The EMF27 study shows that without policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions fossil fuels will remain the major energy source in 2100 with resulting increases in greenhouse gas emissions.
These papers touch on issues as diverse as climate policy land use and agriculture and non-CO2 greenhouse gases among others.
However our study which compares long-term scenario results across a large suite of technologically-detailed models shows that fossil resource constraints are unlikely to limit greenhouse gas emissions in this century.
#New vaccine against lung diseases in goats and sheepan intranasal spray was developed using local isolated bacterium in Malaysia
or pneumonic diseases in goats and sheep that was developed and patented by its scientists. The soft launch of STVAC7 the first intranasal spray vaccine for goats
and sheep was officiated by the Deputy Minister of Science Technology and Innovation Datuk Dr Abu Bakar Mohamad Diah in a brief ceremony on 24.oct 2013.
The vaccine was developed and tested from 1998 to 2005 by UPM scientists led by Prof Dr Mohd Zamri Saad of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine.
since in Malaysia alone there were more than 600000 goats and sheep at present and the figure is expected to increase to 1 million by 2015 a growth rate of 12.1%as projected by the Veterinary Services Department.
The company's collaboration with UPM would ensure that it would produce the STVAC7 vaccines under Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP)
The FTU services centre which cost RM14 million to develop is now serving a horde of local companies like Malaysia Agriculture Hightech Stella Gen Johor Biomicrobe Pascal Biotech MVP One
or respiratory diseases of goats and sheep caused by bacteria. It was developed and produced using sophisticated recombinant technology
which unlike the imported vaccines has been demonstrated to provide protection against bacterium infection in the small ruminants like goats and sheep.
and the goats and sheep farmers could benefit from the STVAC7. The product itself is ready for the market
Dr. Gee however has applied now successfully microct to visualize silicified conifer seed cones as old as 150 million years without cutting sawing
Because each specimen is precious the main goal of this research was to study the internal structure of fossil conifer seed cones without destroying
This study along with computer animations and detailed figures presenting microct imaging is freely available for viewing in the November issue of Applications in Plant sciences.
Pinaceae--the pine family Araucariaceae--a family of coniferous trees currently found only in the Southern hemisphere and Cheirolepidiaceae--a now-extinct family of conifers known only from the Mesozoic.
This tells us that 150 million years ago the ancient forests of western North america consisted of members of these three families.
The fossil cones of the Araucariaceae from Utah confirm that this family which now grows naturally in Australasia
and South america once had a worldwide distribution notes Gee. Dr. Gee hopes this study will provide researchers with an alternative to traditional techniques such as thin-sectioning
#Defending food crops: Whitefly experimentation to prevent contamination of agricultureon November 8th Jove the Journal of Visualized Experiments will introduce a new technique to aid in the development of defenses against diseases threatening food crops worldwide.
The method published under the title Transmitting Plant viruses Using Whiteflies is applicable to such at-risk crops as tomatoes and common bean plants.
The whitefly method provides a means of interfering with the plant-contamination process as well as the cultivation of plants that are altogether resistant to infection.
For example the described technique is used to develop tomatoes with resistance to tomato yellow leaf curl virus
which is a big problem in tomato production in the southern U s . and in many parts of the world said Jane Polston the principle investigator at the University of Florida's Department of Plant pathology.
In the article accompanying their Jove video Polston and her colleagues write that numerous genera of whitefly-transmitted plant viruses (such as Begomovirus Carlavirus Crinivirus Ipomovirus Torradovirus) are part of an emerging and economically significant group of pathogens affecting important food
and fiber crops. The technique includes reliably rearing whiteflies with a specific virus while omitting the possibility of cross-contamination to other viruses--an easily encountered problem because of the sheer number of whiteflies used in testing.
The Rice lab of chemist James Tour has enhanced a polymer material to make it far more impermeable to pressurized gas
Tour and his colleagues at Rice and in Hungary Slovenia and India reported their results this week in the online edition of the American Chemistry Society journal ACS Nano.
By adding modified single-atom-thick graphene nanoribbons (GNRS) to thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) the Rice lab made it 1000 times harder for gas molecules to escape Tour said.
The researchers led by Rice graduate student Changsheng Xiang produced thin films of the composite material by solution casting GNRS treated with hexadecane and TPU a block copolymer of polyurethane that combines hard and soft materials.
Co-authors of the paper are Rice graduate students Daniel Hashim Zheng Yan Zhiwei Peng Chih-Chau Hwang Gedeng Ruan and Errol Samuel;
Rice alumnus Paris Cox; Bostjan Genorio a former postdoctoral researcher at Rice and now an assistant professor at the University of Ljubljana Slovenia;
Akos Kukovecz an associate professor of chemistry and ZÃ ltan KÃ nya head of the Department of Applied and Environmental Chemistry both at the University of Szeged Hungary;
Parambath Sudeep a research scholar at Cochin University of Science and Technology India; Rice senior faculty fellow Robert Vajtai;
and Pulickel Ajayan the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Mechanical engineering and Materials Science and of chemistry at Rice.
Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science at Rice.
The Air force Research Laboratory through the University Technology Corp. the Office of Naval Research MURI graphene program and the Air force Office of Scientific research MURI program supported the research.
The environmental scientists experts in air quality atmospheric chemistry and ecology have been studying the fate of nitrogen-based compounds that are blown into natural areas from power plants automobile exhaust and--increasingly--industrial agriculture.
However no government regulations currently limit the amount of ammonia (NH3) that enters the atmosphere through agricultural fertilization or manure from animal husbandry
The team of scientists--comprising researchers from Harvard SEAS the National park service the USDA Forest Service the U s. Environmental protection agency
In Eastern temperate forests like those in Great smoky mountains national park the most sensitive elements of the ecosystem are the hardwood trees
In the forests of Mount rainier national park it's the lichens that suffer first; their critical load is between 2. 5 and 7. 1 kg/ha/yr
#Grains fumigated ecologicallya substance present in nature turned out to be just as effective as other chemical compounds to eradicate harmful organisms in stored grains without negative effects.
Agro a Mexican enterprise that operates silos and warehouses located in Sinaloa (Northwest Mexico) created a new technology of effective fumigation that solely uses ozone.
when in the middle of a silo or warehouse fill with grains. There they perforate the external layer of the stored products feed freely have good temperature
and ten percent of all the stored grains worldwide mainly corn wheat sorghum rice and beans. Until five years ago the main fumigation technique and pest control inside warehouses
However this can be substituted by an ozone system that ventilates the grains for 48 hours.
and modifying the internal atmosphere of the room using this technique pest free grains are obtained during the whole purchase sale and storage cycle.
In Mexico companies with large grain and flour warehouses already use this technology. Thanks to this technological innovations and the business plan created with the help of the Mexico-United Estates Foundation for Science (FUMEC) the Mexican enterprise that had 10 employees in 2008 today counts with 73 permanent employees and 20
temps for gathering season and grain storage. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Investigaciã n y Desarrollo.
#Seeing the forest and the trees: Panoramic, very-high-resolution, time-lapse photography for plant and ecosystem researchever wonder what plants do
How about an entire forest or grassland? Not even the most dedicated plant researcher can be continuously present to track environmental effects on plant behavior
The new technique is demonstrated in the September issue of Applications in Plant sciences. The beauty of time-lapse is that we can make observations in the plant's time scale.
Changes among the plants can be seen as they respond to cabbage white butterfly caterpillars and stinkbugs introduced during the experiment.
Current research using the Gigapan system is investigating processes including plant response to grazing and precipitation patterns.
comparisons of the energy consumption greenhouse gas emissions and total cost of ownership for the medium-duty vehicles.
and emit about 40 percent less greenhouse gases than diesel trucks for about the same total cost taking into account both the purchase price
and reduces greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 50 percent. Where they are stopped frequently and started the higher efficiency of the electric motor at low speeds
The research team took into account the sources of electricity used to charge the electric vehicles in evaluating greenhouse gas emissions.
Electricity produced from hydroelectric sources--more common in the northwest United states--dramatically reduced total greenhouse gas emissions for electric vehicles operated there.
In every state in the U s. electric trucks provided some reduction in greenhouse gas emissions with urban routes providing the most advantage.
In about half of the states the electric trucks cut greenhouse gas emissions by a third
and in locations with relatively low greenhouse gas emissions from electricity electric delivery trucks both save money
or duty cycle application fleet operators could enjoy higher returns on investment while saving energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Patrick Brown an assistant professor in plant breeding and genetics said having a complete characterization of the locations (loci) affecting specific traits will speed up the adaptation of sorghum and other related grasses to new production
While much improvement has been done for grain sorghum Brown said little improvement has been done for sweet or bioenergy types.
Part of the reason for caring about all of that now is that up to this point sorghum has mostly been grown for grain.
But now there is a lot of interest in using sorghum for other things such as growing sweet sorghum in areas where they grow sugarcane and growing biomass sorghum for bioenergy through combustion or cellulosic technology.
and bring it into grain sorghum Brown said. We'll be able to start moving forward.
and use the genes that we bred for in grain sorghum over the last hundred years and move them into sweet sorghum and biomass sorghum.
The case I always make is that over here we have grain sorghum where we've done almost all the plant breeding
For that genetic diversity to be useful to grain sorghum we need to know where the genes are for height
while keeping our grain sorghum short and early like we need it he said. On the other hand Brown added that
or biomass sorghum researchers will need to bring in some of the genes from grain sorghum for traits like seed quality or early-season vigor.
Sweet sorghum where you squeeze the sugary juice out like sugarcane may be closer on the horizon.
There is an ethanol plant starting up in southern Illinois that plans to use 25 percent sweet sorghum.
and improvements there are other value-added opportunities for sorghum grain. It's not quite as nutritious as corn
but researchers are looking at it as a way to combat obesity. They are looking at compounds that will prevent you from absorbing all the nutrition in your food in the small intestine he said.
Another gene found shows that sorghum produces a huge amount of antioxidant in the outer layer of the grain.
It produces 10 times more antioxidant than blueberries. The yield of sorghum hybrids with those traits aren't quite
solar-lighting technology cookstoves drip irrigation and a line of Nokia cellphones. From their research as well as interviews with product designers the researchers drew up guidelines on how to design for emerging markets.
and reliability were also big factors for small farmers in choosing a system for drip irrigation--an efficient means of delivering small amounts of water directly to the base of each plant.
Farmers tended to choose systems that came with service plans along with extras beyond the irrigation system itself.
The researchers also found that modular irrigation systems were attractive: Farmers could easily buy a small system then add more components as their farms grow.
#World-changing technology enables crops to take nitrogen from the aira major new technology has been developed by The University of Nottingham
which enables all of the world's crops to take nitrogen from the air rather than expensive and environmentally damaging fertilisers.
However only a very small number of plants most notably legumes (such as peas beans and lentils) have the ability to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere with the help of nitrogen fixing bacteria.
and for most crops currently being grown across the world this also means a reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser.
The implications for agriculture are enormous as this new technology can provide much of the plant's nitrogen needs.
A leading world expert in nitrogen and plant science Professor Cocking has recognised long that there is a critical need to reduce nitrogen pollution caused by nitrogen based fertilisers Nitrate pollution is a major problem as is also the pollution of the atmosphere by ammonia
and can be applied to all crops. Over the last 10 years The University of Nottingham has conducted a series of extensive research programmes
The University of Nottingham's Plant and Crop sciences Division is acclaimed internationally as a centre for fundamental and applied research underpinning its understanding of agriculture food production and quality and the natural environment.
Dr Susan Huxtable Director of Intellectual Property Commercialisation at The University of Nottingham believes that the N-Fix technology has significant implications for agriculture she said:
There is a substantial global market for the N-Fix technology as it can be applied globally to all crops.
N-Fix has the power to transform agriculture while at the same time offering a significant cost benefit to the grower through the savings that they will make in the reduced costs of fertilisers.
Agriculture has to change and N-Fix can make a real and positive contribution to that change.
In the paper researchers from Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) show two ways that solar steam can be used for sterilization--one setup to clean medical instruments
Sanitation and sterilization are enormous obstacles without reliable electricity said Rice photonics pioneer Naomi Halas the director of LANP
and lead researcher on the project with senior co-author and Rice professor Peter Nordlander. Solar steam's efficiency at converting sunlight directly into steam opens up new possibilities for off-grid sterilization that simply aren't available today.
Halas Rice's Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering professor of physics professor of chemistry and professor of biomedical engineering is one of the world's most-cited chemists.
Solar steam's efficiency comes from light-harvesting nanoparticles that were created at LANP by Rice graduate student Oara Neumann the lead author on the PNAS study.
The solar steam autoclave was designed by Rice undergraduates at Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen
Oden and Nordlander all of Rice. The research was supported by a Grand Challenges grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and by the Welch Foundation.
Silicon oxide memories transcend a hurdlea Rice university laboratory pioneering memory devices that use cheap plentiful silicon oxide to store data has pushed them a step further with chips that show the technology's practicality.
The team led by Rice chemist James Tour has built a 1-kilobit rewritable silicon oxide device with diodes that eliminate data-corrupting crosstalk.
But as a proof of concept the chip shows it should be possible to surpass the limitations of flash memory in packing density energy consumption per bit
The crossbar memories built by the Rice lab are flexible resist heat and radiation and show promise for stacking in three-dimensional arrays.
The device built by Rice postdoctoral researcher Gunuk Wang lead author of the new paper sandwiches the active silicon oxide between layers of palladium.
and encoded ASCII letters spelling out RICE OWLS into the bits. Setting adjacent bits to the on state--usually a condition that leads to voltage leaks and data corruption in a 1r crossbar structure--had no effect on the information he said.
Co-authors of the paper are Rice graduate student Adam Lauchner; postdoctoral researcher Jian Lin; Douglas Natelson a professor of physics and astronomy and of electrical and computer engineering and Krishna Palem the Ken and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computer science and Electrical and Computer Engineering and a professor of statistics.
Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science at Rice.
Virginia Tech and World Wildlife Fund researchers have found that tigers in central Sumatra live at very low densities lower than previously believed according to a study in the April 2013 issue of Oryx--The International Journal of Conservation.
but they are threatened also in seemingly suitable forests when there is too much human activity. The smallest surviving tiger subspecies Sumatran tigers are extremely elusive
This is the first study to compare the density of Sumatran tigers across various forest types including the previously unstudied peat land.
The WWF field team collected data in partnership with the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry staff.
and gathering of forest products Sunarto said. We found a low population of tigers in these areas even
The Rice labs of lead investigator Jun Lou Pulickel Ajayan and Boris Yakobson all professors in the university's Mechanical engineering and Materials Science Department collaborated with Wigner Fellow Wu
Last year Lou and Ajayan revealed their success at making intricate patterns of intertwining graphene and hbn among them the image of Rice's owl mascot.
The question now is how to bring all the 2-D materials together said co-author Sina Najmaei a Rice graduate student.
Early CVD experiments produced MDS with grains that were too tiny to be of use for their electrical properties.
Now we can grow grain sizes as large as 100 microns Lou said. That's still only about the width of a human hair but in the nanoscale realm it's big enough to work with he said.
when grains met at precise 60-degree angles. The ORNL electron microscopy images make it possible to view these grain boundaries directly.
The Rice researchers see many possible ways to combine the materials not only in two-dimensional layers but also as three-dimensional stacks.
Natural crystals are made of structures bound by the Van der waals force but they're all of the same composition Lou said.
Co-authors of the Nature Materials paper are Rice research associate Xiaolong Zou graduate students Gang Shi and Sidong Lei and Wu Zhou at Oak ridge National Laboratory.
Ajayan is the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Engineering and a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science chemistry and chemical and biomolecular engineering.
Computations were performed on Rice's DAVINCI system and at the Cyberinfrastructure for Computational Research both funded by NSF.
The technique developed by Dr. Annemie Van der Linden and her laboratory at the University of Antwerp in Belgium will be one of the first published in Jove Behavior a new section of the video journal that focuses on observational and experimental techniques that seek to understand human and animal
By utilizing a high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging apparatus (fmri) Dr. Van der Linden and her colleagues can image the brains of live birds in a noninvasive environment.
and to a lesser extent on mice Dr. Van der Linden explains. Thus far songbird brains have been studied using electrophysiological and histological techniques.
The Van der Linden laboratory hopes to use this technique to conduct experiments that be done with humans.
and reproduce behavioral experiments such as bird fmri techniques as described in Dr. Van der Linden's article which are both novel and technically complex.
Proud to be included in this significant new section Dr. Van der Linden says MRI imaging techniques should in the near future lead to major conceptual advances in the study of how the brain changes behavior
even if stitched together from many small crystalline grains is almost as strong as graphene in its perfect crystalline form.
which predicted that grain boundaries can be strong and earlier experiments which indicated that they were much weaker than the perfect lattice.
Large-area sheets required for applications must contain many small grains connected at grain boundaries
and it was unclear how strong those grain boundaries were. This our second Science paper reports on the strength of large-area graphene films grown using chemical vapor deposition (CVD)
and were able to create test samples without harming the graphene notes the paper's lead author Gwan-Hyoung Lee a postdoctoral fellow in the Hone lab. Our findings clearly correct the mistaken consensus that grain boundaries of graphene
But CVD graphene is stitched'together from many small crystalline grains--like a quilt--at grain boundaries that contain defects in the atomic structure Kysar explains.
These grain boundaries can severely limit the strength of large-area graphene if they break much more easily than the perfect crystal lattice
Their experiments demonstrated that CVD graphene with large grains is exactly as strong as exfoliated graphene showing that its crystal lattice is just as perfect.
And more surprisingly their experiments also showed that CVD graphene with small grains even when tested right at a grain boundary is about 90%as strong as the ideal crystal This is an exciting result for the future of graphene
because it provides experimental evidence that the exceptional strength it possesses at the atomic scale can persist all the way up to samples inches
Very little is known about the effects of grain boundaries in 2d materials Kysar adds. Our work shows that grain boundaries in 2d materials can be much more sensitive to processing than in 3d materials.
This is due to all the atoms in graphene being surface atoms so surface damage that would normally not degrade the strength of 3d materials can completely destroy the strength of 2d materials.
Just as tree rings record the environment in which a tree grew traces of barium in the layers of a primate tooth can tell the story of
when an infant was fed exclusively milk when supplemental food started and at what age it was weaned said Katie Hinde professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard university and an affiliate scientist at the UC Davis Primate Center.
when the infant was fed exclusively on mother's milk and the weaning process from mineral traces in teeth.
They found that the Neanderthal baby was fed exclusively on mother's milk for seven months followed by seven months of supplementation--a similar pattern to present-day humans.
Although there is some variation among human cultures the accelerated transition to foods other than mother's milk is thought to have emerged in our ancestral history due in part to more cooperative infant care
The connections between the crystals called grain boundaries can be as important as the crystals themselves in determining the material's performance on a large scale.
The grain boundaries become important in any technology says Hone. Say for example we want to make a solar cell.
and that means that there will be thousands of grain boundaries. We need to understand what they do so we can control them.
The team used atomic-resolution electron microscopy to examine the grain boundaries of this material and saw lines of misaligned atoms.
Once they knew where to find the grain boundaries and what they looked like the team could study the effect of a single grain boundary on the properties of the Mos2.
To do this they built tiny transistors the most basic component in all of electronics out of the crystals
and saw that the single defective line of atoms at the grain boundaries could drastically change the key electronic and optical properties of the Mos2.
The original article was written by Holly Evarts. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference e
#New non-GM technology platform for genetic improvement of sunflower oilseed cropscientists have developed techniques for the genetic improvement of sunflowers using a non-GMO based approach.
and Plant science at NUI Galway and has been published in the journal BMC Plant Biology. Among oilseed crops sunflowers are one of the most important sources of edible vegetable oil for human consumption worldwide.
Sunflower and other oilseed crops are the source of the vast majority of vegetable oil used for cooking and food processing.
The oils are also for industrial processes such as making soaps cosmetics perfumes paints and biofuels.
Also known as elephant grass miscanthus is one of a new generation of renewable energy crops that can be converted into renewable energy by being burned in biomass power stations.
At Aalto University a research team led by Assistant professor Hele Savin is conducting studies on crystalline silicon solar cells
and technological compatibility with the manufacturing technologies currently used by the semiconductor industry Savin explains.
According to Savin the researchers are motivated in their work by the fact that the manufacturing technology players are major corporations in the industry
One goal of the research led by Savin is to find ways to produce equally efficient solar cells using the less expensive but impure silicon rather than the more expensive purified silica.
Hele Savin has been granted major funding for this research by the European Research Council (ERC. Story Source:
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