A judge has prohibited Bayer Cropscience from marketing Liberty Link corn, a genetically modified crop resistant to Ignite and Liberty herbicides, in Brazil. If the Leverkusen, Germany–based company fails to suspend marketing, planting, transportation and import immediately, it will be fined R$50,000 ($28,500) a day. This ruling issued in July by an environmental court in the southern state of Parana is only the second time a Brazilian court has overturned a commercial GM crop already approved by the country’s technical commission on biosafety (CTNBio), says the commission’s coordinator Jairon Nascimento. Continue reading Brazil bans Bayer
Category Archives: Formats
EC woos SMEs
The European Commission (EC) is inviting biotech firms to apply for research grants, if partnered with academia. For the first time, a quarter of the biotech-specific grants will require the participation of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The EC plans to hand out €240.3 million ($310.2 million) in direct research grants in 2011, up 26% from the €190 million ($245.3 million) this year. Continue reading EC woos SMEs
Crested dinosaur pushes back dawn of feathers
A predatory dinosaur with bony bumps on its arms and a strange hump on its back provides evidence that feathers began to appear earlier than researchers thought, according to a report in Nature today.
The new species, named Concavenator corcovatus, was about 4 metres long from nose to tail and lived during the Early Cretaceous period, about 130 million years ago.
Read the rest of this news story on Nature News [html] or here [pdf].
This story got a mention on the Knight Science Journalism Tracker: here.
When Chickens Attack
Robotics engineer Stephen Roberts was taking his lunch at Somerville College at the University of Oxford, in England, when the conversation turned to chicken. It wasn’t the food, though. His dining companion was animal welfare specialist Marian Dawkins, and she thought that the pattern-recognition technology Roberts was explaining might help identify misbehaving hens. Continue reading When Chickens Attack