November 13, 2007, 8:56 PM CT

Citrus juice, vitamin C give staying power to green tea

To get more out of your next cup of tea, just add juice.

A study observed that citrus juices enable more of green tea's unique antioxidants to remain after simulated digestion, making the pairing even healthier than previously thought.

The study compared the effect of various beverage additives on catechins, naturally occurring antioxidants found in tea. Results suggest that complementing green tea with either citrus juices or vitamin C likely increases the amount of catechins available for the body to absorb.

"Eventhough these results are preliminary, I think it's encouraging that a big part of the puzzle comes down to simple chemistry," said Mario Ferruzzi, assistant professor of food science at Purdue University and the study's lead author.

Catechins (pronounced KA'-teh-kins), display health-promoting qualities and may be responsible for some of green tea's reported health benefits, like reduced risk of cancer, heart attack and stroke. The problem, Ferruzzi said, is that catechins are relatively unstable in non-acidic environments, such as the intestines, and less than 20 percent of the total remains after digestion.

"Off the bat you are eliminating a great majority of the catechins from plain green tea," Ferruzzi said. "We have to address this fact if we want to improve bodily absorption." ......... Posted by: Erica      Read more         Source

November 7, 2007, 8:07 PM CT

Helping to fight widespread potato disease

Researchers have made a key discovery into the genetics of the bacteria that causes blackleg, an economically damaging disease of potatoes, that could lead to new ways to fight the disease. The scientists at the University of Cambridge, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), observed that if a particular gene is inactivated in the bacterium Erwinia carotovora, its ability to damage the plant and cause disease is severely impeded. The research was recently reported in the Journal of Bacteriology.

Erwinia carotovora can cause disease in a wide range of plants, including carrots, tomatoes and onions, but is best known in temperate regions for causing blackleg and soft rot in potatoes. Its success partly lies in its ability to produce enzymes which break down its hosts cell walls. The degraded cell walls provide nutrients to the bacterium, and so aid its survival and growth.

The Cambridge scientists discovered that if they inactivated a gene called relA, which helps the bacteria recognise when nutrients are running low, then the bacterias ability to export enzymes to break down the plants cell walls is also abolished.

Research leader Dr Martin Welch explains: Blackleg is a significant economic problem, substantially reducing crop yields......... Posted by: Erica      Read more         Source

November 7, 2007, 8:01 PM CT

Prairie verbena: conserves water, drought-tolerant

Prairie verbena, a common wildflower, grows from the Mississippi River to Arizona and from Southern Mexico to South Dakota. This beautiful native plant can be seen covering large areas of plains, prairies, pastures, and roadsides, often from March through October.

Working to create a new drought-resistant and water-saving wildflower, researchers at Texas Tech University's Department of Plant and Soil Science have introduced 'Raider Amethyst', a new cultivar of common prairie verbena. Cynthia McKenney, Associate Professor of Horticulture at Texas Tech, says that Raider Amethyst was bred for homeowners and landscape architects who are interested in using more environmentally adapted materials in home gardens and public use areas. McKenney noted, "This project was to develop an improved wildflower release that would provide more compact, dependable color in a water-conserving landscape".

Raider Amethyst, or Glandularia bipinnatifida, is the second addition to the Raider Wildflower collection, following Melampodium leucanthum 'Raider White', usually known as blackfoot daisy. It is recommended for use in low-maintenance plantings and water-conserving landscapes. It grows throughout the season with minimal care. Raider Amethyst is now available as commercial and experimental seed......... Posted by: Erica      Read more         Source

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 04:10:32 GMT

Macleania insignis

Today''s entry and written accompaniment are both courtesy of Tom Lemieux of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Very much appreciated, Tom – I''m so busy these days that having someone else share the writing is a real treat. This is also a good time to remind folks that photographs taken by people not from UBC are copyright of the respective owner of the image and use is permitted by whatever license the photographer chooses to apply to the image (this is why I always link to the original photographs with Flickr).

Tom writes:

“Macleania insignis is a common and widespread species found primarily in lower montane cloud forests from southern Mexico to Costa Rica at elevations of mostly 900-2400m. It is a member of the Ericaceae or rhododendron family and grows as an epiphyte or terrestrial, occasionally even on rocks. A moderate sized shrub (to 2+ m tall), it grows from a caudex or basal swollen stem.”

“This species is the most commonly cultivated Macleania and is offered in some seed catalogs. The specimen photographed here was obtained from the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Florida and grown in the greenhouse for the University of Colorado, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.”

Daniel – Tom added that the reference he used was this factsheet on Macleania insignis via James Luteyn''s and Paola Pedraza-Peñalosa''s Neotropical Blueberries. Definitely check out this photograph of a Macleania insignis lignotuber growing epiphytically (on another plant, in this case, a tree trunk). Also, if you are interested in caudex-forming plants, there''s a forum dedicated to these intriguing growth-forms on the UBC BG forums: Caudiciforms and Pachycaul Trees. Posted by: Daniel Mosquin      Read more     Source

October 31, 2007, 9:10 PM CT

Why do so many species live in tropical forests and coral reefs?

The latest development in a major debate over a controversial hypothesis of biodiversity and species abundance is the subject of a paper would be reported in the 1 November 2007 issue of the journal Nature. The authors report good agreement between the species richness of two of the world's most vulnerable ecosystems -- tropical forests and coral reefs -- and a simple mathematical model building on the so-called "neutral theory of biodiversity." "We're helping to refine and improve this theory because it might have important implications for the effort to protect terrestrial biodiversity from climate change and urban development," says Jayanth Banavar of the Department of Physics at Penn State, a member of the research team.

The Nature paper is based on a counterintuitive assumption of neutral theory: that one can largely ignore interactions between species in modeling patterns of species abundance. The authors are physicists Igor Volkov and Jayanth Banavar of Penn State University, plant biologist Stephen Hubbell of UCLA (formerly of the University of Georgia), and physicist Amos Maritan of the University of Padua in Italy.

Among ecological theorists, neutral theory has sparked a six-year quarrel over the fundamental assumptions of their discipline. The Nature paper counters another scientific team's claim in 2006 that coral-reef diversity "refutes" the neutral theory. At the same time, the paper by Volkov et al., would be published on 1 November 2007, modifies the classical version of neutral theory that appeared in a 2001 book by Hubbell. (Graham Bell of McGill University also developed a neutral theory independently of Hubbell.) Banavar, Maritan, Volkov, and their collaborators have been active in the development of a mathematical framework for understanding ecosystems that builds on and clarifies Hubbell's neutral theory......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

October 31, 2007, 8:08 PM CT

Go nano, natural and green

In 2002, U.S. farmers harvested 2.7 billion bushels of soybeans. Last year in Missouri, farmers harvested 194 million bushels of soybeans worth about $1.2 billion. Now, a team of scientists at the University of Missouri-Columbia is turning those soybeans into gold, with nothing more than a little water.

MU scientists Kattesh Katti, Raghuraman Kannan, and Kavita Katti led a team of researchers that have discovered how to make gold nanoparticles using gold salts, soybeans and water. No other chemicals are used in the process, which means this new process could have major environmental implications for the future.

Typically, a producer must use a variety of synthetic or man-made chemicals to produce gold nanoparticles, said Katti, professor of radiology and physics in MUs School of Medicine, senior research scientist at MURR, and College of Arts and Science, and director of the University of Missouri Cancer Nanotechnology Platform. In addition, to make the chemicals necessary for production, you need to have other artificial chemicals produced, creating an even larger, negative environmental impact. Our new process only takes what nature has made available to us and uses that to produce a technology that has already proven to have far-reaching impacts in technology and medicine......... Posted by: Erica      Read more         Source

October 29, 2007, 7:39 PM CT

Human-generated ozone will damage crops

A novel MIT study concludes that increasing levels of ozone due to the growing use of fossil fuels will damage global vegetation, resulting in serious costs to the world's economy.

The analysis, published in the recent issue of Energy Policy, focused on how three environmental changes (increases in temperature, carbon dioxide and ozone) linked to human activity will affect crops, pastures and forests.

The research shows that increases in temperature and in carbon dioxide may actually benefit vegetation, particularly in northern temperate regions. However, those benefits may be more than offset by the detrimental effects of increases in ozone, notably on crops. Ozone is a form of oxygen that is an atmospheric pollutant at ground level.

The economic cost of the damage will be moderated by changes in land use and by agricultural trade, with some regions more able to adapt than others. But the overall economic consequences will be considerable. As per the analysis, if nothing is done, by 2100 the global value of crop production will fall by 10 to 12 percent.

"Even assuming that best-practice technology for controlling ozone is adopted worldwide, we see rapidly rising ozone concentrations in the coming decades," said John M. Reilly, associate director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. "That result is both surprising and worrisome"......... Posted by: Erica      Read more         Source

October 29, 2007, 7:14 PM CT

Nitrogen Fertilizers Deplete Soil Organic Carbon

The common practice of adding nitrogen fertilizer is believed to benefit the soil by building organic carbon, but four University of Illinois soil researchers dispute this view based on analyses of soil samples from the Morrow Plots that date back to before the current practice began.

The research, also drawing upon data from other long-term trials throughout the world, was conducted by U of I soil researchers Saeed Khan, Richard Mulvaney, Tim Ellsworth, and Charlie Boast. Their paper "The Myth of Nitrogen Fertilization for Soil Carbon Sequestration" is reported in the November/December 2007 issue of the Journal of Environmental Quality.

"It is truly fortunate that scientists over the past 100 years have been diligent in collecting and storing samples from the U of I Morrow Plots in order to check how management practices have affected soil properties," said Khan. The Morrow Plots are America's oldest experimental field. "We were intrigued that corn growth and yields had been about 20 percent lower during the past 50 years for the north (continuous corn) than for the south (corn-oats-hay) end of the Morrow Plots, despite considerably greater inputs of fertilizer nitrogen and residues."

To understand why yields were lower for plots that received the most nitrogen, Khan and colleagues analyzed samples for organic carbon in the soil to identify changes that have occurred since the onset of synthetic nitrogen fertilization in 1955. "What we learned is that after five decades of massive inputs of residue carbon ranging from 90 to 124 tons per acre, all of the residue carbon had disappeared, and there had been a net decrease in soil organic carbon that averaged 4.9 tons per acre. Regardless of the crop rotation, the decline became much greater with the higher nitrogen rate," said Khan......... Posted by: Erica      Read more         Source

October 28, 2007, 3:48 PM CT

World's hottest chile pepper

Scientists at New Mexico State University recently discovered the worlds hottest chile pepper. Bhut Jolokia, a variety of chile pepper originating in Assam, India, has earned Guiness World Records recognition as the worlds hottest chile pepper by blasting past the prior champion Red Savina. In replicated tests of Scoville heat units (SHUs), Bhut Jolokia reached one million SHUs, almost double the SHUs of Red Savina, which measured a mere 577,000.

Dr. Paul Bosland, Director of the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State Universitys Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences collected seeds of Bhut Jolokia while visiting India in 2001. Bosland grew Bhut Jolokia plants under insect-proof cages for three years to produce enough seed to complete the mandatory field tests. The name Bhut Jolokia translates as ghost chile, Bosland said, I think its because the chile is so hot, you give up the ghost when you eat it! Bosland added that the intense heat concentration of Bhut Jolokia could have significant impact on the food industry as an economical seasoning in packaged foods......... Posted by: Erica      Read more         Source

October 25, 2007, 10:15 PM CT

Why Do Autumn Leaves Bother to Turn Red?

Soils may dictate the array of fall colors as much as the trees rooted in them, as per a forest survey out of North Carolina.

By taking careful stock and laboratory analyses of the autumn foliage of sweetgum and red maple trees along transects from floodplains to ridge-tops in a nature preserve in Charlotte, N.C., former University of North Carolina at Charlotte graduate student Emily M. Habinck observed that in places where the soil was relatively low in nitrogen and other essential elements, trees produced more red pigments known as anthocyanins.

Habinck's discovery supports a 2003 hypothesis put forward to explain why trees bother to make red pigments, by plant physiologist William Hoch of Montana State University, Bozeman. Hoch observed that if he genetically blocked anthocyanin production in red-leafed plants, their leaves were uncommonly vulnerable to fall sunlight, and so sent less nutrients to the plant roots for winter storage.

For trees living in nutrient-poor soils, then, it makes sense to produce more anthocyanins, which protect the leaves longer, so as much nutrient as possible can be recovered from leaves before winter sets in. It is, after all, the process of recovering of nutrients from leaves which turns leaves from green to yellow, orange and sometimes anthocyanin-red......... Posted by: Erica      Read more         Source