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,
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.
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.
A follow-up study by Burda and his colleagues showed no such alignment near electric power lines,
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,
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.
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
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.
most bumblebees were carrying a positive charge. Next, the team placed the insects into an arena with petunias (Petunia integrifolia)
That suggested that the bees were detecting the electric fields and using them to guide their activities,
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.
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.
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 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.
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,
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."
while a crew with chainsaws and electric weed-cutters cleared blackberry bushes, ivy vines and small eucalyptus trees near roads and buildings in
Resistance to such a heretical idea runs deep among ecologists, but growing numbers are embracing altered ecosystems in the name of pragmatism."
and diseases are moving towards the poles at about the same speed as warmer temperatures.
Climate change is expected to cause changes in the distributions of species around the world, with an overall shift away from the equator and towards the poles.
or pesticide resistance, says ecologist Dan Bebber of the University of Exeter, UK, who led the new study.
On 18 Â November, the Tokyo Power and Electric Corporation began the delicate task of removing fuel rods from a damaged reactor building.
Tissue culture of Cavendish plants has generated variants with random mutations that confer partial resistance to Foc-TR4.
and researchers are experimenting with putting its resistance genes into the Cavendish. The resulting transgenic specimens have been in field trials for 18 Â months on contaminated ground in Australia,
Dale is trying to engineer Gros Michel bananas for resistance to the original Foc strain.
Mogens Nicolaisen, who works with plant pathogens at Aarhus University in Denmark, thinks that endophytes could be a good way to help introduce resistance to both drought
and Mars. Power-plant rules The US Environmental protection agency (EPA) published a controversial rule on 8 Â January governing greenhouse-gas emissions from new power plants.
Advanced natural-gas power plants are poised to meet the standards but the rule would effectively require new coal-fired plants to capture
while working on a second standard governing existing power plants. Polio progress On 13 Â January, India marked its third consecutive year without a case of polio,
Georgia Power/PRNEWSFOTOREACTOR construction gets funding boost The US Department of energy has approved US$6. 5 Â billion in loan guarantees to build two nuclear reactors at the $14-billion Vogtle Electric
Power out The US Energy Information Administration predicted on 14 Â February that the energy generated by coal-fired power plants in the United states will shrink by 20%(the equivalent of 60 gigawatts by 2020.
The reduction is the result of power-plant closures arising from competition from lower-priced natural gas
85 plants with a combined capacity of 10.2 Â gigawatts were retired in 2012. Satnav success Europe s fledgling satellite navigation system, Galileo, is working well,
and INEOS Bio near Vero Beach, Florida (see Power plants).(Both plants are currently idle, pending upgrades.
The modified olive fruit flies may have other unwanted genetic traits such as pesticide resistance that they'll spread among wild flies Wallace said.
People don t often think of burning trees to make electricity however in part because in many regions of the world groups are trying to protect the trees and forests.
In a new program the U s. Forest Service is fueling a biomass power plant in Colorado with trees killed by a pest called the mountain pine beetle Greenwire reports.
The Eagle Valley Clean Energy plant will burn 250 tons of wood daily for the next 50 years Greenwire reports creating electricity for the residents of the small town of Gypsum.
Biomass power plants do use a renewable fuel but nevertheless contribute to global warming because they put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Even a pine tree burned in a forest fire does not release as much carbon as a pine tree burned in a power plant Niel Lawrence a National Resources Defense Council lawyer told Greenwire.
and converts it into commands for a MIDI interface which stores a large library of digital sounds. 4. Powera 120v power strip feeds electricity to the sensors
and a 100-watt speaker harvested from a PA SYSTEM. Red LEDS that illuminate the birdhouse meanwhile get energy from a 250-watt computer power supply.
Time: 72 hourscost: About $2500 Autoloopmb Labs a team from Chicago built a giant electronic drum sequencer during Creation s 72-hour build-off.
which is powered by electricity from the road bed in 2 protected automated lanes and an access and exit lane
http://www. viewzone. com/magnetic. weather. html...Should we be worried about Earth's magnetic poles reversing?
Some people believe global cataclysm will occur when Earth's magnetic poles reverse. When north goes south they say the continents will lurch in one direction
The geologic record shows that hundreds of pole reversals have occurred throughout Earth's history; they happen when patches of iron atoms in Earth's liquid outer core become reverse-aligned like tiny magnets oriented in the opposite direction from those around them.
and indeed there's evidence to suggest the planet may be in the early stages of a pole reversal right now.
when the poles reverse is a very large decrease of the total field intensity said Jean-Pierre Valet who conducts research on geomagnetic reversals at the Institute of Earth Physics of Paris. 5 Ways the World Will Change Dramatically this Century Earth
and might show more than two poles for a while and then builds up in strength and aligns in the opposite direction said Monika Korte the scientific director of the Niemegk Geomagnetic Observatory at GFZ Potsdam in Germany.
Earth's Magnetic poles May be About To Switch By Paul Simons The Guardian-London 7-6-2the Earth could be about to turn upside down.
At the magnetic poles a compass needle would stand up and point straight down into the Earth.
The magnetic poles are where all the lines of force of Earth's magnetic field are drawn together. It does not coincide with the geographic poles the axis on
which the Earth spins but it is close. Yet the Earth is not a solid magnet.
For one thing its magnetic poles are constantly drifting around. At present magnetic north is heading out of Canadian territory into the Arctic ocean at about 10 miles per year.
and protects us from the sun's charged particles and cosmic rays by focusing them towards the poles.
As the magnetic poles migrate across the world those night lights are going to light up some very strange places where they have never been seen before.
http://rense. com/general26/poles. htm...Geomagnetic Reversal and hypothetical considerations of 2010/2012the Earth's geomagnetic field is currently undergoing a reversal.
magnetic pole flip with the reduction of the Earths magnetic field. Which when it does occur does have an larger effect on the global environment in a broad spectrum influence with one of the influences being global warming.
the Suns own dipole reversal becomes a major culprit! Some interesting Sun/Earth timing coincidences in the last flip. http://www. livescience. com/31795-earth-magnetic-field-reversal. htmldo not try
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