Gene promotes deep rooting
of rice and give drought edge


Scientists have identified a gene that helps rice plants produce grain even during drought conditions.

The gene is the blueprint for a protein that makes the plant’s root tips more responsive to the pull of gravity.

Rice plants with the gene send their roots deeper into the soil than those without it. They can access water farther underground.

The gene is called DRO1, short for “deeper rooting.”

The Japanese researchers found that, under moderate drought conditions, plants without DRO1 produced 60 percent less rice than normal. But plants with the gene were virtually unaffected.

“This group of authors has identified a gene that seems to be of pretty significant importance,” said Julia Bailey-Serres, a rice researcher at the University of California-Riverside, who was not involved in the study.

Under severe drought conditions that cut rice production to near zero in plants without the gene, the DRO1 plants still managed to produce some grain.

“There was only 30 percent grain yield in this new rice variety under that condition, but still, comparing zero to 30 is quite a significant insurance policy for the farmer,” said Ms. Bailey-Serres.

She added that it would take only a few years to introduce this gene to shallow-rooting rice varieties around the world.

Rice is a staple crop for roughly half the world’s population, and climate change is expected to pose challenges to crop production.

The Japanese researchers say other crops, such as maize, have genes similar to DRO1, which may prove useful in adapting them to drought conditions as well.



U.S. says some overseas posts
will remain closed all this week


The United States says most of its diplomatic missions in the Middle East and North Africa will remain closed all week. More than 20 embassies and consulates were closed Sunday due to security concerns.

The State Department said Sunday that a small number of additional posts will be closed, while others will reopen Monday.

It said the extension was not related to new security threats, but that officials were simply exercising caution.

Sunday's move to close U.S. embassies and consulates came several days after American officials warned of a possible al-Qaida attack.

Most of the more than 20 diplomatic missions are in Muslim countries, where Sunday is a regular business day, and included embassies in Iraq, Libya and Yemen. The embassy in Baghdad will reopen on Monday.

The United States has issued a global travel alert to American citizens that said the potential for terrorist attacks is strong in the Middle East and North Africa.

The State Department says diplomatic posts in the following places will be closed all week: Abu Dhabi, Amman, Cairo, Riyadh, Dhahran, Jeddah, Doha, Dubai, Kuwait, Manama, Muscat, Sanaa, Tripoli, Antanarivo, Bujumbura, Djibouti, Khartoum, Kigali, and Port Louis.

The following embassies and consulates were closed Sunday, but will be allowed to reopen on Monday: Dhaka, Algiers, Nouakchott, Kabul, Herat, Mazar el Sharif, Baghdad, Basrah, and Irbil.

U.S. lawmakers and former high-ranking officials called the decision to close diplomatic missions and to issue the global travel alert an extraordinary move.

Other countries took similar actions, and the international police organization Interpol issued its own security alert.

The U.S. security moves come nearly a year after Islamic militants attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing four Americans including the U.S. ambassador.



Apple gets a trade break
allowing continued imports


The Obama administration has overturned a U.S. trade panel's ban on imports of some Apple iPads and older iPhones into the United States, dealing a setback to Apple's rival, Samsung.
 
U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman Saturday overturned the ban, which the U.S. International Trade Commission had announced June 4, saying some Apple products violated a patent owned by Samsung.
 
In a letter to Trade Commission Chairman Irving Williamson, Froman said this policy decision was not an endorsement or a criticism of the commission's decision or analysis. He also said Samsung could continue to pursue its case through the courts.
 
This was the first time since 1987 that a U.S. administration had taken action against a product ban that the Trade Commission had ordered. The Trade Commission ban was to have taken effect Sunday.
 
Apple welcomed Saturday's decision, while Seoul-based Samsung said it was disappointed.
 
The two companies have taken their disputes to courts around the globe.
 
Last year, Samsung was ordered to pay Apple $1 billion in damages for patent infringements. A judge later reduced the award.
 


Rising temperatures are linked
to rising hostilities in  study


As global temperatures rise, so do levels of hostility and violence, according to a new study.

Scientists from the University of California-Berkeley and Princeton University  discovered a strong link between shifts in climate to human violence around the world.  The study found that even minor climate deviations, such as slight changes in normal temperature and rainfall, can greatly increase the risk of conflict.

The link between climate variations and violent behavior was noted on a small scale—in one-on-one crimes like assault, murder or domestic abuse—as well as on a much grander scale involving riots or civil war.

Unlike previous similar studies, this project combined data and evidence from a wider number of fields such as economics, political science, geography, psychology and archeology, according to Edward Miguel from the University of California-Berkeley.

Climate shifts researchers explored included temperature as well as rainfall. from very low rainfall and drought conditions to extreme amounts of rainfall.

The scientists say  their findings could have critical implications for understanding the impact of future climate change on human societies. Many global climate models project temperature increases of at least 2 degrees C over the next half century.

The researchers compared extensive data,  spanning from ancient times until today.  Collecting more material than any prior study, the researchers were able to show that the Earth’s climate plays a more influential role in human affairs than previously thought.

Among the historical correlations researchers found was the case of the advanced Mayan civilization which was established around 2000 BC in what is now Mexico and Central America.  Some scholars say this Mesoamerican civilization peaked between the years 250 to 900 AD, when it mysteriously collapsed.

Scientists and historians, including those involved in this study, theorize that climate may have had a lot to do with the Mayan decline and failure.

“The Mayan civilization, the Mayan empire…during the 9th century AD, experienced an unprecedented century of warm, dry weather,” said Miguel. “In fact, they had three mega-droughts during that century and at the end of the third mega-drought, that’s the time at which that civilization collapsed into civil war never to recover its previous grandeur.”

Looking at the link between climate and violence in more modern times, Miguel pointed to hot temperatures and dry conditions in Somalia  and the extreme violence it has endured in recent times.

“When you have temperature spikes on top of what’s already a very hot place, that’s associated with political violence in Somalia, so Somalia is an African case where you can see this come through very clearly,” said Miguel.

The study also found a link between high temperatures and a rise in domestic violence in India.

In Brazil, scientists found a correlation between rainfall and land invasions. Miguel pointed to a landless people’s movement in the South American country that organizes violent raids.

“It turns out that when rainfall is really bad, either way too much or way too little rainfall in a given year, in those years you see spikes in the number of land invasions in Brazil,” said Miguel.

Results of the Berkeley/Princeton research could be used to predict future violent trends and potential trouble spots around the world, which could help in the development of strategies that would address possible violence and conflict in the future.

“There are at least two different approaches you can take, given these findings,” Miguel said.

The first approach is building better forecasts for where there will be potential violence going forward.

“So if we know, for instance, that temperatures are rising very quickly in a part of the world that is prone to civil conflict, then early on in that year or maybe there’s a drought that year, that is a trouble spot where governments and foreign aid donors and other agencies should focus their efforts,” said Miguel.

The second approach Miguel suggested would be to use the results to really understand just how high the stakes are in dealing with climate change in the next 40 to 50 years.

Politicians could look at the changing climate and try to craft new policies to deal with changing climate, said Miguel. “We can develop new technologies and approaches that are more resilient to a changing climate. That may be our only way out.”



Trust in government plummets
even in European countries


Years into an economic crisis that has rocked the eurozone, European citizens are losing trust in their governments. A recent survey found that trust in political parties is at an all-time low with up to 90 percent in some countries saying politicians are affected by corruption. The survey comes as a number of top political figures in Italy, Spain, and France face allegations of fraud and tax evasion.

Across Europe, citizens are losing trust in their governments.

A recent study carried out by the corruption watchdog Transparency International surveyed people in 107 countries. Only 23 percent said their governments are making effective efforts to beat corruption.

In Europe, the figures were much lower. In Spain, 8 percent felt like corruption was being addressed; in Italy, 13 percent; in Greece and Portugal, just 1 percent.

Valentina Rigamonti of Transparency International  said the crisis of confidence was deepest in the countries hardest hit by the economic crisis, arguably the ones most in need of citizens’ trust.

“The global corruption barometer has showed that corruption is very strong in southern Europe, the countries that are hit by the financial crisis,” said Ms. Rigamonti.

Trust in political parties themselves has also gone down. In Greece, one of the eurozone’s major economic worries, 9 in 10 people surveyed said they think political parties are affected by corruption.

Ms. Rigamonti said that while the deteriorating trust was most noticeable in economic crisis zones, corruption was a problem in every European country, even Nordic nations, which typically have a good reputation for transparency.

“No one of the countries in Europe is clean. All of them are involved in corruption, at different levels with different problems,” said Ms. Rigamonti.

Transparency International’s research comes as politicians across Europe are being hit with accusations of corruption.

Thursday, a prison sentence was upheld for Italy’s former prime minister and current senator, Silvio Berlusconi, for tax fraud.

A day earlier, Spain’s prime minister was forced to defend himself before parliament over corruption allegations, after he was accused of receiving under-the-table cash payments from construction magnates, an accusation he denies.

Last month, the prime minister of the Czech Republic resigned following a corruption scandal involving one of his aides, as did the entire government of Luxembourg, again because of corruption allegations.

William Bartlett is a Europe analyst at the London School of Economics.

He said the economic recession in Europe has not necessarily made corruption worse. Government corruption, he said, has been a problem across Europe for decades.

But he said that when money was tight, the problem became more apparent.

“I think in recession, in a way, strangely enough, although there are less opportunities for corruption because the pie is shrinking and there is less to go around, nevertheless at that time people are much more sensitive to it, so it's much more likely to come to public attention,” said Bartlett.

He said the loss of citizens' trust in their governments was a major problem for European countries as they tried to implement austerity measures.

Bulgaria has recently seen weeks of public protest over alleged government corruption.  In Spain, the allegations over the prime minister’s links to corruption also brought people onto the streets in protest.

“Countries such as Greece, France, Italy, where unemployment is increasing, living standards are falling, whenever these issues crop up, people think, why should we be taking the costs of all of these policies when politicians are not taking part, too?,” said Bartlett.

According to the Transparency International survey, citizens of 51 nations see political parties as their countries' most corrupt institution. And more than half of those surveyed said they feel government is run by special interests.

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An artist's conception of a commercial hydrogen production plant that uses sunlight to split water in order to produce clean hydrogen fuel.


By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services

The dream of using hydrogen as a clean fuel source may be a step closer to reality, according to a new scientific report.

A team of researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder say they have developed a system that would use sunlight as an energy source to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The method would use a vast array of mirrors that would concentrate sunlight onto a single point atop a central tower. The temperatures there could rise to as high as 1,350 Celsius. That energy would then be sent to a reactor vessel containing metal oxides, which, when heated, release oxygen atoms, according to the report in the journal Science.

That, in turn, would cause the material to seek out new oxygen atoms. When steam produced from the boiling water in the reactor vessel is added, the oxygen molecules would adhere to the metal oxide, freeing hydrogen molecules to be collected as gas, the report said.

“We have designed something here that is very different from other methods and frankly something that nobody thought was possible before,” said Alan Weimer, a professor, in a statement. He is a member of the team that worked on the project. “Splitting water with sunlight is the Holy Grail of a sustainable hydrogen economy.”

While there are other methods to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, Colorado Boulder scientists say their method is unique because the two chemical reactions can be done at the same temperature.

“The more conventional approaches require the control of both the switching of the temperature in the reactor from a hot to a cool state, and the introduction of steam into the system,” said Associate Professor Charles Musgrave. “One of the big innovations in our system is that there is no swing in the temperature. The whole process is driven by either turning a steam valve on or off.”

Despite the findings, the commercialization of such a solar-thermal reactor is likely years away.

With the new method, the amount of hydrogen produced for fuel cells or for storage is entirely dependent on the amount of metal oxide. which is made up of a combination of iron, cobalt, aluminum and oxygen, and how much steam is introduced into the system.

The research results were published in Friday’s issue of Science.



U.S. growth put at 1.7%,
better than predictions


The world’s largest economy grew only slightly in the second quarter, expanding at an annualized rate of 1.7 percent between April and June.  Despite the lackluster growth and a downward revision in U.S. gross domestic output in the first quarter, the GDP numbers were still better than some analysts expected.  But the data also suggest the economy is still not growing fast enough for the central bank to change course on monetary policies that have kept interest rates at record lows.
 
Gross domestic product, GDP,  the broadest measure of the U.S. economy, confirms continuing slow but steady growth led by better than expected consumer spending and a much improved housing market.  Economists say it shows an economy barely in recovery, but one resilient enough to absorb deep government spending cuts enacted by Congress earlier this year.

Joseph Gagnon, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., says the numbers took him by surprise.
 
"I’m really amazed at how well we’re doing given the sequester  and the big tax increases we had this year.  Although I was predicting a year ago that if we could have avoided the sequester and the tax increases this year, we could have kicked that can down the road another year or two  that we might be growing over three percent, almost four percent this year," says Gagnon. The sequester is the mandatory government spending cuts.
 
The U.S. central bank has said as much, warning Congress that a continuing focus on government austerity could further slow the recovery.

Anthony Valeri, at LPL Financial, says weak growth in the first half of 2013 means the Federal Reserve, as the U.S. central bank is referred to, is unlikely to scale back too quickly on its easy money policies.
 
“I think Bernanke and company made it pretty clear that they are still very dovish. They are in no rush to remove accommodation  and that they are in no rush, more importantly, to raise interest rates,” says Valeri of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben  Bernanke.
 
The Federal Reserve has been purchasing $85 billion a month in bonds and mortgage-backed securities to keep long-term interest rates at record lows. Experts say ending the program too soon could stall the housing recovery.

Economist Ken Simonson says that would hurt employment.
 
“Clearly, over time, more people would find they don’t qualify for a mortgage if rates do keep rising, so that could put a lid on (bring to a halt) how high home sales and home construction go.”
 


Week in the woods will reset
the biological clock of humans


A week-long wilderness escape from the electrical lights that illuminate most of our daily lives is enough to reset our internal circadian clocks to synchronize with sunrise and sunset, according to new research from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Eight hardy study participants spent a week camping in Colorado’s Eagles Nest Wilderness with just the blaze of the sun and the glow of a campfire for light. At the end of the trip researchers found that the campers’ biological night times shifted to start when the sun went down and end when the sun came back up.

The shift happened for all the participants, even though some are night owls in their normal lives and others are early birds.

“What’s remarkable is how, when we’re exposed to natural sunlight, our clocks perfectly become in sync in less than a week to the solar day,” said Kenneth Wright, who led the study.

Electrical lighting, widely available beginning in the 1930s, has affected the human internal circadian clocks, which tell the bodies when to prepare for sleep and when to prepare for wakefulness. The ability to flip a switch and flood a room with light allows humans to be exposed to light much later into the night than is possible naturally.

Even when people are exposed to electrical lights during daylight hours, the intensity of indoor lighting is much lower than sunlight and the color of electrical light also differs from natural light, which changes shade throughout the day.

To quantify the effects of electrical lighting, a research team led by Wright, and including undergraduate and doctoral students, monitored the study participants for one week as they went about their normal daily lives. The participants wore wrist monitors that recorded the intensity of light they were exposed to, the timing of that light, and their activity, allowing the researchers to infer when they were sleeping.

At the end of the week, the researchers also recorded the timing of participants’ circadian clocks in the laboratory by measuring the presence of the hormone melatonin. The release of melatonin is one of the ways bodies signal the onset of biological nighttime. Melatonin levels decrease again at the start of  the biological daytime.

The same metrics were recorded during and after a second week when the participants, six men and two women with a mean age of 30, went camping in the Rocky Mountains. During the week, flashlights and personal electronic devices were not allowed.

On average, participants’ biological night times started about two hours later when they were exposed to electrical lights than after a week of camping. During the week when participants went about their normal lives, they also woke up before their biological night ended.

After the camping trip when study subjects were exposed to four times the intensity of light compared with their normal lives participants’ biological nighttimes began near sunset and ended at sunrise. They also woke up just after their biological night had ended. Becoming in sync with sunset and sunrise happened for all individuals even though the measurements from the previous week indicated that some people were prone to staying up late and others to getting up earlier.

“When people are living in the modern world, living in these constructed environments, we have the opportunity to have a lot of differences among individuals,” said Wright. “Some people are morning types and others like to stay up later. What we found is that natural light-dark cycles provide a strong signal that reduces the differences that we see among people, night owls and early birds, dramatically.”