Information about News And Events, Politics And Government and More

A brewing company in the US is adapting a new system that will make its own high-quality ethanol fuel from discarded beer yeast.

According to a report in Live Science, the company, known as the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., in Chico, California, has developed the new system, in collaboration with E-Fuel Corporation.

The company will start testing the system in the second quarter of this year, and hopes to move to full-scale ethanol production in third quarter.

“This has the potential to be a great thing for the environment and further our commitment to be becoming more energy independent,” said Ken Grossman, founder and president, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.

Currently, Sierra Nevada resells almost 1.6 million gallons of unusable “bottom of the barrel” beer yeast waste to local farmers to be used as dairy feed.

The waste contains 5 to 8 percent alcohol content, including enough yeast and nutrients to enable the ethanol system, the MicroFueler, to raise that level to 15 percent alcohol, allowing for an increased ethanol yield.

“Creating ethanol from discarded organic waste is an excellent example of how the MicroFueler can help eliminate our reliance on the oil industry infrastructure. This is especially true when considering Americans reportedly discard 50 percent of all agricultural farmed products,” said Tom Quinn, E-Fuel founder and CEO.

“Using a waste product to fuel your car is friendlier to the environment and lighter on your wallet, easily beating prices at the gas pump,” he added.

Researchers who tried to use mouse, cow and rabbit eggs to make human clones said on Monday the effort failed to produce workable embryos but added that they showed human cloning should work in principle.

Mixing human and animal cells does not appear to program the egg properly, said Dr. Robert Lanza of Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology.

But using human cells did reprogram the egg cell or oocyte and activate the genes needed to make a viable embryo, Lanza and colleagues reported in the journal Cloning and Stem Cells.

Several teams have tried to make animal-human hybrids as a source of embryonic stem cells, the master cells of the body. Because human eggs are scarce — it requires a surgical procedure to get them from a woman — some scientists came up with the idea of using animal egg cells.

The cloning technique is called somatic cell nuclear transfer. The nucleus is removed from an egg cell and replaced with the nucleus from another type of cell from the donor animal or person who is to be cloned.

Done right, the process starts the egg growing and dividing as if it had been fertilized by a sperm, but the resulting embryo carries mostly the DNA of the donor.

“The idea was to simply to plunk a patient’s DNA into an empty cow or rabbit egg — and presto — you reprogram the DNA back into a stem cell,” Lanza said in a telephone interview.

But teams that have tried to do this have always ended up with what looks like a cell dividing over and over to become an embryo, but which eventually fizzles out.

“For the last decade, we’ve carried out literally hundreds of experiments trying to create patient-specific stem cells using animal eggs,” Lanza said.

BEAUTIFUL HYBRIDS

“We got beautiful little hybrid embryos, but it didn’t work no matter how hard we tried.”

A mouse-human hybrid petered out after just one division. The cow and rabbit human hybrids went further, but stopped at the point when maternal DNA is supposed to kick in and turn the ball of cells into a proper embryo, Lanza said.

Lanza’s team used a new method called global gene expression analysis to see which genes were turned on and off as the eggs grew.

“We never had the tools before to actually look inside the cell and see what’s going on,” Lanza said. It appears that using the egg of another species turns off the genes needed to make an embryo instead of turning them on, he said.

But the human-human clone did turn on the right genes, although it, too stopped dividing before it could produce stem cells, Lanza said.

“We see exactly the same genes turned on in a normal embryo are actually turned on in a human clone,” he said.

Ian Wilmut of the University of Edinburgh, one of the scientists who cloned the first mammal, Dolly the sheep, and editor of the journal, called the results disappointing.

“This very important paper suggests that livestock oocytes are extremely unlikely to be suitable as recipients for use in human nuclear transfer,” Wilmut said in a statement.

But Lanza said it might be possible to use other methods to create “banks” of stem cells that match the several hundred tissue types found among humans.

This could include cloning humans, using a single cell from growing embryos used for fertility treatment, or a new method called induced pluripotent stem cells, made by taking a sample of skin and reprogramming the cells to act like embryonic stem cells, Lanza said.

Don’t put off action on global warming just because times are lean — that’s the message Al Gore, world environmental leaders and U.S. executives sent Friday to President Barack Obama.

Worries are mounting that economic troubles are sapping momentum, in the U.S. Congress and in other world capitals, for costly investment in clean energy and cutting carbon emissions.

“The oceans are being choked off of oxygen. They are dying as a result of this process we are seeing before our eyes the melting of the polar ice cap,” Gore said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “The assumption that we can continue on this path is an assumption that is collapsing.”

Many countries are looking to Obama for aggressive action after frustration at the Bush administration’s refusal to sign international pacts on reducing emissions of carbon, blamed for global warming.

Gore, U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer and executives were discussing the fate of a U.N. meeting in Copenhagen this December aiming for a global agreement on reducing emissions. Questions remain over the new U.S. government’s position on the Copenhagen meeting, which is seen as crucial.

“We need an agreement this year, not next year or some other time,” Gore said.

Still, Gore expressed optimism in Obama, calling him “the greenest person in the room” for making environmental funding a big chunk of the $819 billion economic stimulus bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives this week.

But he and other panelists acknowledged that the financial crisis will be a key challenge. Governments could shy from forcing polluting industries to pay for their carbon emissions or using taxpayer money for expensive new clean energy investments — even if they prove more efficient in the long term.

“Undeniably the financial crisis is making things more difficult,” U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer, told Associated Press Television News. “There is a shortage of finance, you see that many renewable energy projects are being put on the back burner.”

But he added, “If you look at the economic recovery packages of the European Union, the United States, Japan, China — they are all using this as an opportunity to change the direction of economic growth, and that I find encouraging.”

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who will host the Copenhagen meeting, urged countries to agree to reduce global emissions by 50 percent by 2050, and said industrialized countries should reduce by 80 percent.

“We have to be vigilant so that the crisis does not derail this,” he told the AP.

The onus is not only on Obama. Climate negotiators are looking anxiously at developing giants and heavy emitters China and India. And Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin disappointed some activists with his non-committal stance on climate change in his keynote address at the Davos forum.

Media magnate Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corp., joined the call to ensure that investment in clean energy doesn’t collapse.

“There’s a real risk that the alternative energy industry could die again,” he said later. “I really hope that the new president will not let that happen.”

The head of the New York Stock Exchange, Duncan Niederauer, agreed.

“We’ve got to stay the course on energy efficiency,” he said. “It’s time we get serious about it and push it through.”

Roche cut its offer for Genentech Inc, launching a hostile bid which dashed investor hopes of a sweetened offer for the 44 percent of the U.S. biotech group its does not already own.

Roche Holding AG’s new and lower offer for the outstanding shares, pitched directly to shareholders, was a surprise and reflected tougher financing conditions and a drop in Genentech Inc shares, analysts said on Friday.

“We are confident that we will have the financing available when the money is needed,” Roche Chairman Franz Humer told reporters.

Roche is now making a public tender offer at $86.50 per share in cash, valuing the deal at $42 billion, replacing its initial bid that totaled $44 billion.

Roche stock rose 1.5 percent to 162.70 Swiss francs by 1039 GMT as investors welcomed the slightly lower price. Genentech shares in Frankfurt rose 1.9 percent to 65.51 euros ($85.69).

The move comes just days after the world’s biggest drugmaker Pfizer Inc agreed to buy rival Wyeth for $68 billion, backed by a new $22.5 billion loan, indicating debt markets for cash rich pharmaceutical makers are far from dead.

Roche had initially aimed to acquire the remaining shares through a negotiated settlement — an offer rejected by Genentech — and decided to appeal directly to shareholders after further talks failed to reach an agreement, Humer said.

“The plan is to use as financing partly our own funds, and then obviously bonds and then commercial paper and traditional bank financing. We will start by going to the bond market first,” he said.

BIG-SELLING CANCER DRUGS

Buying Genentech would give Roche control of all revenues for blockbuster cancer drugs Avastin and Herceptin, as well as absorbing an attractive portfolio of new medicines, and reflects Big Pharma’s rush to acquire biotech assets to fill sparse new product pipelines.

Roche appeared to be raising the pressure on Genentech, which analysts said could be trying to delay the process until key clinical data on its blockbuster cancer drug Avastin due in April — when positive results could drive up the company’s value.

“By reaching out directly to minority shareholders Roche will soon get an answer from the shareholders what they think is a fair offer,” said Andrew Weiss at Swiss bank Vontobel.

Helvea analyst Karl-Heinz Koch believed the offer should attract interest from Genentech shareholders, saying 80 percent ownership would be enough to integrate the U.S. company.

Koch said a deal at the new price could still be earnings accretive for Roche in 2010 and 2011, even at a debt financing cost of up to 8 to 9 percent.

But Andreas Theisen, analyst at WestLB, reckoned few Genentech shareholders will jump at the offer.

“We believe Roche aimed to stick to its take-out plans, but is also trying to get some extra time until maybe financing conditions improve,” Theisen said.

OPPORTUNITIES IN DOWNTURN

Roche made a fresh round of calls to banks after news of the Pfizer-Wyeth deal emerged, bankers close to the Genentech deal told Reuters this week.

Business leaders meeting in Davos, meanwhile, said they saw opportunities in the global downturn, though leverage is out and a hard-nosed focus on cost cutting is the order of the day.

Roche, which currently owns 56 percent of the Genentech outstanding shares and originally bid $89 per share, pitched its new offer at a premium of nearly 3 percent over the Genentech’s closing price of $84.09 on Thursday, compared with a premium of 29 percent for the Wyeth deal.

The Swiss company declined to give details of how its planned financing would break down.

After the initial announcement in July 2008, shares in Genentech rose to a high of $99.05, but later fell back below the offer price as the credit crisis bit, which gave Roche leeway to lower its bid.

Greenhill & Co is financial advisor to Roche and Davis Polk & Wardell is legal counsel for the tender offer, which Roche expects to commence the tender offer within approximately two weeks.

In a rare Sunday session, the Senate advanced legislation that would set aside more than 2 million acres in nine states as wilderness. Majority Democrats assembled more than enough votes to overcome GOP stalling tactics in an early showdown for the new Congress.

Republicans complained that Democrats did not allow amendments on the massive bill, which calls for the largest expansion of wilderness protection in 25 years. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and other Democrats said the bill — a holdover from last year — was carefully written and included measures sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats.

By a 66-12 vote, with only 59 needed to limit debate, lawmakers agreed to clear away procedural hurdles despite partisan wrangling that had threatened pledges by leaders to work cooperatively as the new Obama administration takes office. Senate approval is expected later this week. Supporters hope the House will follow suit.

“Today is a great day for America’s public lands,” said the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M. “This big, bipartisan package of bills represents years of work by senators from many states, and both parties, in cooperation with local communities, to enhance places that make America so special.”

The measure — actually a collection of about 160 bills — would confer the government’s highest level of protection on land ranging from California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range to Oregon’s Mount Hood, Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado and parts of the Jefferson National Forest in Virginia. Land in Idaho’s Owyhee canyons, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan and Zion National Park in Utah also would be designated as wilderness.

Besides new wilderness designations, the bill would designate the childhood home of former President Bill Clinton in Hope, Ark., as a national historic site and expand protections for dozens of national parks, rivers and water resources.

Reid said about half the bills in the lands package were sponsored by Republicans. Most had been considered for more than a year.

“I am happy that after months of delay we will finally be moving forward,” Reid said.

The bill’s chief opponent, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., denounced what he called Democratic bullying tactics.

“I am disappointed the Senate majority leader has refused to allow senators the opportunity to improve, amend or eliminate any of the questionable provisions in his omnibus lands bill,” Coburn told fellow senators.

“When the American people asked Congress to set a new tone, I don’t believe refusing to listen to the concerns of others was what they had in mind,” Coburn said. “The American people expect us hold open, civil and thorough debates on costly legislation, not ram through 1,300-page bills when few are watching.”

Coburn and several other Republicans complained that bill was loaded with pet projects and prevented development of oil and gas on federal lands, which they said would deepen the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.

Environmental groups said the bill set the right tone for the new Congress.

“By voting to protect mountains and pristine wildlands, Congress is starting out on the right foot,” said Christy Goldfuss of Environment America, an advocacy group. “This Congress is serious about protecting the environment and the outstanding lands that Americans treasure.”

The three-member board appointed by the central government to bring back financial order to the fraud-hit Satyam Computer Services began its meeting here Monday.

A Satyam spokesperson said the meeting began at the company’s headquarters in Hitec City at 11 a.m.

The new board comprises former chief of the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) Kiran Karnik, chairman of Housing Development Finance Corp (HDFC) Deepak Parikh and former member of markets watchdog Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) C. Achuthan.

The board members drove straight into the Satyam premises as the media persons waiting outside since morning were not allowed in.

The company official told media persons that there would be a media briefing at 5 p.m.

Before reaching the Satyam headquarters, the board members met informally at a hotel to decide the agenda. The board is expected to elect a chairman and discuss ways to bring working capital to the company to tide over the liquidity crisis. It will also discuss ways to restore confidence of employees, investors and clients into the firm’s future operations.

They will also consider various names for including them on the 10-member board.

A new study has determined that when extremes of drought and flood come in rapid succession, the extent of damage to vegetation may depend in part on the sequence of those events.

The study, which focused on tree species common to the Everglades in Florida, found that seedlings maintained higher growth rates and were less likely to die when subjected to drought first then flood, rather than vice versa.

The findings could have significant implications for predicting how vegetation responds to climate extremes-especially amid forecasts of increasingly severe droughts and floods associated with climate change, according to authors ShiLi Miao (South Florida Water Management), Chris B. Zou and David D. Breshears (both from University of Arizona).

According to Dr. Miao, most previous studies on how vegetation responds to hydrological events have been based largely on responses to a single hydrological condition.

ew studies have investigated multiple events in succession.

“Our research suggests that you can’t really predict how the plants will respond to combinations of drought and flood by studies that look just at a single drought or a single flood,” Dr. Miao said. “We found that plants respond very differently depending on the sequence of flood and drought,” she added.

In a greenhouse, Dr. Miao’s team subjected seedlings to sequences of conditions that simulated drought and flood, with each phase lasting four months.

The three species chosen for the experiments have varying tolerances to hydrological events.

The pond-apple tree tends to be flood tolerant. The gumbo-limbo, also known as West Indian birch, tends to be drought tolerant. The red maple, also known as swamp maple, has intermediate tolerances to drought and flood.

Each species tested showed higher mortality and lower growth rate when flood was first in the sequence, compared to when drought came first.

The study has implications for the restoration and management of the Everglades and other aquatic systems, according to Dr. Miao.

The results suggest that “the challenge ahead includes evaluating different sequences of extreme events.”

Dr. Miao and her team plan to conduct additional research on various wetland plants related to their nutrient removal function under extreme hydrological conditions.

Just spending two to three hours outdoors daily is a great way of halting short sightedness or myopia, which is fast spreading among urban children worldwide.

Myopia affects over 1.6 billion people worldwide, is spreading rapidly among city populations and, in its most severe form, can cause blindness by middle-age.

Scientists from The Vision Centre said that increased exposure to daylight can prevent the permanent short-sightedness and eye damage which now afflicts up to 80-90 per cent of East Asian children.

The finding demolishes long-held beliefs that short sight is due mainly to reading, and overuse of TVs and computers by youngsters, or is primarily linked to genetic factors.

‘The prevalence of myopia in the Australian population is dramatically lower than in other urban societies round the world - yet we do just as much reading and computer work,’ said Ian Morgan of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Vision Science (The Vision Centre) and Australian National University.

Comparing myopia levels among people of Indian origin, the team noted five percent short-sightedness among rural Indians, 10 percent among city Indians - and 65 per cent among Indians living in Singapore.

‘Our hypothesis is that the light intensity experienced outdoors - which can be hundreds of times brighter than indoor light - causes a release of dopamine, which is known to block the growth of the eyeball. This prevents it taking on the distorted shape found in myopic people. We are now testing this idea,’ said Morgan.

The team’s conclusions are borne out by new research in Singapore and the US, which has reached similar conclusions, said a Vision Centre release.

‘Looking at children of Chinese origin, we found only three percent of those in Sydney suffered from myopia, compared with 30 per cent in Singapore, where there is an epidemic,’ said Morgan.

Yet, if anything, the children of Chinese origin in Sydney read more than those in Singapore. This clearly suggests that myopia was triggered by something in the environment, rather than the genes. The critical factor seemed to be the fact that the children in Singapore spent much less time outdoors.’

‘We’re seeing large increases in myopia among children in urban societies all around the world - and the outstanding common factor may be less and less time spent outdoors,’ said Morgan.

‘The idea that ‘reading makes you short-sighted’ has been popular for a couple of hundred years. But recent data shows that the time spent indoors is a more important factor. Children who read a lot, but still go outdoors, have far less myopia.’

Morgan explained that myopia is essentially an eye that has grown too long, and once it is too long, you can’t shorten it again: ‘So you have to stop it happening in the first place.

About 5,000 families in the southern Philippines have been displaced by flash floods and large waves spawned by heavy rains, officials said Saturday.

Over a hundred houses have been destroyed and many people are fleeing their homes in the face of rising waters in the northern part of the southern island of Mindanao, civil defence officials said.

Regional civil defence director Carmelito Lupo said that most of those whose homes were destroyed were from Cagayan de Oro city but officials were still trying to get information on the situation in the surrounding areas.

Local officials in Cagayan de Oro said that over 2,000 families had to be evacuated to basketball courts due to rising waters on river banks.

Evacuations were also under way in nearby Ginoog City and other areas where flash floods have been reported, said provincial officials.

Local officials said two children, aged one and two, were narrowly rescued from the floods but no casualties had been reported yet.

Astronomers are using what they say is the “world’s biggest laser pointer” to unravel the mystery behind the birth and death of stars.

According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, the international team of astronomers is led by Stuart Ryder from the Anglo-Australian Observatory, near Coonabarabran.

“We are using a laser 10,000 times more powerful than the ones you can have in NSW (New South Wales),” said Ryder, who is seeking to explain a mystery threatening to undermine science’s understanding of how stars are born and how they die.

The mystery is that about 250 million light years away, two galaxies are colliding, slamming massive clouds of gas together to give birth to new stars.

Large stars end their lives in massive explosions called supernovae. Inside the colliding galaxies, however, there is an absence of any stellar death.

“We are seeing only a few per cent of the supernovae we should be seeing,” said Dr Ryder. “There should be many, many more stars dying,” he added.

One possible explanation is that science’s understanding of stars is wrong.

Another is that dying stars, “like cockroaches dying unseen under the couch”, are easily missed.

To discover which is right, Dr Ryder is using sophisticated new technology called laser guide star adaptive optics at the giant Gemini telescope, atop Hawaii’s 4200-metre Mauna Kea.

Adaptive optics allows astronomers to produce extraordinarily sharp images by canceling the blurring effect of Earth’s atmosphere, which also makes stars twinkle.

A 10-watt laser is blasted 90 kilometers into the sky, causing atoms to glow, creating “an artificial star”.

The atmosphere also blurs the artificial star.

“We know what shape it ought to be,” said Dr Ryder, adding that by watching it twinkle, they can plot the atmospheric distortions.

Computers then use the information to manipulate the telescope’s galactic observations, removing the distortions.

By comparing Gemini images snapped this year with ones shot by the Hubble telescope in 2004, Dr Ryder’s team, including Finnish and South African scientists, has already spotted one previously unseen supernova.

With only a third of the two-year project completed, he expects to find at least a dozen more.

“It shows we are on the right track,” said Ryder.