As mirids develop resistance to the pesticides, Wu expects that farmers will soon spray as much as they ever did.
bollworms developed resistance and rose to become the primary pest. Similarly, stink bugs have replaced bollworms as the primary pest in southeastern United states
while a ship monitors the air off the coast and two electric vehicles zip about collecting samples upwind and downwind of selected sites.
as part of Calnex, NOAA plans to use aircraft to sample pollution plumes downwind of cities, refineries, power plants and agricultural fields.
a fireproof insulator used in electrical equipment. 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,
Researchers at the University of the Free state in Bloemfontein found that the new variants can overcome the effects of two resistance genes in wheat that normally prevent stem rust from taking hold.
which would cap emissions from electricity utility companies. The report1 from the US National Research Council (NRC), sets out the consequences from streamflow and wildfires to crop productivity
Since 1996, Monsanto has held a European patent on genes that give soya beans resistance to the company's Roundup herbicide specifically the active ingredient glyphosate.
where soya-bean crops (known as Roundup Ready) expressing the glyphosate-resistance genes can be cultivated without a licensing agreement.
met less resistance when she encouraged village weavers to switch from artificial to natural dyes in the production of their woollen carpets and kilims,
They rely on relatively coarse data from sources including the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration's Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer satellites,
and drug resistance hadn't developed. We have been aided by pure good luck she said. Research Student gene-testing dropped:
The venture will develop rechargeable power units that combine elements from fuel cells and liquid-based batteries. 24m has US$10 million in venture-capital funding,
and tested for the presence of proteins that could give it resistance to either of the herbicides.
But those that have evolved resistance to both herbicides could become a weed problem for farmers,
At the International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology in Copenhagen last week, Gilbert's team presented the first results of their efforts to coax RNA sequences from ancient maize samples from Chile and Arizona.
the corn earworm (Helicoverpa zea), has evolved resistance to Bt toxin in situations where GM-crop coverage is 100%.
slowing the evolution of full-blown resistance. Some farmers were very sceptical of entomologists telling them they needed to maintain non-Bt corn
where it has been shown to improve the disease resistance of vegetables including as broccoli, tomatoes and potatoes.
Six of the eight GM banana strains developed with the green pepper gene showed 100%resistance to BXW in the lab1.
The field trials will also screen GM banana varieties with resistance to BXW for resistance to fungal diseases
Although political resistance to the introduction of GM food has softened in recent years several MPS remain sceptical.
resistance could grow once more, says M'mboyi. Urban Ugandans are opposed more to GM CROPS than their rural counterparts are,
To prevent the spread of Bt resistance, farmers are required to plant nearby'refuges'of conventional crops.
and stave off Bt resistance for at least 20 years. In 2005, the Pink bollworm Rearing Facility in Phoenix began cranking out pinkies for the Arizona experiment.
Ideally, the same approach could be used in regions where poor farmer compliance with the refuge rule has contributed to widespread Bt resistance.
The paper also highlights genes potentially involved in disease resistance. These may eventually allow breeders to improve the quality and yields of the cocoa varieties.
potentially making it a good candidate for further study in the lab. This could open the way to studies on flavour and disease resistance in the cultivated strawberry Fragaria x ananassa,
They attached magnetic steel discs to 25 bees that had been trained to visit a feeder of sucrose solution located 1 kilometre away from the hive.
a bank of magnets mounted on a rail, called the'insominator'by the researchers, was passed back and forth along one wall of the hive for 12 hours,
says that the directional sense of bees is known to be partly magnetic. Changing the magnetic field may disturb their magnetic orientation,
he says, leading to less precision in dance communication. But Klein is confident that magnetism did not affect the experiment.
We tested for that by comparing the dances between the magnetic steel-tagged bees and the copper-tagged bees on days when the bees had not been sleep-deprived,
he says. Currently a member of the BEEGROUP at the University of W Â rzburg in Germany, Klein says that he would like to investigate
will make it more difficult for the pathogen to evolve resistance to the controls. The genetically conserved part of the genome could be the potato blight pathogen's Achilles heel,
there is a big risk that we will run out of options for natural genetic resistance, says Spanu.
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,
India plans to build about 20 more nuclear reactors to generate 60 gigawatts of electricity (10%of total demand) by 2035.
Published last week, THE WHO's plan for containing resistance to the drugs also calls for increased monitoring,
We have more ambitious objectives in terms of getting full flu resistance before we would propose to put these chickens into true production,
even if the GM chickens carried full resistance to influenza, there are political and economic hurdles to their widespread commercial use not least the public's aversion to GM food.
but for using similar cassettes to create resistance to other common poultry diseases. Tiley's study was funded partially by Cobb-Vantress, a major international chicken-breeding company.
New york. Schat is paid a consultant for another company that is also funding research on using transgenes for disease resistance.
Whereas resistance to a particular herbicide might be pinned down to one gene, the response to drought plays out across the genome.
as part of plans to save more than ¢ 4. 6 billion in electricity costs over the next three years.
cut generous feed in tariffs (the price an electricity utility must pay to generators of solar energy) by capping the subsidized hours that solar plants can sell.
and in technology including magnets, car batteries, wind turbines and mobile phones. Business watch In 2011 and 2012, the drug industry will face the worst effects of its'patent cliff'
as several major drugs face competition from generics. The world's best-selling drug 墉 Pfizer's cholesterol-lowering medication Lipitor (atorvastatin) 墉 may face competition from generics maker Ranbaxy of Gurgaon, India.
Massachusetts, detects diseased muscle tissue by sending electrical currents through the body. The ALS biomarker award was launched in 2006 by Prize4life,
The Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project, involving more than a dozen institutes and coordinated by Cornell University in Ithaca, New york,
Japanese utility Chubu Electric power has suspended operations at its Hamaoka nuclear power station, which sits in an area considered overdue for a large earthquake.
who fear for their electricity supply if other nuclear plants under inspection following the Fukushima disaster are ordered also to close.
Usually, the channel along which electric current passes in a transistor is flat; in the'Tri-gate'transistors (pictured), it protrudes from the surface so that the'gate'that switches current on or off wraps around the channel on three sides.
and animals living in the vicinity of the damaged power plants, but they also give researchers a unique opportunity to study the effects of radiation on populations that would be impossible to recreate in the lab. Tim Mousseau,
H4 is that it has resistance genes to multiple classes of antibiotics. This suggests that wherever the bacteria have come from there has been selective pressure to resist antibiotics.
But antibiotic resistance might have helped the bacteria to survive and persist in the environment. EHEC outbreaks usually only last around two weeks,
In addition to the antibiotic-resistance genes, the bacteria contain a gene for resistance to the mineral tellurite (tellurium dioxide.
Some strains of bacteria may have evolved resistance to tellurium during its historical medical use, or after its use in the mining and electronics industries increased its presence in the environment.
According to Wieler, the strain's resistance characteristics could point towards an environmental source, such as water or soil.
and herbicide resistance, were stable in the field. I would expect that by the end of the decade,
and Sangamo Biosciences in Richmond, California, announced that they had used enzymes called zinc-finger nucleases to insert a gene for herbicide resistance at a specific site in the maize genome (V. K. Shukla et al.
making the plant produce toxins that confer resistance to some insect pests. A Bt cotton variety is being developed for Kenyan farmers at KARI.
The most important finding of the consortium's initial analysis is the identification of more than 800 disease-resistance genes, each
Most of the people in the group are now asking how we can use information from the sequencing to learn about some of the traits we work on, such as disease resistance, tuber dormancy,
But they have created also intense selection pressure for mosquitoes to develop resistance. Data are coming in thick and fast indicating increasing levels of resistance,
and also of resistance in new places, says Jo Lines, an entomological epidemiologist and head of vector control at the Global Malaria Programme of the World health organization (WHO) in Geneva,
Switzerland. THE WHO now intends to launch a global strategy to tackle the problem by the end of the year.
'As soon as you scale up you are going to get resistance.''But Lines says that the malaria-control community felt too many lives were at stake to let the threat of resistance stand in the way of massively scaling up the bed-net and spraying campaigns.
Teasing out the impact of resistance on the success of malaria-control interventions is difficult
because so many other factors influence their outcome. More systematic and more sophisticated monitoring of resistance is also vital,
says Lines. The best surveillance data (see'Resistance on the rise), 'although useful, do not give a complete picture of where resistance is emerging
and how prevalent it is, he says. Malaria-control programmes often lack insect-resistance monitoring,
and detection of all forms of resistance is not easy. Quick, cheap tests can pick out gene mutations that help the mosquitoes'nerve cells withstand pyrethroid attack.
But other forms of resistance, which depend on increased levels of mosquito enzymes that can destroy pyrethroids before they reach their target,
require more complex tests to detect (H. Ranson et al. Trends Parasitol. 27,91-98; 2011). ) But uncertainties about the extent of resistance or its impact are no excuse for inaction,
says Newman, arguing that the proposed WHO strategy needs to be implemented urgently, and also rolled out preemptively in places where resistance has yet to be detected.
THE WHO's plan will recommend, for example, that control programmes rotate insecticides sprayed indoors, using pyrethroids one year and a different class the next.
This would be more costly and less effective than relying only on pyrethroids, however, so control programmes may be reluctant to adopt this measure.
Repurposed agricultural insecticides might also act as a stopgap were resistance to pyrethroids to develop rapidly.
soya and cotton with little public resistance, but EMBRAPA is now tinkering with a product that people eat in large quantities every day,
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'.
It sets limits on the intensity levels of greenhouse gases emitted by Alberta facilities oil sands operations and coal-fired power plants,
such as the number of kilowatt hours of energy produced or miles driven. Alberta, unlike other jurisdictions, has opted to link reduction targets to a facility s production output.
and feeding it to a power plant that would otherwise have used fossil fuels; investing in the development and operation of an energy-efficient rapid transit system in Delhi, India;
although this took more than two years of debate in the face of strong resistance from tobacco companies and retail associations.
The mystery of the magnetic cowse. ELISSEEVA/GLOWIMAGES. COMCATTLE seem to align with magnetic field lines,
A follow-up study by Burda and his colleagues showed no such alignment near electric power lines,
says Lukas Jelinek, a researcher in the electromagnetic-field department at the Czech Technical University in Prague and one of the authors of the replication attempt.
because some of the pastures are on slopes or near high-voltage power lines, for example, or because the images are too poor to make out cattle,
The Jelinek team says that it only looked at cows far from power lines, and that the slopes are few
and store carbon emissions from power plants, allowing Western countries to finance these plants more cheaply in India or China.
such as a flood at a power plant or the loss of crops due to pests. Jim Hall, director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, UK,
And power plants overshadow any other stationary sources of greenhouse gases, accounting for about three-quarters of emissions in the inventory (see The gas tracker).
which microbes acquire resistance to the drugs. On 4 january, the agency banned unapproved uses of cephalosporins in cattle, pigs,
By contrast, a 4 january report from the UK nuclear regulator did not find any fundamental weaknesses in its nation's power stations.
National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System/FDATHE new rules, to come into effect on 5 Â April,
Its new antibiotic-resistance strategy, published in November  2011, calls on EU countries to ensure that antibiotics are only available on prescription,
and report cases of resistance (see Nature http://doi. org/cshmhv; 2011). ) Although it is accepted widely that overusing antibiotics can be a major driver of resistance in microbes,
the evidence linking antibiotic use in farm animals with resistance in humans is still controversial (A e. Mather et al.
Proc. R. Soc. B http://doi. org/hj8; 2011). ) A research programme coordinated by Europe s Innovative Medicines Initiative could provide some answers:
in the next few months it will call for proposals for  350 million (US$445 million) in grants to understand how resistance arises,
Antimicrobial resistance is also this year s top priority for the intergovernmental World organisation for Animal health (OIE),
and are on par with emissions from individual coal-fired power plants. In areas where the sands are mined
Because they lack electric charge, 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
make more efficient use of fertilizers or capture methane emissions for electricity generation. The programme's potential is highlighted by recent progress in Brazil,
"Weed resistance is a game changer for agriculture in the same way that drug resistance has been a game changer for the health-care industry,
The chief worry is that new herbicide blends will accelerate the emergence of resistance to multiple chemicals.
) Mortensen expects that increased reliance on two herbicides will favour plants with multiple mutations for resistance to each,
herbicide resistance is already forcing farmers to combine such techniques with conventional herbicide use. New machinery could also help.
"The weeds that have survived the crop season are the ones that are the most likely to have stacked resistance
but if overused could still breed resistance. Most agree that farming in a post-Roundup era will be complicated more."
Switzerland, issued a strategic plan to curb the spread of resistance.""We don t want to wait for failures to happen,
according to THE WHO. Insecticide resistance could also result in as many as 26 Â million further cases a year,
Health authorities in Somalia, Sudan and Turkey have reported also sporadic resistance to the two other classes of insecticides recommended by THE WHO for safe and effective household spraying:
Resistance has evolved probably several times independently, and is now spreading as extensive use of pyrethroids and other insecticides favours resistant mosquitoes."
"In 2004, there were pockets of resistance in Africa, and now there are pockets of susceptibility, says Janet Hemingway, chief executive of the Innovative Vector Control Consortium (IVCC),
"If we can stop pyrethroid resistance from spreading, it will be cheaper in the long run, Newman says.""In 2004, there were pockets of resistance in Africa,
and now there are pockets of susceptibility. But the two largest players in malaria aid the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria,
and the US President s Malaria Initiative (PMI) have not yet pledged additional money to fight resistance.
the report urges that a global database be set up to track the spread of resistance,
African ministers of health realize the need to manage resistance but can t do much without outside funds,
naphtha and aviation fuels from old electricity poles. Kior expects to begin producing gasoline and diesel from southern yellow pine trees at its Columbus, Mississippi facility at the end of the year.
Resistance is always a danger when drugs are taken as a prophylaxis, which is why THE WHO requires that people on SP-AQ take different medications
and insects have evolved resistance to the modified crops3. Seed companies can counter this by engineering new crops that are resistant to additional herbicides such as a new soya bean developed by Dow Agrosciences of Indianapolis,
Battery rescue A123 Systems a leading US manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, may have found a solution to its financial woes.
and energy efficiency in American history and proposed an ambitious Clean Energy Standard to generate 80 percent of our electricity from clean energy sources like wind, solar, clean coal,
Since taking office, electricity production from wind and solar sources has doubled already more than in the United states. We are boosting our use of cleaner fuels,
For some crops, improvements to heat resistance through conventional and transgenic breeding, for example, will help farmers to adapt.
Battery bankruptcy A123 Systems, a leading US Â manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, filed for bankruptcy on 16 Â October.
In some countries in Eastern europe and Central asia, multi-drug resistance occurs in more than 20%of cases (see chart.
Nuclear safety Hundreds of safety upgrades are needed at European nuclear reactors, according to an analysis of the continent's power plants.
The spores have based a static electricity ejection system designed to launch them into the air with ease.
At the Federal Rural University of Rio de janeiro in Brazil, Valdir Diola is working to isolate resistance genes in coffee
especially the $535 million that went to now-defunct solar-cell manufacturer Solyndra of Fremont, California.
Reicher, an attorney by training, previously headed Google s $1-billion initiative for investing in energy and climate, where he guided investments into solar technologies and electric transport.
Since then, her agency has developed the first US greenhouse-gas standards for vehicles, tightened air-quality standards and proposed emissions limits for power plants.
The decline is in part a result of the economic slowdown and a shift in electricity production from coal to natural gas,
As a next step, Obama s administration is expected to impose two greenhouse-gas regulations targeted at power plants
The deal offered an extra year for electricity producers to claim 10 years of tax credits for wind, geothermal and biomass projects.
Bumblebees sense electric fields in flowersas they zero in on their sugary reward, foraging bumblebees follow an invisible clue:
electric fields. Although some animals, including sharks, are known to have an electric sense, this is the first time the ability has been documented in insects.
Pollinating insects take in a large number of sensory cues, from colours and fragrances to petal textures and air humidity.
It has long been known that bumblebees build up a positive electrical charge as they rapidly flap their wings;
Daniel Robert, a biologist at the University of Bristol, UK, knew that such electrical interactions would temporarily change the electrical status of the flowers
most bumblebees were carrying a positive charge. Next, the team placed the insects into an arena with petunias (Petunia integrifolia)
and measured the flowers'electrical potentials. Sure enough, when the bees landed, the flowers became a little more positively charged.
But when the researchers turned off the electrical charge on the flowers and re-released the trained bees,
That suggested that the bees were detecting the electric fields and using them to guide their activities,
"We think bumblebees are using this ability to perceive electrical fields to determine if flowers were visited recently by other bumblebees
But the continued growth in energy produced by coal-fired power stations is offsetting progress, it says.
the resurgence of measles and antimicrobial resistance are discussed all at the European Society of Clinical Microbiology
and so lacks resistance to these subtypes. If a pandemic were to occur, it would probably have a severe toll.
and improved aerial and ground surveillance to monitor the threat. Bird flu deaths Two men have died after being infected with a type of bird flu never before seen in humans
Monsanto will gain access to some Dupont patents covering disease resistance and maize (corn) defoliation.
In fact, the strains lack a gene found in modern strains of P. infestans that overcomes the plant s resistance genes.
which describes the strong and weak nuclear forces and the electromagnetic force, leaves several basic questions unanswered.
They also predict that some nuclei should generate a weak electric dipole field similar to the magnetic field of a bar magnet.
If that is so, pear-shaped nuclei should have the strongest electric dipoles, and measuring these could help researchers to choose between the various models.
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,
and produced roughly 85%of its electricity from hydropower in 2010. But Brazil has turned increasingly to fossil fuels to drive an ever larger share of its economic growth in recent years.
"It s bad news for Europe, for European farmers and for global food security, says Jonathan Jones, who uses both GM and conventional approaches to study disease resistance in plants at the Sainsbury
Weeds warrant urgent conservationfaced with climate change, plant breeders are increasingly turning to the genomes of the wild, weedy relatives of crops for traits such as drought tolerance and disease resistance.
the reactors will have combined a electricity generation capacity of 2, 000 Â megawatts. DLRGIANT iceberg cut adrift Antarctica s Pine Island Glacier shed a massive iceberg last week (to the left of the crack),
World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2013nuclear power plants generated 2, 346 terrawatt hours of electricity in 2012, a decline of nearly 7%from 2011 and nearly 12%from the all-time peak in 2006,
Much of the decline was due to power plant closures in Japan following the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011,
But the European commission has ducked the issue in the face of strong resistance from the biofuels industry and Europe s energy and agricultural sectors.
helping that virus fuse to cell membranes. That made H1n1 more efficient at infecting pigs and causing disease.
This glyphosate resistance enables farmers to wipe out most weeds from the fields without damaging their crops.
whether transgenes such as those that confer glyphosate resistance can once they get into weedy or wild relatives through cross-pollination make those plants more competitive in survival and reproduction."
Oryza sativa, gets a significant fitness boost from glyphosate resistance, even when glyphosate is applied not. In their study, published this month in New Phytologist1,
Brain-implant trial A deep-brain stimulation (DBS) device that not only delivers electrical pulses, but also records brain activity simultaneously, has been implanted in a person for the first time.
US power plants Regulations proposed on 20 Â September by the US Environmental protection agency would limit carbon dioxide emissions for future fossil-fuel power plants in the United states. To meet the emissions limits,
due in June 2014, to govern existing power plants. See go. nature. com/c2m4tn for more.
Grass gets greenerindustrial power plants take most of the flack for climate change. But nature s plants are not blameless:
The latest findings suggest that manure is helping antibiotic resistance to spread, says Joan Casey, an environmental-health scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public health in Baltimore, Maryland,
and resistance, says study co-author Stuart Reid, a veterinary epidemiologist at the Royal Veterinary College in Hatfield, UK.
When they looked at the strains'antimicrobial resistance, the researchers found that bacteria from humans had more diverse collections of resistance genes than those in local livestock.
This indicates that local livestock cannot be the sole source of the resistance genes found in the strains found in humans.
The authors therefore suggest that local livestock are not the source of drug-resistant human salmonella outbreaks in Scotland.
and acquire resistance separately. The authors stress that the study does not imply that antimicrobial resistance developed on farms is less concerning than previously thought,
including resistance stemming from the controversial practice of giving antibiotics in feed to promote animal growth.
We're not saying it's not as bad, we're just saying that there are other sources that need to be considered,
he explains that it does not eliminate the possibility that resistance genes from local farms
Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, says that the study clarifies how pathogens and drug-resistance genes spread."
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