-poor nations,
The talks also moved closer to establishing a system that would allow payments to countries that reduce carbon emissions by preventing deforestation,
which countries can sell carbon credits for projects that lower greenhouse-gas emissions, such as renewable energy.
and store carbon emissions from power plants, allowing Western countries to finance these plants more cheaply in India or China.
with 5%of the carbon credits being set aside to account for any leakage of stored greenhouse gases in the 20 years after they are buried.
and expanding prospects for a low-carbon market and tourism. Although the study has been lauded for its innovative methodology,
Molecular technologies need to be made more easily available and affordable to countries at risk, and genetic surveillance more comprehensive and timely.
Rapid measures to reduce emissions of black carbon, which soaks up solar energy, and methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 Â times more potent than carbon dioxide,
the assessment ranked hundreds of  options for reducing black carbon and ozone pollution according to their potential to reduce warming.
Black-carbon reduction would focus on cleaning up diesel vehicle emissions biomass stoves, brick kilns and coke ovens.
Modelling suggests that, together, a 75%reduction in black carbon and a 40%reduction in methane emissions over the next two decades would lower projected warming by about 0. 5 °C by 2050.
Cuts to black carbon would yield the biggest reduction in warming in Africa, south Asia and the Arctic,
and black-carbon mitigation are intentionally keeping the agenda separate from the UN climate negotiations.
As scientists pin down exactly where anthropogenic carbon emissions are coming from, Marland says, they can separate out carbon uptake and emissions by plants and soils."
"The better we understand both the magnitude and distribution of human emissions, the better we understand what is happening in the biosphere.
The municipal government said on 5 january that it would publicly report data on levels of particles smaller than 2. 5 micrometres across (PM2. 5),
Airline carbon row Global airlines are protesting a European law that requires them to pay for some of the carbon emissions from their flights using European airports.
The company said that its $149, 000 Ion Proton sequencer, the latest version of the Ion Personal Genome Machine that it launched late in 2010 (see Nature 475,278;
2011), would be able to sequence a genome in a day for $1, 000. Hepatitis C hopefuls Pharmaceutical giant Bristol-myers squibb of New york city has become the latest company to spend billions on the promise of hepatitis C treatments.
Georgia. Inhibitex's main asset is a compound against hepatitis C that is in phase II trials.
defusing the carbon bombenvironmentalists and many politicians have called the oil sands a planetary-scale threat as they fight to prevent further development of the resource.
"We wanted to address the carbon-bomb question, Weaver says.""And frankly, these numbers aren t as big as
They modelled the effects on global climate of the carbon emissions that would result if all of the oil available in the Alberta reserves were to be burned.
burning every tonne of carbon underground would be virtually impossible. Restricting the analysis to proven reserves those believed to be economically viable using present technologies the duo calculated a temperature increase of 0. 02 °C. Taking into account the portion of the reserve that is already under active development,
But barring a precipitous drop in oil prices or a sudden imposition of carbon regulations, Canada will probably find customers for its oil one way or another.
Oil-sands vote ends in deadlockan attempt to assign a carbon footprint to oil obtained from oil sands,
all fuels must be assigned a default carbon footprint. However, policy-makers are stuggling to achieve this for oil-sands oil.
They generally recognize the higher carbon footprint of oil extracted from oil sands, but do not single them out with a separate value.
when calculating the overall carbon footprint for all of Europe's petrol from 2014 onwards. Environmentalists agree that oil obtained from different sources should have different carbon footprints
but few data are available on the actual emissions generated by other sources, and that because oil-sand oil is known to generate more emissions,
and Environment in Brussels."All fuels need correct carbon accounting to count their contribution, to reach the 6%greenhouse-gas reduction target,
as well as the size of individual ash particles, suggest that the volcanic blast occurred more than 100 kilometres away.
so it is much harder to copy drugs based on them than small-molecule drugs (see Nature 449,274-276;
) The FDA wants firms to prove their molecules'similarity to branded biologics before the generics can be approved
A whiff of interstellar clouda NASA spacecraft has detected directly atoms from outside the boundary of the Solar system
It could also mean that oxygen atoms are being locked up somehow in the trace grains of dust
a solar wind of charged particles pushes outward and creates a bubble that extends well beyond the orbit of Pluto.
the bubble stops electrically charged atoms in their tracks and keeps them from crossing into the Solar system.
but it has detectors that are sensitive to neutral atoms that can enter the heliosphere.
these atoms are unaffected by the Sun's magnetic field. Mccomas says that it takes about 30 years for particles to cross the bubble wall at the heliosphere s edge
and travel to the inner Solar system, where they are caught by  IBEX.""I call it the 15-billion-mile hole-in-one,
IBEX found the ratio of oxygen atoms to neon atoms to be lower in the Local Cloud than the average ratios for both the Solar system and the Galaxy as a whole
Based on the speeds and directions of the neutral atoms, the IBEX team was also able to refine its picture of the shape of the heliosphere.
Mccomas says that the pressure from the incoming atoms is about 20%less than what was estimated by Ulysses.
and carbon-offset projects can result in the eviction of inhabitants of wooded areas that are bought up in exchange for carbon credits.
Although the official carbon market made little progress in last year s United nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South africa,
the voluntary carbon market is still dispossessing local custodians of their lands. For example Green Resources, a forestry company based in Oslo,
A Dutch firm s carbon-offset project in Uganda s Mount Elgon National park became unmarketable after sustained conflict with local farmers who contest the group's right to the land.
to reduce carbon emissions, leave tropical forests standing. But a widely heralded approach in which rich nations would pay poorer ones to keep their forests intact has proved trickier to deploy than many had hoped.
Carbon payments would make it easier for landowners to earn a living without clearing more land.
soya and palm oil could have the greatest impact on carbon (see'Food versus forests').'With more than US$4 million in seed money from Norway, the consortium plans to announce an initial round of projects in the run-up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de janeiro (Rio+20) in Brazil in June.
The consortium is also looking at tackling overall greenhouse-gas emissions using carbon credits, which could be sold to private investors
and co-editor of the April issue of Molecular Ecology, which is devoted to the emerging field of studying environmental DNA.
In the Molecular Ecology special issue, various research teams worked out the diet of a leopard by sequencing DNA in its faeces3;
but not how to apply them to routine biodiversity surveys, points out Mehrdad Hajibabaei, an evolutionary molecular geneticist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.
In the past, researchers have examined herbal medicines by running assays for toxic compounds and using DNA tests to determine
and carbon emissions and secures a smaller area of forest than was thought. However, the Indonesian government has confirmed its commitment to its climate-change pledge by extending the protected area
and stripping a palm-oil firm of a permit to develop carbon-rich peatland.""No other country has done anything like this,
although that in itself won t do much to reduce carbon emissions. Norway s environment minister, B ¥rd Vegar Solhjell, acknowledges the limitations of the moratorium."
and carbon-storage potential than others, says William Laurance, a forest-conservation scientist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.
Laurance does commend the Indonesian government for protecting 11.5 million hectares of forests growing on carbon-rich peatland.
If deforested, these areas could release up to eight times more carbon into the atmosphere than would dryland forests growing on mineral soil.
says Allen Van Deynze, a molecular geneticist at the Seed Biotechnology Center at the University of California,
such as the ability to break up certain molecular structures or to confine herbicides in cell vacuoles."
where mosquitoes are frequently resistant to compounds known as pyrethroids and even to the organochloride DDT, venerable tools of mosquito control.
Canadian company Iogen Energy in Ottawa announced on 30 april that it has shelved plans to build a large-scale facility in Manitoba to produce fuel ethanol from cellulose, the long molecular chain of sugars that forms
But cracking apart the tough cellulose molecules is a lot harder than brewing up simple sugars.
and could explain a mysterious spike in carbon-14 levels in that year's growth rings in Japanese cedar trees.
when he heard about a team of researchers in Japan who had found an odd spike in carbon-14 levels in tree rings.
which carbon-14 is formed (see'Mysterious radiation burst recorded in tree rings').'But there was a problem:
noting that the red crucifix could have been formed by sunset light illuminating high-altitude ice particles in both vertical and horizontal bands of light.
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