This includes a greater emphasis on urban agriculture such as vertical farming which properly designed and planned could provide the sustainable means to improve food supply we need.
Ideally urban agriculture fits neatly alongside or within existing buildings in a self-contained and sustainable manner without competing for resources.
They can use greenhouses in order to take advantage of the sun s energy or grow indoors with the help of artificial lights.
Vertical farming is promising because it requires no soil and can save space and energy and improve crop yield.
It takes advantage of the vertical space of city buildings rather than turning over wide expanses of land to agriculture and uses advanced greenhouse technology:
hydroponics or aeroponics and environmental controls that regulate temperature humidity and light to produce vegetables fruits and other crops year-round.
Singapore has taken local urban farming to a high level Skygreens has built the world s first commercial vertical farm in large three-storey greenhouses providing a sustainable source of fresh vegetables.
Vertical farming s biggest limitation is energy consumption. Considerable energy is required to power a closed indoor greenhouse facility s artificial lighting heating and cooling and hydroponic or aeroponic growing systems.
The amount of energy required per unit of product is an important factor for ensuring
and wind turbines with greenhouses to provide self-generated renewable electricity on-site. But the single technology that will be key to making vertical farms possible is lighting.
There is potential for these multifunctional techno-greenhouses built around LED grow lights to increase the quality of the food we eat
Chungui Lu receives funding from the UK Technology Strategy Board to work on developing LED lighting for horticultural crops.
Erik Murchie receives funding from the UK Technology Strategy Board to work on developing LED lighting for horticultural crops.
I think wearables is a technology for the next decade said Rob Shaddock chief technology officer of The swiss technology company TE Connectivity.
and share that information with their social network almost like a diary of your life Shaddock said.
Communications technology will shift more toward wearable devices Shaddock predicts. Reminiscent of the VISOR worn by the character Geordi La Forge in Star trek:
The applications of wearable technology are limited only by people's imaginations Shaddock said. With more and more devices measuring personal data
but the technology is there to solve the problem Shaddock said. Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+.
#Soil-Free Farming Grows Vegetables in the Desert With average summer precipitation of about 1 inch (2. 5 centimeters) temperatures higher than 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees
Celsius) and nutrient-poor sandy soil it's easy to see why agriculture hasn't taken off for the nations of the Persian gulf.
Hydrogel film reduces the water required for farming by 90 percent and the fertilizer needed by 80 percent while increasing farm productivity by 50 percent overall according to Professor Mori.
or even sand and works in greenhouse facilities so it can be used in nearly any climate.
and highly nutritious vegetables because the membrane keeps the plants separated from any pathogens in the culture medium allowing only the water
Fruits and vegetables including cherry tomatoes lettuce cucumbers and melons have been proven to grow well on the film.
For countries like the UAE which imports 90 percent of its food this technology could be crucial for fighting food scarcity and conserving water.
Nature Newsozone experts are exploring ways to curb powerful greenhouse gases of their own making under the Montreal Protocol,
but are also powerful greenhouse gases. Although in this respect many are less potent than their predecessors,
As greenhouse gases, they are covered under the Kyoto Protocol, but many believe that they could be eliminated much faster
explicitly citing the potential to further reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The US Environmental protection agency says that the resulting greenhouse-gas reductions could equate to around 2. 6 billion tonnes of CO2,
akin to taking more than 68 million vehicles off the road for 30 years, depending on which chemicals fill the void.
Although they represent less than 1%of the greenhouse-gas forcing, HFC emissions are rising by about 15%per year,
which is 11,700 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas (M. Wara Nature 445,595-596;
By contrast, the Lieberman-Warner climate legislation introduced in the US Senate last year proposed a stricter phase-down for HFCS than for other greenhouse gases,
by applying either the treaty itself or its framework to other powerful greenhouse gases such as perfluorocarbons (PFCS) and sulphur hexafluoride (SF6), both
Chemicals in early refrigerants contributed to the hole in Earth's ozone layer-->Â See also Correspondence'Time running out to deal with banks of greenhouse gases
and the creation of genetically engineered crops, observers say. The technique relies on enzymes called zinc-finger nucleases,
two independent groups of researchers report that the technique can also be used to engineer herbicide-resistant corn and tobacco1,
The team has used zinc fingers to replace a gene called IPK1 with an herbicide-resistance gene.
'Voytas's group has engineered herbicide-resistant tobacco by inserting specific mutations into a gene called Sur.
and costs could be higher for other labs. The technique could also assuage a common concern about transgenic crops.
Environmental groups are protesting after the Mexican government's 15 october approval of the first permits to plant experimental genetically modified (GM) maize (corn.
which is the homeland of domesticated maize. Mexican environmental and agricultural agencies say that they will keep plantings away from traditional'landrace'maize,
and will monitor the experimental crops closely before considering requests from agribusiness for full-scale GM maize planting.
But researchers say that past landrace contaminations from illegal GM maize planting (see Nature 456,149;
2008) mean corruption of traditional genomes is inevitable. Events Hwang convicted Disgraced South korean cloning scientist Woo Suk Hwang left Seoul Central District court on 26 october knowing that his sentence,
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.
Or what if the very possibility of using geoengineering to mitigate climate change gives political leaders cover to say that greenhouse gases aren't a problem?
People aren't discussing apples and oranges, they are talking about apples and oranges and Porsches and whales and moons,
he says. Testing solar-radiation management techniques on a global scale is given particularly daunting that detecting changes in the climate system caused by geoengineering would be nearly as difficult as measuring global warming itself.
Tide turns against corn ethanol: Nature Newsbuffeted by the economic crisis and a drop in the oil price,
US producers of corn ethanol are encountering increasing scepticism from the legislators on Capitol hill even as producers of the'greener'cellulose-derived ethanol struggle to move beyond basic research and development.
Producers of ethanol from corn (maize) starch got what they needed out of a tax package enacted by the US Congress last week:
Among them was a one-year extension of a tax credit giving refiners nearly 12 cents of federal cash for every litre of corn ethanol they blend into gasoline.
Critics say the corn ethanol credit eats up scarce federal resources and puts cellulosic ethanol at a competitive disadvantage.
director of renewable energy policy for the Natural resources Defense Council in New york. There's a sort of belief in Washington that corn ethanol is one of these topics where everyone has to toe the line,
and promises to corn-growing country, just like they always have. Rumours of the tax credit's demise may be a little bit premature,
Around 90%of the biofuel will come from conventional corn ethanol next year, with the remainder coming from biodiesel and other advanced biofuels.
Nature Newsresearch Policy Events People Business Trend watch Research Crop catalogue A global search to gather the wild relatives of essential food crops such as wheat,
barley and rice has been launched by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, based in Rome. The ten-year initiative, announced on 10 december,
Canc ae'Â n climate deal United nations climate talks in Canc ae'Â n, Mexico, ended with an agreement by developed and developing countries to reduce greenhouse
Hall (pictured) has made it clear that he will take a hard line against attempts to regulate greenhouse gases.
and conventional crops and a public register for the location of GM plantings, was justified because the long-term consequences of GM technology are still unclear.
can trigger abortions in goats and sheep and cause flu-like symptoms and sometimes pneumonia in humans.
and agriculture ministries coordinated their efforts poorly before they ordered a cull of more than 50,000 dairy goats in 2009,
Nature Newswhen the US Department of agriculture (USDA) announced this month that it did not have the authority to oversee a new variety of genetically modified (GM) Kentucky bluegrass,
With changing technologies, the department says that it lacks the authority to regulate newly created transgenic crops.
The grass, a GM variety of Poa pratensis, is still in the early stages of development by Scotts Miracle-Gro
The grass has been altered genetically to tolerate the herbicide glyphosate, which would make it easier to keep a lawn weed-free.
The grass can evade control because the regulations for GM plants derive from the Federal Plant Pest Act,
Developers then used genetic control elements derived from pathogenic plant viruses such as the cauliflower mosaic virus to switch on the genes.
'Scotts took advantage of both techniques to construct the herbicide-resistant Kentucky bluegrass that put the USDA's regulatory powers to the test.
The technique is established well for many crops, and particle bombardment is less predictable, often yielding multiple, fragmented insertions of the new gene.
agribusiness giant Syngenta, based in Basel, Switzerland, conducted the first field trials of maize (corn) containing engineered mini-chromosomes,
and showed that the mini-chromosomes, which carried multiple genes for insect and herbicide resistance, were stable in the field.
I would expect that by the end of the decade, this technology will be used well by many as a way to deliver large stacks of genes to plants,
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.
and former head of the USDA's National Institute for Food and Agriculture. The Kentucky bluegrass decision drives this point home,
he says: It really speaks to the importance of reviewing the regulatory process periodically to ensure that it is keeping up with the advances in technology.
dead trees and deep pits filled with murky water. Now the government is tightening the screws on illegal mining,
destroying 6, 600 Â hectares of wetlands and primary tropical forest. And they predicted that the trend will only get worse.
and deforested  lumping agriculture, towns and mining areas together, and making it difficult to track the impact of the gold rush.
including mining, agriculture and five different classes of forestry. Scullion says that there is a misconception among locals that researchers are against mining.
and Madre de dios tends to yield larger, coarser grains. To reduce miners exposure to mercury, non-governmental organizations have distributed retorts that can capture the toxic vapour.
China long ago passed America as the leading emitter of greenhouse gases. Developed world emissions have leveled off
reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and produce the economically-attractive technologies that developing nations must have access to
The use of hormones, antibiotics and pesticides, as well as animal diseases and even terrorism pose risks. What steps would you take to ensure the health, safety and productivity of America s food supply?
I am also working to bolster the use of organic farming methods and minimize pesticides and antibiotics in our food.
I set the ambitious goal to increase the number of certified organic operations by 20 percent â oe
I am protecting human health by ensuring that the foods the American public eats will be free from unsafe levels of pesticides by making sure that all new,
and even older pesticides, comply with strict science-based health standards. We are also making sure safer pesticides get to market faster,
so that we can decrease the use of those pesticides that have higher risks of health impacts.
And my administration is taking steps to limit antibiotic use for livestock. This will help ensure that antibiotics are used only address diseases and health problems
and not for enhancing growth and other production purposes. And I will continue to work on food safety issues to ensure that public health is the priority in our food safety system.
Animals engineered with pinpoint accuracytwo genetically engineered farm animals reported today illustrate how far from Frankenstein s stitched-together monster animal biotechnology has come.
One of those animals, a cow, secretes milk that lacks an allergy-inducing protein because researchers accurately blocked its production using the technique of RNA interference1.
And in pigs, scientists have used an enzyme called a TALEN2 to scramble a gene that would normally help remove cholesterol.
For years, researchers tried to remove the allergy-inducing milk protein beta-lactoglobulin from cow's milk
They inserted DNA encoding a version of this microrna into the genome to create genetically modified cow embryos that they hoped would grow into cows without the allergen in their milk.
Out of 100 embryos, one calf yielded beta-globulin-free milk.""This isn t a quick process,
That's why it has taken so long to succeed in making an allergen-free cow, he says.
who contributed to the work in pigs.""In essence, we are just mimicking an evolutionary process with precise, man-made editors.
Pigs with this condition may be reliable models of human atheroscelerosis in biomedical research. The TALEN-modified pig is not the first model of human heart disease (see Model pigs face a messy path),
but the technique makes genetic engineering less costly and more efficient.""I d be exaggerating if
I said that pigs and cows can now be thought of as big mice, but we are moving in that direction,
says Heiner Niemann, a bioengineer at the Institute of Farm animal Genetics in Neustadt, Germany. The excitement surrounding these technological advances is bittersweet, however.
Originally, engineered animals were produced with the aim of making food safer, healthier and more abundant.
Wagner says he has tasted not the milk from his special cow because he s not permitted to under New zealand law."
Biofuels are falling from grace around the world as critics charge that devoting millions of hectares of agricultural land to fuel crops is driving up food prices
this has forced Brazil to import some 1. 5 billion litres of maize (corn) ethanol from the United states over the past 2 Â years.
-and-trade system to limit greenhouse-gas emissions remains one of the key failures of Obama s first term.
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.
Christine Gregoire, Bob Perciasepe A former governor of Washington, Gregoire signed a 2010 law setting up greenhouse-gas reporting requirements
if unexpected, reduction in US greenhouse-gas emissions during his first term. The decline is in part a result of the economic slowdown and a shift in electricity production from coal to natural gas,
These include federal greenhouse-gas standards for vehicles and the introduction by more than half of the states of significant energy and climate initiatives that could deliver further reductions  perhaps even the 17%cut by 2020 that Obama promised at the United nations climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009.
As a next step, Obama s administration is expected to impose two greenhouse-gas regulations targeted at power plants
when it patented a method for engineering transgenic crops to produce sterile seed, forcing farmers to buy new seed for each planting.
This week, the US Supreme court hears arguments that pit Monsanto against 75-year-old Indiana soya-bean farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman
I learned that patents are not available to protect my soybeans, I would think of some kind of technological fix,
Bowman was a regular customer for Monsanto s herbicide-resistant soya beans for his main crop,
but bypassed the company by purchasing seed for a late-season crop from a grain elevator known to contain Monsanto s transgenic seed.
That is the strategy of Ginkgo Bioworks, a four-year-old synthetic biology company in Boston, Massachusetts, that develops made-to-order microbes to churn out marketable chemicals.
For accurate billing and theft protection, Gingko needs to control that use, so it is developing
supplied by Ginkgo, in its fermentation medium. The approach could even be used in nanotechnology, by making engineered nanobots that are dependent on a proprietary raw material.
Organic farmers want ways to keep genetically engineered crops from contaminating their fields, and food safety groups are concerned about contamination of food crops with products from a new generation of crops engineered to produce chemicals or pharmaceuticals.
By ensuring that genetically modified plants survive for only one planting""that technology would have alleviated a lot of environmental concerns,
Natasha Gilbertafrican agriculture African farmers must use sustainable and environmentally friendly technologies to reverse rising hunger levels across the continent,
a group of agriculture and development experts based in London. One recommended practice is pictured in Malawi:
planting crops under fertilizer trees, such as Faidherbia albida, which provide nutrients to the soil below.
It says that sustainable intensification of African agriculture will produce higher yields and more nutritious foods while reducing reliance on fertilizers and pesticides,
thus lowering greenhouse-gas emissions. Energy spending Investment in renewable energy technologies still falls short of the level needed to clean up the global energy system
US regulation misses some GM cropsit took scientists 85 years to breed a commercial apple that could fend off apple scab,
Instead of dousing orchards with fungicides 30 Â times a season, farmers could spray the resistant crop just twice.
and apples trees were becoming infected again. Breeders were back to square one. Even armed with modern breeding techniques and 15 Â known defence genes in the apple family
it would take another 40  years to breed a resistant strain conventionally, says Henk  Schouten, a plant scientist at Wageningen University in The netherlands.
Because he wants to insert DNA only from related apple varieties, Schouten argues that his product should not be regulated in the same way as genetically modified (GM CROPS that are engineered with bacterial or VIRAL DNA.
and small companies to pursue speciality crops, such as apples, that have so far been ignored by biotechnology giants."
"There are any number of companies exploring new techniques to produce crops that don t trigger regulatory oversight,
or niche crops that can t support the escalating costs of regulatory approval. The regulation of GM CROPS in the United states is based on laws that were not tailor-made for the technology.
has stuck so far to a strict interpretation of a 1957 law designed to protect agriculture against plant pests that was coopted in 1986 to regulate GM CROPS.
In 2011, APHIS regulators announced that a herbicide-tolerant Kentucky bluegrass would not fall under their purview,
because the lawn-and-garden company developing it did not use Agrobacterium or any other plant-pest DNA to engineer the grass.
The company, Scotts  Miracle-Gro of Marysville, Ohio, instead used a gene gun to fire DNA-coated gold particles into plant cells.
a consumer advocacy group in Washington  DC, the news highlighted the shortcomings of the US regulatory system for GM  crops."
and who want to encourage corporate development of niche crops. Dennis Gray, a developmental biologist at the University of Florida in Apopka
is trying to use genes from grape varieties to engineer a wine grape that is resistant to Pierce s disease a condition caused by a bacterium that has made it difficult to grow wine grapes in the state.
He says that the lack of regulation is encouraging researchers like him to pursue such small-market crops."
Sally  Mackenzie, a plant biologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, contacted APHIS about the high-yield offspring of a transgenic sorghum grass plant
and may allow her to launch a company to develop her grass variety. Agricultural giants Monsanto, based in St  Louis, Missouri,
that it would not regulate a herbicide-tolerant maize (corn) made using zinc-finger nucleases.
since the maize project, but is working with outside researchers to develop other crops using similar technology.
Jennifer Kuzma, a policy analyst at North carolina State university in Raleigh, says that a lack of regulation for the latest approaches could fuel public suspicions about GM CROPS."
Schouten, meanwhile, did not skirt regulation for his apples after all. In April 2012, APHIS told him that the agency would regulate his variety
in spite of the fact that the genes he introduced came from other apples. This was used because he Agrobacterium to insert the genes it did not matter to regulators that no trace of Agrobacterium DNA remained in his plants.
and that organic fertilizers such as manure are cheaper and greener. Malnourishment affects roughly 223 Â million people in Sub-saharan africa about one-quarter of the region s total population according to estimates by the Food and agriculture organization (FAO) of the United nations. Most of the region missed out on the green revolution
which boosted crop yields in other parts of the world. Farmers in some areas of Africa have begun to adopt fertilizers only in the past decade.
compared with more than 200 Â kilograms used in high-intensity agriculture, such as in Germany. Yields are typically 30-80%lower as a result.
an agricultural scientist at the International Center for Tropical agriculture (CIAT) in Nairobi, is to provide smallholders with easy-to-understand information that will help them to decide what works best,
Agronomists, he adds, would also be able to make informed recommendations on the right mix
says Johannes  Kotschi, a soil scientist at the Association for Agriculture and Ecology in Marburg, Germany,
Kotschi also thinks that organic fertilizers such as manure, compost and plant residues should play a greater part in efforts to increase productivity."
"Its use produces greenhouse gases and it ruins soil fertility rather than improving it. He points out that many smallholders in Sub-saharan africa can scarcely afford to buy mineral fertilizers anyway.
"Conservation agriculture is excessively time-consuming, and organic fertilizer produced on-farm does not replenish soils with nutrients,
he says.""We will need to find solutions that fit local farmers. The times when African farmers blindly applied
Chemical treatment could cut cost of biofuela mild chemical treatment that completely dissolves wood, dried grasses and other indigestible plant matter could greatly improve the efficiency of converting waste biomass to fuel.
Ethanol and other biofuels, including certain petrol and diesel substitutes, can be produced from simple sugars, usually by fermentation.
including sugar cane and maize (corn). But most of the biomass produced in agriculture and forestry lies unused in more-complex chains of sugars, for example lignin and cellulose.
These tough, recalcitrant materials, which provide structural support for wood, grasses and the non-edible parts of crops, are hard to break down.
Producers of cellulosic ethanol currently spend 15-20%of their fuel costs on acids and enzymes to loosen
and chew up the fibres. By adding a dash of dilute sulphuric acid to a colourless, herbal-smelling liquid called à Â-valerolactone (GVL),
The London Company was a joint stock enterprise that established the Jamestown Settlement in 1607providing transportation to pioneers in return for seven years of labor in America where they cultivated tobacco and other crops for the company's profit.
In the west ranchers set barbed wire to hold their cattle and this in effect set up their property boundaries.@
They let their cattle just roam free. Luckily the cattle are not a consideration for the land of the moon.
I think the real goal would be to mine Helium3 if possible. But if the homesteaders find water somewhere in the depths of the moon too I feel water found on the moon would be worth like gold
the fruit of several years of intensive research for them to taste even take for themselves.
A grizzled maverick of an engineer named David Hall designed the lidar that Google uses.
They drove teams of horses herds of goats drifts of sheep. Animals Smith argues are autonomous.
Advocates like to say that there is no technical reason the new Mercedes needs hands on the wheel to steer through a turn.
Watching the video it reminded me of the old Test Driving video game on the PC a long time ago. lol---In space no one can hear a tree fall in the forest.
My concept car ecologically friendly and low CO2 footprint will be an external combustion CNG fueled car made almost exclusively of wood
I bought too many radishes(??12:15: haha omg HTML is SUCH A BITCH to use on an iphone.
the cracks on the back of the phone are shedding small shards of glass into my palm. 12:20:
37 I forget where the carrot symbol is every single time I need to type it the iphone is not liveblog-friendly 4/5 stars 12:39 I messe up the closing HTML tags again12:
I hope the texture is like the fur of an Australian brush tail possum. 1: 20 commenter says I do not understand how this guy still has a job...
You can't really blame Apple for your inability to keep your phone safe. Cool1:
if apple is ripping off Nokia with these bright colors???Fire that person1: 31 the iphone 5c will cost $100 for 16gb and $200 for 32gb.
48 better battery life than the last iphone says apple. That's good that matters. 1: 51 I cheated
The camera is unheralded as maybe THE main thing that puts the iphone above android phones in quality--apple's image processing is amazing way better than even flashy HTC
if the NSA demands it apple will turn over your fingerprint which will then be connected to your entire online identity and location.
05 oh apple says they encrypt the fingerprints. Cool because its not like it was revealed just last week that the NSA has been working for decades to break just that kind of encryption oh wait2:
and is limited as a liveblogging tool. 2: 12 apple says we really love music. Whoooooooa maybe you shoulda workshopped that sentiment man2:
Dan is complaining about fundamentally Apple things yet still owns an iphone. If you don't like the lack of 4g the terrible glass on the back the poor html get a different phone!
Especially with how long Apple goes between releases. The more real competition the better it is for us consumers!@
http://live. theverge. com/apple-iphone-5s-liveblog/I do not understand how this guy still has a job...
You can't really blame Apple for your inability to keep your phone safe. Second your phone isn't old.
You're like one of those idiots who complains about Duffelblog or Onion articles. I realize this is a popular science magazine
Apple's addition of a fingerprint reader in its latest smartphone the iphone 5s is part of its strategy to double down on device security. by Zack Whittaker September 10 2013 12:27 PM PDT Apple has unveiled its smartphone
a fingerprint reader it's calling Touch ID. With its move Apple could end up making the technology commonplace as rivals might feel compelled to follow suit.
Most likely Apple fanboys but aside from that Popsci is a science magazine yes but it isn't like they are accredited a scholarly science journal.
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