Climbing one of the world’s biggest granite walls is different from climbing trees, as National Park Service botanist Martin Hutten discovered while dangling from a cliff in the spray of Vernal Falls high above the Yosemite Valley. Hutten apprenticed in the logging industry before he started graduate school, so he new how to climb trees. “I could trust myself to a rope,” he recalls, “but I’d definitely never hung off a cliff or collected [samples] from a cliff.”
Category Archives: Formats
African GM safety drill
The African Union has set up a school to educate and train future regulators in genetically modified (GM) crop biosafety. The African Biosafety Network of Expertise (ABNE) was officially launched in April in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, with a five-year, $10.4 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Continue reading African GM safety drill
The Sun as comet snatcher
New simulations suggest that the Sun may have captured more than its fair share of comets from the primordial star-forming soup. The study, led by Harold Levison of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, seeks to account for the abundance of comets in the outer reaches of the Solar System.
Read the rest of this news story on Nature News [html] or here [pdf]
Fruitfly larvae smell the light
Researchers in Germany have genetically modified fruitfly larvae so that they can smell light. The team, led by Klemens Störtkuhl of Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, managed to change the larvae’s odour receptors so that they respond to blue light instead of smells. The researchers hope that the move will allow them to unravel the way in which the larvae detect and interpret smells.
Read the rest of this news story on Nature News [html] or here [pdf]