news20100304sa1

[Environment] from [scientificamerican.com]

[Energy & Sustainability]
March 3, 2010
By David Biello
Is ARPA-E Enough to Keep the U.S. on the Cutting-Edge of a Clean Energy Revolution?

ARPA-E, the U.S.'s energy transformation agency, is doling out funds for greener power, but is it too conservative?

{{CLEAN ENERGY?: ARPA-e is the government agency tasked with identifying and nurturing transformational energy technologies, such as better, cheaper solar and wind power.}
© iStockphoto.com / James Steidl}

WASHINGTON, D.C.—At the inaugural summit of ARPA–E, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, no less an august personage than Norman Augustine declared that we were possibly witnessing an inflection point—a turn from old thinking to new. As an aerospace business pioneer, Augustine certainly knows when trajectories change and escape velocities are attained. Indeed, a host of speakers regarded ARPA–E's effort as an Apollo project, a Manhattan project, and Mike Splinter, CEO of Applied Materials, even called for ARPA–E to be part of a potential Marshall Plan for energy—a road map to a future of clean power, complete with the Hoover Dam of solar, or the like.

But the actual premise of the U.S. Department of Energy's ARPA–E is somewhat more simple—emulate its older sibling, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has brought to the world a host of technologies, including stealth fighters and the Internet since its Cold War founding in 1958 in the wake of the Soviet Union's Sputnik. ARPA–E plans to fund multidisciplinary technical ideas that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve national security and create jobs.

Just 37 technologies qualified for government funds, with each getting an average $4 million. They were selected from 3,700 applications and from among the 75 percent that weren't disqualified for violating the first or second law of thermodynamics, according to Arun Majumdar, ARPA-E's first director. Yet, the bulk of them are old ideas dusted off after years of storage.

For instance, the Lexington, Mass.–based 1366 Technologies received funds to develop its "monocrystalline equivalent" wafers that are formed directly from melted silicon rather than sawed from a block, which wastes as much as half of the semiconducting material. Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists David Bradwell and Donald Sadoway were funded to build a "pizza box"–size version of their liquid-metal battery—based loosely on the electricity-intensive process of making aluminum—that could enable the cheap storage of megawatts of electricity from intermittent resources such as the sun and wind. And United Technologies got money to develop a chemical analogue of the enzyme that takes CO2 out of biological tissue and dumps it in the lungs to be expelled, except that the chemical would work on extracts CO2 from power plant flue gas. "We need to develop technologies to do fossil fuels cleanly," says Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, perhaps explaining why ARPA-E bankrolled five carbon-capture projects in this initial round.

"The number of good ideas has been amazing, and we don't even have all the intellectual horsepower of the U.S. into clean energy," Majumdar says. But "we need multiple lunar landings, not just one." Political realities, however, might short-circuit those "lunar landings," many of which won't become manifest for 10 years or more, according to Majumdar. "We are not short on ideas. The question is, what happens next?"

Funding efficiency
Nevertheless, another $100 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (better known as the stimulus) was made available on March 2, to be awarded via ARPA–E to the best proposals for new grid-scale storage devices, better power converters and more efficient air conditioners, such as the ones being developed by the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) that rely on sound waves rather than mechanical pistons to drive compressors.

The potential for impact is huge. For example, the cheaper, more powerful ultracapacitors under development by FastCAP Systems, another ARPA–E awardee, are intended to "finally make hybrid vehicles cost-effective," says Riccardo Signorelli, founder and president of the fledgling company. And if hybrids become cheap enough "just replacing 1 percent of [U.S.] vehicle fleet translates into $4 billion in [consumer] savings, $80 billion in oil we don't import and 50 million tons of CO2 reduction."

Enhancing economic might
ARPA–E is not just about the climate either; economic and national security implications also drive this small government program. "China missed the first industrial revolution, missed the computer revolution, and the biology revolution—they want to be a leader in the green revolution," Chu says, referring to the competition that might preclude U.S. domination of the field. "We want to be a leader. This is our prosperity."

Commercially, China certainly has a lead; it offers cheap, high-quality solar cells and components for wind turbines, among other key products. And it is already working on at least 21 nuclear power plants. "America is quickly falling behind in clean energy, trading Middle Eastern oil for cheap Chinese solar, batteries and wind turbines," says Chris Rivest, co-founder of Berkeley, Calif.-based SunPrint, which is developing technology to print cadmium telluride thin-film photovoltaic cells. "If not clean energy, what will be our next growth industry?"

That sentiment is not confined to plucky start-ups. "This is going to be the growth industry of the coming time period," said General Electric chief executive Jeff Immelt in his address to the conference. He noted that 292 gigawatts of electricity will be added in the world over the next decade, adding that "clean energy is the most exciting big market in the world."

Slow and steady wins?
Has ARPA–E been too conservative in these early stages, funding ideas that have been around for awhile? Besides the stimulus monies, the Obama administration committed just $400 million to ARPA-e specifically—and asked for just $300 million in next year's budget—for an agency intended to remake the multitrillion dollar U.S. energy landscape. China is spending $12 million an hour on clean energy, according to John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress, a politically liberal think tank. And the U.S. lacks what many here regard as the key to driving a transition to clean, abundant energy: a price on carbon. "Let's not take this growth industry [in clean energy] and give it to every other country in the world but the U.S.," Immelt said.

But in the end, ARPA–E's conservative approach may prove to have been both politically and scientifically smart. In considering Galileo's breakthrough, "he didn't invent the telescope, he improved the telescope," said Chu in his address to the conference. "If you find a new rock or a new way of looking at the rock, chances are you can make a good discovery and you don't even have to be that smart."

news20100304sa2

[Environment] from [scientificamerican.com]

[Technology]
March 3, 2010
By Larry Greenemeier
Next-Gen Scientists Honored for Evolving Medicine and Renewables

Artificial antibodies, 3-D genome imaging, inexpensive prosthetics, a liner for hydrogen-car fuel tanks--winning ideas from the Lemelson-M.I.T. awards for students

{{GIVE 'EM A HAND: In its 15th year, the Lemelson-MIT Program awarded $30,000 prizes Wednesday to students at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (R.P.I.) and University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (U.I.U.C.). These specific schools were chosen because they have top engineering programs and inventive students, including UIUC's Jonathan Naber, who developed the prosthetic hand in this photograph. The program hopes to expand its student prizes to even more schools in the coming years.}
© JONATHAN NABER}

The more mysteries that scientists unlock, the more opportunities emerge for the next generation of researchers to transform newfound knowledge into tomorrow's breakthroughs that serve society. The Lemelson–M.I.T. Program recognized several potential breakthroughs Wednesday in awarding four of its $30,000 Lemelson–M.I.T. Student Prizes to those from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (R.P.I.), and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (U.I.U.C.).

A key criterion in recognizing Caltech's Heather Agnew, Harvard-M.I.T.'s Erez Lieberman-Aiden, U.I.U.C.'s Jonathan Naber and R.P.I.'s Kayvan Rafiee is the potential for commercial application. Their work in particular could open new avenues for combating disease, understanding the human genome, building hydrogen-powered vehicles and empowering the disabled.

Agnew, 28, has done her Ph.D. work with a team of researchers—including Caltech chemistry professor James Heath—to help them develop synthetic antibodies called "protein capture agents," which can identify, bind to and remove protein biomarkers that are indicators of disease and infection. Natural antibodies are very delicate because they themselves are proteins that can be rendered ineffective by heat and other stresses, says Agnew, a native of Allentown, Pa. Agnew first identified the chemical components at the core of these protein capture agents, which might someday replace natural antibodies in the healing process.

When Agnew completes her work at Caltech she plans to join a start-up called Integrated Diagnostics, with offices in Seattle and Culver City, Calif., that will commercialize the artificial antibody technology. "It's been thrilling to see something that was in [our] heads turn into something with so many applications for biomedicine," she says.

New York City native Lieberman-Aiden's foray into biotechnology resulted in a genome sequencing methodology, which he calls "Hi-C," designed to better understand how the human genome—with its three-billion-letter chemical code—fits into a cell's tiny nucleus. Lieberman-Aiden, 30, and his colleagues designed Hi-C as a molecular biology technique to let researchers collect information suitable for the reconstruction of a genome's 3-D architecture. Whereas it is possible today to observe the double-helix architecture of bases of DNA, "at larger scales it's not obvious how the genome is folding," he says.

Hi-C has made possible a global, three-dimensional view of whole genomes as they fold, says Lieberman-Aiden, who is graduating in June and will begin a three-year fellowship with the Harvard Society of Fellows during which he plans to develop ways to improve the resolution of 3-D DNA images. As a side project Lieberman-Aiden has also developed the iShoe, a sensor-laden insole that enables early diagnosis and rehabilitation of deteriorating balance for the elderly and disabled.

Naber, 20, a materials engineering junior at U.I.U.C., is also creating technology to help people with disabilities, although his emphasis is on helping the two million or so people worldwide in need of prosthetics to replace amputated arms. Naber and his Illini Prosthetics team want to create and commercialize affordable, functional, comfortable and inexpensive transradial prosthetic arms, which are for people with amputations below the elbow (upper-arm prosthetics will follow eventually).

"I rejected the paradigm that we had to use the custom-fitted socket and clamp-and-hook design, which hasn't changed much since the Civil War," says Naber, who hails from Waterloo, Ill. Instead Naber's prosthetics will be based on a design where the amputee wears the prosthetic on a harness and can screw on different types of attachments—a hook or artificial hand, for example—at the wrist.

Naber, who expects to graduate in 2011, will travel to Guatemala this summer to field-test his prototypes at a prosthetics clinic. After graduation, he and his team plan to continue visiting developing countries to do beta testing and modify their designs. He is looking to China or Taiwan as possible sites for mass producing prosthetics, although he wants the assembly work to be done locally, in the countries where the artificial limbs will be used.

Just as Naber did in making a prosthetic entirely from recycled materials, Rafiee's work likewise has a green hue. Rafiee is developing a way to line a hydrogen vehicle's fuel tank with a one-atom-thick layer of graphene, essentially a sheet of single-walled carbon nanotubes that have been opened up and laid flat, so that the tank can better store and release hydrogen. His goal is to help automakers speed hydrogen-fueled cars to the market. "The hydrogen economy is the main key to solving oil dependency," he says.

The challenges to making an automobile run on hydrogen are primarily those of hydrogen production, storage, distribution and energy conversion, says Rafiee, a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering who plans to graduate next year. As a gas, hydrogen is a very low density material and difficult to store. "We need a cheap, porous material to store and release hydrogen at low pressure and at room temperature, and it needs to be a reversible process, for when the tank needs to be refilled," he says, adding that he and his colleagues are working on a business plan that will help them commercialize their work.

news20100304sn1

[SN Today] from [ScienceNews]

[Science News for Kids]
By Susan Gaidos Web edition : Monday, March 1st, 2010
FOR KIDS: Making light of sleep

Teens are prone to sleep problems, but a little sunshine could help

{{Not seeing blueResearcher Mariana Figueiro helps middle school student Carolyn Cimo test a pair of orange goggles and a Daysimeter™ headset that were used in the first field study showing the connection between sleep problems and lack of exposure to morning light.}
From the lab of Mariana Figueiro/RPI}

Maybe this has happened to you: In the middle of class, while you pretended to be paying attention to the teacher’s lecture, your eyelids started to droop. You began having second thoughts about staying up late on Facebook the night before.

Don’t be too hard on yourself. Your computer screen may be to blame. And your clock may be too. Not the clock on your nightstand, but the one in your head. All mammals have a clock located inside their brains. Similar to your bedside alarm clock, your internal clock runs on a 24-hour cycle. This cycle, called a circadian rhythm, helps regulate when you wake, when you eat and when you sleep.

Somewhere around puberty, something happens in the timing of the biological clock. The clock pushes forward, so adolescents and teens are unable to fall asleep as early as they used to. When your mother tells you it’s time for bed, your body may be pushing you to stay up for several hours more. And the light coming from your computer screen or TV could be pushing you to stay up even later.

This shift is natural for teens. But staying up very late and sleeping late can get your body’s clock out of sync with the cycle of light and dark. It can also make it hard to get out of bed in the morning and may bring other problems, too. Teenagers are put in a kind of a gray cloud when they don’t get enough sleep, says Mary Carskadon, a sleep researcher at Brown University in Providence, R.I. It affects their mood and their ability to think and learn.

But just like your alarm clock, your internal clock can be reset. In fact, it automatically resets itself every day. How? By using the light it gets through your eyes.

Scientists have known for a long time that the light of day and the dark of night play important roles in setting our internal clocks. For years, researchers thought that the signals that synchronize the body’s clock were handled through the same pathways that we use to see.

But recent discoveries show that the human eye has two separate light-sensing systems. One system allows us to see. The second system tells our body whether it’s day or night.

Blue light special

Light is detected by the eye’s retina. The retina contains millions of light-sensitive cells called photoreceptors. Two important types of photoreceptors are rods and cones. When they detect light, rods and cones pass the visual signal from nerve cell to nerve cell to the visual processing part of the brain. There, the signals are analyzed to tell you what you’re looking at.

A few years ago, scientists discovered another type of light-sensitive cell in the eye. These cells are called melanopsin ganglion cells. Like rods and cones, these ganglion cells are found in the retina. But unlike rods and cones, melanopsin ganglion cells send their signals to the part of the brain that regulates the body’s master clock.

The light signals sent to your body’s master clock tell you when to be sleepy and when to be alert. But not just any light will do. The circadian clock can distinguish between different colors, or wavelengths, of light. Blue light — such as the light from the blue sky — is best for stimulating the circadian system. In experiments, people exposed to blue light become less sleepy and more alert.

Sunlight is an excellent source of blue light. Although the light from the sun looks white, it is actually a combination of many colors, including blue light. This might explain why stepping outside on a bright sunny day helps clear the fog from your head.

Exposure to the morning sun is best for synchronizing the body’s clock with the Earth’s natural 24-hour cycle of light and dark. If you wake early and get outside, the body’s master clock tends to shift earlier, says Mariana Figueiro, a scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. That means you’re alert when it is light outside and sleepy when it’s dark.

The problem is, adolescents and teens may have limited exposure to the morning light. Often, they are on a bus or in class during the peak morning hours. Recently, Figueiro ran an experiment to see how exposure to morning light affects the circadian clocks of middle school students. She traveled to Smith Middle School in Chapel Hill, N.C. This school’s building is designed to provide daylight throughout the entire building.

Half of the students in the group wore orange-tinted goggles during morning school hours for one week. The glasses allowed enough light for the students to see, but blocked blue light coming in through skylights. Students in the other group had full access to daylight.

Each day, the scientists measured how much light exposure each student received, using a special light meter placed on the headphones of the goggles. The researchers also gave students a series of tests to measure their reaction times and memory skills. And at the end of each day, the scientists collected some spit from each student.

The saliva was used to measure amounts of a hormone called melatonin. Hormones are the body’s messenger molecules. Melatonin is known as the “sleep hormone.” When it gets dim outside, your brain secretes melatonin, preparing the body for sleep. As kids mature, melatonin is secreted later and later in the evening. This makes it easier for teens to stay awake longer and later.

Figueiro predicted that getting bright light early in the day would help get the melatonin flowing earlier in the evening. If so, the students who wore goggles would get sleepy later. And that’s what she found happened in the experiment.

After five days, the students who wore goggles began producing melatonin 30 minutes later than students in the no-goggles group. Thirty minutes may not sound like much, but the difference could be seen: Kids who wore goggles got sleepy later in the evening and stayed up later. They were also less alert during the day and scored lower on the performance tests.

“That shows that it’s important to get enough light in the morning to make sure you are synchronized with solar day,” Figueiro says. “Especially if you find it hard to get out of bed in the morning or get to sleep at night.”

Finding your rhythm

To get morning light during the school year, researchers suggest, use your morning break — say, sometime around 9 a.m. or 10 a.m. — to go outdoors or look out a window. Also, try to spend a few minutes outside before going to school.

And wearing orange goggles to block out blue light may also be helpful. The trick is to wear them in the evening, not in the morning. Worn in the evening, blue-blocker goggles could protect you from getting too much daylight when your body should be winding down.

Carskadon, the sleep researcher at Brown University, says that’s because adolescents and teens may be less sensitive to light in the morning and more sensitive to light in the evening. Working at the computer or watching TV late at night can make matters worse. Computer screens, TVs and other electronic devices emit some blue light. The extra light input can push your master clock’s sense of night ever later.

In her studies, Carskadon is trying to figure out what’s going on in the brain to produce this delay. She runs a summer sleep camp to study sleep patterns in adolescents and teens. Hers is no ordinary camp with horseback riding and canoeing. It’s a research lab housed underground. In this windowless environment, all outside time cues are eliminated. No sunlight, no clocks, no TV or texting. Teens play, read, eat and, of course, sleep. Monitors record their brain waves, muscle activity and heart rates.

Staying up late may come naturally for teens, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. If teenagers awaken for school before the final phase of sleep is complete, grogginess in class is inevitable. Grades can suffer. Sometimes, it becomes impossible to get to school at all.

Dr. Roger Green, a pediatrician in Kingston, N.Y., helps kids who have reached this point. He specializes in treating sleep disorders. He also has firsthand knowledge of the problems an incorrectly set clock can create.

He remembers being late many days during sixth grade and regularly missing the school bus in middle school. In high school, he was suspended for being late too many times. “I had sleep problems for years, but there was no one to help me,” he says.

Sleep problems can cause health problems, too. When 11-year-old Madyson Macejka’s sleep-wake cycle got out of sync with her daily schedule, she began to suffer from headaches. That’s when her mother took her to see Dr. Green.

Macejka was always a night owl, according to her mother. She liked to stay up late, and often found it hard to go to sleep at an early hour during the school week. During the week, Macejka had problems waking up for school. On weekends, she would often sleep until noon.

CONTINUED ON newssn2

news20100304sn2

[SN Today] from [ScienceNews]

[Science News for Kids]
By Susan Gaidos Web edition : Monday, March 1st, 2010
FOR KIDS: Making light of sleep

Teens are prone to sleep problems, but a little sunshine could help

CONTINUED FROM newssn1

Green says this kind of pattern can knock the circadian rhythm totally off-kilter. By sleeping late on weekends, Macejka was disrupting her the sleep-wake cycle for the whole week. “It’s like having jet lag,” Green says. Jet lag happens when your circadian rhythm is running on a different day-night cycle than the day-night cycle of the outside world.

Kids who are struggling to get out of bed in the morning may need help resetting their internal clocks, he says. “You can't just turn back the clock and make a big change overnight. The brain and the body and the timing systems don't work that way.”

But gradual changes can be made. Green recommends starting out by going to bed at your regular time, but getting up a few minutes earlier each day. “You may start out with a late bedtime, but if you get up earlier every day, you will eventually go to bed earlier, too.”

Staying away from light in the evening is also important. That means no computer or TV in the bedroom. He also recommends getting out into the early morning daylight for 10 to 15 minutes.

It worked for Macejka. In just a few weeks she was able to get her sleep-wake cycle in sync with her schedule and with the sun’s cycle. She says she now feels more awake in class and no longer needs naps. Her grades have shot up, too. Now that’s nothing to make light of.

Power words (adapted from Access Science: Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Online)

photoreceptors Cells or groups of cells found in both plants and animals that are sensitive to light.

retina The part of a vertebrate eye that is the end of the expansion of the optic nerve and that also hosts photoreceptors.

rods Photoreceptors in the retina of the eye that are sensitive to dim light.

cones Photoreceptors in the retina of the eye that respond to specific colors of light.

melatonin A hormone that helps to regulate the body’s master clock.

circadian rhythm A cycle of changes in the body that follow a 24-hour cycle that usually matches the light-dark cycle of an organism’s surroundings.

news20100304nn1

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 3 March 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.106
News
Volunteer army catches interstellar dust grains

Stardust mission finds particles that represent the building blocks of the solar system.
By Eric Hand

{{NASA's Stardust mission captured flecks of interstellar dust.}
NASA}

Scientists say they have caught the first pieces of interstellar dust — the fundamental building blocks of the Sun, the Earth and the rest of the solar system. The discovery required an army of volunteers, including a Canadian man who spent 15 hours a day studying images online and eventually won the interstellar lottery.

The minute specks of dust were collected by NASA's Stardust spacecraft, which launched in 1999 with the aim of catching pristine interstellar grains and returning them back to Earth.

The discovery validates four years of effort from more than 27,000 volunteers around the world, who searched 71 million images of the material captured in the Stardust collecting trays.

The two probable dust particles found so far could mark the beginning of an analysis of what stars and planets really are made of, and also offer a way of charting the chemical evolution of the Milky Way.

"The interstellar dust is fundamentally the stuff we're made of," says University of California at Berkeley scientist Andrew Westphal, who announced the discovery on 3 March at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference near Houston, Texas. "We're trying to understand our own origins."

The Stardust mission was sent on a path through the solar system that crossed the route of Comet Wild-2. Westphal and his colleagues wanted to collect dust from Wild-2 because they thought at the time that comets were frozen samples of primordial interstellar matter, essentially unchanged since they formed billions of years ago outside the solar system. But analyses of these comet grains several years ago showed that they were forged in hot environments near the Sun and had been substantially altered during the Solar System's formation (see 'Comet Born of Our Own Sun').

However, Stardust also captured some non-cometary grains. Before the encounter with Wild-2, Stardust opened another collecting tray to space. The researchers hoped to catch 100 or so interstellar grains from the weak but continuous flux in open space. The elements in these grains were forged in stars, but coalesced into grains in the empty space between stars, where they were mixed and rocked by supernova shockwaves and cosmic rays.

The grains were far harder to catch than the comet particles. Not only was the flux much lower, but the interstellar particles were smaller than the comet grains and were moving several times faster — up to 30 kilometres per second.

The Stardust researchers say that the interstellar grains nabbed by their spacecraft may provide a unique way to study the matter between stars. "It's kind of a grand thing," says Don Brownlee of the University of Washington in Seattle, who was principal investigator for the mission. "We're catching a piece of the galaxy."

"I'm cautiously excited," says Westphal, who adds that the researchers must conduct more tests to ensure that their particles are truly interstellar grains, rather than micrometeorites or even pieces of the spacecraft knocked loose by debris.

It took four years of searching to identify the two potential interstellar dust particles, stuck at the ends of tunnels they had bored in the Stardust collector, which consists of a wispy material called an aerogel. The researchers carefully extracted the first particle and sent it to three microprobe facilities around the world for analysis. The results offered hints of a glassy, amorphous shape that is rich in aluminium.

One of the most powerful aspects of the project was the distributed army of volunteers who have searched for the tiny tracks in the aerogel. The online effort created by Westphal, dubbed Stardust@Home, has relied on the work of thousands of self-described "dusters", who have scanned millions of pictures of candidate tracks.

A Canadian man named Bruce Hudson, from Midland, Ontario, scored the first catch and, per the rules of the project, got to name the first piece of stardust: Orion. Reached by phone, Hudson, 46, a former groundskeeper for a Catholic shrine, said he thought the result was "so cool". Hudson suffered a stroke in 2003, and he turned to the Stardust@Home project in 2006 as a productive way of passing the time. For a year or so, he spent as much as 15 hours a day scanning thousands of pictures, five seconds per slide. "I kept doing that over weeks and months," he says. "It was all I could do, really." He at one point cracked the top ten ranking among the dusters, which reflects productivity and efficiency.

Westphal says he will start a new phase of the @Home project in a few weeks, using the newly identified candidate tracks as a way of calibrating the way that dusters do their searches.

news20100304nn2

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 3 March 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.104
News
Gut bacteria gene complement dwarfs human genome

Sequencing project finds that Europeans share a surprising number of bacteria.
By Andrew Bennett Hellman

{{The human gut contains around a thousand different species of bacteria.}
Dattatreya / Alamy}

Researchers have unveiled a catalogue of genes from microbes found in the human gut. The information could reveal how 'friendly' gut bacteria interact with the body to influence nutrition and disease.

"This is the most powerful microscope that's been used so far to describe microbial communities," says George Weinstock, a geneticist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the study.

The human body contains about ten times as many microbes as human cells, and most of them live in the gut. The new study, published today in Nature¹, shows that, between them, those microbes contain 3.3 million genes, dwarfing the human genome's 23,000. The authors also find that the bacterial species in one person's gut are not as different from those of others as had been expected.

Scientists hope to use this genetic information much as they hope to use the human genome: to predict and treat disease. The goal has led to efforts around the world to sequence and characterize all the microbes in the human gut, dubbed the 'microbiome'.

Now, a group of scientists associated with a European project called MetaHIT (Metagenomics of the Human Intestinal Tract) has undertaken the biggest ever census of the bacterial genes that are present in the gut.
Mix and match

The team collected faecal samples from 124 Europeans, some healthy, others obese or overweight, and some with inflammatory bowel disease. They isolated and sequenced the DNA from the samples using high-speed sequencing techniques — a process that yields a daunting number of short DNA fragments. The team assembled the pieces into larger, continuous stretches, then compared the resulting genes to those in databases, and eliminated known human genes from the set.

On the basis of the average bacterial genome size, the authors predict that the 3.3 million genes represents about 1,000 species of bacterium. They also propose that each person's gut contains at least 160 of these species, and that about 40% of a person's gut species are shared by around half the other people in the study.

Fewer than one-third of the genes catalogued in the paper are well studied, and about 40% look like poorly studied genes from known bacteria. Finally, more than 25% of the genes have never been seen before, which suggests that unknown species may be living in our guts, says co-author Dusko Ehrlich, a microbial geneticist at the National Institute for Agricultural Research in Jouy en Josas, France.

The catalogue provides information on the genes bacteria use to process complex sugars, produce essential amino acids and vitamins, and to turn compounds foreign to the body, such as the food supplement benzoate, into useful compounds.

Elusive visitors

The authors estimate that, so far, they have sequenced about 85% of the microbial genes found in the gut. Ehrlich explains that some microbial species reside only transiently in the gut, making them difficult to catch there. Weinstock points out that species that are rare or less abundant may also be difficult to identify. And there could be greater variety around the globe: Jun Wang, a co-author on the paper and bioinformaticist at the BGI in Shenzhen, China, would like to collect data from non-Europeans to help complete the set.

The study provides some clues about how gut bacteria contribute to human health. The bacterial populations of healthy individuals are known to differ from those of people with inflammatory bowel disease, and the authors back this up, finding differences in the abundance and variety of bacteria reported for these two groups.

The work does, however, leave plenty of room to explore the effects of gut bacteria on health and disease — something, says Ehrlich, that the researchers plan to focus on in the future. Others, meanwhile, are interested in the therapeutic potential of the information. "Could these communities be used as biomarkers of the effectiveness of therapeutic intervention?" asks Jeffrey Gordon, a microbiologist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not part of the study. "Could they be the targets of therapeutic interventions? I think that is what the future holds."

References
1. Qin, J. et al. Nature 464, 59-65 (2010).

news20100304nn3

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 3 March 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.103
News
How the cell's powerhouses turn deadly

Mitochondria can trigger a lethal immune response after injuries.
By Heidi Ledford

{{Mitochondria, which power cells, can trigger a lethal immune response after trauma.}
B. LONGCORE / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY}

Carl Hauser's patient was dying. A broken pelvis had brought the patient to the hospital, and now it seemed that a severe bacterial infection was killing him. Hauser — a trauma surgeon at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson — and his colleagues performed test after test, but could not find any sign of infection. Finally, with nothing left to try and time running out, Hauser removed a 30-litre mass of clotted blood. His patient immediately recovered.

It would take Hauser over 15 years to determine why the patient's own damaged tissue nearly killed him.

In a study published today in Nature, Hauser, now at Harvard Medical School, in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues show that molecules produced in mitochondria — the energy-producing structures in cells — escape into the bloodstream during severe trauma, and can fool the immune system into thinking that bacterial invaders are on the loose¹.

The immune system's response to this perceived invasion can be deadly. A condition called systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) can lead to fever, a racing heartbeat, breathing difficulties and, eventually, organ failure. Caused by infection or by trauma alone, SIRS accounts for most of the deaths that occur in hospital intensive-care centres.

"If you twist your ankle and it turns red and swells, that's fine," says Hauser. "If you have such a huge injury that your whole body turns red and swells, you can end up on a ventilator and dialysis with multiple organ failure."

Mistaken identity

The symptoms of trauma-induced SIRS resemble the inflammatory response to severe infection, known as sepsis — but unlike sepsis, there need not be an infection present. As a result, physicians initially thought that a release of bacteria from the gut (rather than bacteria from outside the body) caused trauma-induced SIRS. But subsequent tests showed that this was not the case, and researchers shifted their focus to another possible culprit: the pulverized tissue itself.

Hauser and his colleagues hypothesized that mitochondrial molecules released when tissue is severely damaged could stimulate the immune system in trauma patients who develop SIRS. Because mitochondria are descendants of ancient bacteria that were engulfed and then enslaved by host cells, Hauser reasoned that mitochondrial molecules could resemble bacteria closely enough that they could fool the immune system into thinking an infection has begun.

Mitochondria are normally tucked away inside the cell, separated from the immune system, which detects invaders by exploring cellular surfaces rather than their interiors. But traumatized tissue may release these mitochondrial molecules into the bloodstream, where they could trigger the immune system's sentinels.

To test this, the researchers analysed samples from 15 trauma patients with severe injuries. The patients had thousands of times more mitochondrial DNA in their blood compared with the blood of healthy people. The trauma patients also seemed to have higher levels of mitochondrial peptides in their tissues.

Overreaction

Hauser and his team found that these molecules were able to activate the immune system's normal response to bacteria. Furthermore, when they injected the mitochondrial molecules into rats at concentrations similar to those found in human trauma patients, the animals developed lung and liver damage resembling that observed in human patients with SIRS.

The work is "extraordinary", says Carolyn Calfee, a critical-care physician at the University of California, San Francisco. "We've always wondered why it is that both trauma and sepsis have this similar syndrome," she says. "This opens a whole new set of connections that we hadn't previously realized."

The results suggest that drugs targeting the mitochondrial molecules themselves or early steps in the immune-response pathway could one day be used to treat SIRS. But Hauser cautions that it might not be that simple. Trauma could also activate other pathways that lead to immune-system stimulation, he points out, so simply targeting those that respond to mitochondrial molecules might not be enough to see an effect.

Furthermore, the SIRS response itself could be important for preventing infection during a time when a patient with trauma would be particularly vulnerable, cautions Jérôme Pugin, an intensive-care physician at the University Hospital of Geneva in Switzerland. "Blocking the effects of this mitochondrial DNA could be seen as a good thing because you don't activate the immune system," he says. "On the other hand, maybe it will stop the priming of the immune system for preventing secondary infection."

References
1. Zhang, Q. et al. Nature 464, 104-107 (2010).

news20100304nn4

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 3 March 2010 | Nature 464, 16-17 (2010) | doi:10.1038/464016a
News
University rankings smarten up

Systems for ranking the world's higher-education and research institutions are about to become more sophisticated, says Declan Butler.
BY Declan Butler

{{Improved university rankings may help students, researchers and policy-makers to make better choices.}
S. JARRATT/CORBIS}

Every autumn, politicians, university administrators, funding offices and countless students wait impatiently for the World University Rankings produced by Britain's Times Higher Education (THE) magazine. A position in the upper echelons of the THE ranking can influence policy-makers' higher-education investments, determine which institutions attract the best researchers or students, and prompt universities to try to boost their ratings.

But academics and universities have long criticized what they describe as the outsized influence of the THE and other university rankings, saying that their methodology and data are problematic (see Nature 447, 514–515; 2007). Many universities see wild swings in their rankings from year to year, for example, which cannot reflect real changes in quality; and many French universities' ratings suffer because their researchers' publications often list affiliations with national research agencies as well as the university itself, diluting the benefit for the university. Now, universities and other stakeholders are developing their own rankings to tackle these shortcomings.

"Rankings have outgrown the expectations of those who started them," says Kazimierz Bilanow, managing director of the IREG Observatory on Academic Rankings and Excellence, a Warsaw-based ranking quality-assurance body created in October 2009. "What were often exercises intended to boost newspaper circulation have come to have enormous influence on policy-making and funding of institutions and governments."

Several approaches to university rankings now being developed are switching the emphasis away from crude league tables and towards more nuanced assessments that could provide better guidance for policy-makers, funding bodies, researchers and students alike. They promise to rank universities on a much wider range of criteria, and assess more intangible qualities, such as educational excellence. And the THE ranking list is trying to remake itself in the face of the criticism.

One complaint is that the THE's rankings rely heavily on reputational surveys, which involve polling academics about which universities they think are the best in a given field. Some argue that these assessments often use too few academics, who may not be well informed about all the universities they are being asked to judge, and that there is a bias towards English-speaking countries.

In November 2009, the THE announced that the data for its rankings would no longer be supplied by QS, a London-based higher-education media company. "We are very much aware that national policy and multimillion-pound decisions are influenced by these rankings," said THE editor Ann Mroz at the time. "We are also acutely aware of the criticisms made of the methodology. Therefore, we feel we have a duty to improve how we compile them."

League-table turnabout

The THE will in future draw its ranking data from the Global Institutional Profiles Project, which was launched by data provider Thomson Reuters in January. The project aims to create a comprehensive database on thousands of the world's universities, including details of research funding, numbers of researchers and PhDs awarded, and measures of educational performance. The company will also use its internal citation and publication data to generate multiple indicators of institutions' research performance, and will build in auditing procedures to guard against misinformation provided by universities.

Thomson Reuters plans to continue reputational surveys, but aims to have at least 25,000 reviewers, compared with the 4,000 used by QS for the THE 2009 rankings. It has partnered with UK pollster Ipsos MORI to try to ensure the survey is representative. "We are not doing this randomly, but putting a lot of thought behind it," says Simon Pratt, project manager for institutional research at Thomson Reuters. "We want a more balanced view across all subject areas." The THE will continue to rank all universities in the form of a league table, which critics say offers a false precision that exaggerates differences between institutions. But the new rankings will be more nuanced and detailed, according to Pratt, including data that enable institutions to compare themselves on various indicators with peers having similar institutional profiles.

Comparing like with like is the cornerstone of a European Commission effort to create a global database of universities — the Multi-dimensional Global ranking of Universities (U-Multirank). A pilot project involving 150 universities will be launched in the coming months by a group of German, Dutch, Belgian and French research centres that specialize in research and education metrics, known as the Consortium for Higher Education and Research Performance Assessment.

U-Multirank hopes to focus its comparisons on institutions that have similar activities and missions. Existing league tables lump together all types of universities, but comparing a large multidisciplinary university with a regional university focused on teaching, for example, makes little sense, says Frans van Vught, one of U-Multirank's project leaders and former president and rector of the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands.

To identify universities with similar profiles, the project will draw on a sister European Union project, U-Map, in which van Vught is also involved. U-Map is building a classification of universities based on their level of research activity, the types of degrees and student programmes offered, as well as the extent of other important roles such as their regional and industrial engagement and international orientation. U-Multirank will develop indicators of performance on each of these aspects. After completion of the pilots, the two projects will seek philanthropic funding to become operational services, says van Vught.

U-Multirank also hopes to overcome one of the major criticisms of many existing ranking systems: that they focus excessively on research output, neglecting the many other crucial roles that universities have, not least teaching. Indeed, the Academic Ranking of World Universities, compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and generally known as the Shanghai index, focuses exclusively on research output and citation impact, including variables such as numbers of Nobel prizewinners and publications in Nature and Science (see 'Top marks').

Rankings that use citation counts do not usually take into account the widely different citation rates among disciplines. This biases rankings in favour of biomedical research institutions, penalizing those that publish mainly in the social sciences or in other fields with lower citation rates. By contrast, both the Thomson Reuters and U-Multirank initiatives will use a variety of normalized bibliometric indicators that take this, and other pitfalls, into account.

In place of league tables, U-Multirank will give an overall grade of institutional performance on each of the various indicators it considers, allowing students, scientists and policy-makers to access and combine the indicators most relevant to them, so making their own à la carte rankings. "They will be able to look at the data through their own spectacles," says van Vught.

But as everyone in the field acknowledges, educational aspects of universities are particularly difficult to compare. Research is an international activity, and reasonable indicators exist for comparing institutions. Education, by contrast, is largely organized nationally and reflects different cultures and traditions. "It's a much tougher problem," says Pratt.

University dropout rates in France, for example, cannot be compared directly with those in other countries because all students who pass the baccalauréat automatically acquire a place at a French university. Selection takes place at the end of the first undergraduate year, and not immediately after leaving high school, pushing up the dropout rate. Similarly, the length and content of degrees often vary greatly between countries.

Measuring ideas

That's a gap in assessment that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is trying to fill. Last month, it launched a US$12.5-million pilot project, the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO), to develop new metrics for assessing teaching and learning outcomes. The project, which does not intend to produce rankings, will try to measure complex aspects of university life — such as the ability of students to think critically and come up with original ideas — across different cultures and languages. Although few details are yet available, it says it intends to launch a pilot involving 200 students in a dozen or so universities in six countries, including the United States and Japan. "We will be watching the development of the AHELO exercise very closely," says Ben Sowter, QS's head of research.

CONTINUED ON newsnn5

news20100304nn5

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 3 March 2010 | Nature 464, 16-17 (2010) | doi:10.1038/464016a
News
University rankings smarten up

Systems for ranking the world's higher-education and research institutions are about to become more sophisticated, says Declan Butler.
BY Declan Butler

CONTINUED FROM newsnn4

QS intends to continue developing its university ranking despite losing its link to the THE. "We will continue improving the methodology and response levels to the surveys," says Sowter, adding that he welcomes the new competition. Other experts say that having more rankings will be beneficial, as it will reduce the undue influence of any one ranking.

And now it is the rankings' turn to be assessed. The European University Association, which represents more than 800 universities, plans to publish annual reviews of all international rankings, assessing their methodologies and scrutinizing why institutions rise or fall in the rankings. The effort will be loosely modelled on an existing overview of ranking systems produced by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education and Research and the Rectors' Conference of the Swiss Universities.

The reviews should help users to decide on which ranking data can best answer key questions about universities' performance. "Any ranking exercise, however sophisticated, is being irresponsible if it projects itself as the right answer to a question, whereas the only right answer is in the hands of the person asking it," says Sowter.


[naturenews]
Published online 3 March 2010 | Nature 464, 14-15 (2010) | doi:10.1038/464014b
News
Unmanned planes take wing for science

Drones will measure ozone and aerosols in the atmosphere.
By Jeff Tollefson

{{Nose for science: the Global Hawk will gather data during 30-hour flights.}
T. LANDIS/NASA PHOTO}

Later this month a remote-controlled aircraft is scheduled to take off from the Mojave Desert in California and veer west over the Pacific Ocean. The Global Hawk, a slim-winged, high-flying jet, was designed for military reconnaissance and tested in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But this time the plane will fly for science.

Guided by pilots at NASA's Dryden Research Center, north of Los Angeles, the plane will measure concentrations of ozone, aerosols and various trace gases along a 15,000-kilometre loop around Hawaii. At the same time, atmospheric scientists hope that the drone's flight will usher in an era of unmanned scientific aircraft that can probe parts of the sky normally inaccessible to manned planes.

During the past two decades, several teams have developed and tested remote-controlled science planes, and NASA already flies the smaller Predator B — also of military origin — over western US wildfires. Drones never caught on as serious research tools, in part because they could carry so little compared with manned planes. But the Global Hawk is larger and much more capable than its predecessors, lifting a payload of around 900 kilograms to a height of nearly 20,000 metres and covering a distance of some 20,000 kilometres.

That combination "can't even be approached with any other aircraft", says David Fahey, a principal investigator with the drone project at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado. "Scientists don't really know how to use a platform like this, because we've never had one. You kind of have to let your imagination be unbridled for a bit, and then you rein it back in."

In particular, the Global Hawk will give scientists the ability to stay in the stratosphere for hours, collecting samples in this key region where ozone is being destroyed. The manned ER-2 can tap the lower stratosphere, but it can't fly as far as the Global Hawk or remain up for as long, says Paul Newman, the scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who is leading this month's mission with Fahey. "Whenever you use these planes it always seems as if the thing that you really want to sample is about 1,000 miles farther than you can go."

Flying instruments on the Global Hawk isn't cheap or easy. NASA charges the same price — US$3,500 per hour — to use the Global Hawk as for various manned aircraft. And although staying in the air for long periods offers many advantages, Fahey says that the team has had to figure out the logistics of rotating crews of scientists to monitor equipment during a 30-hour flight.

Chris Naftel, who manages the programme for NASA, saw the potential of the military reconnaissance drones in 2005, when the Air Force was decommissioning seven Global Hawk prototypes. Naftel secured two of the prototypes in 2007 and a third last year for free. The agency signed an agreement with the plane's producer, Northrop Grumman in Los Angeles, to help convert the aircraft, install new communications equipment, train employees and build an operations centre.

During the summer, a team of NASA scientists will deploy the Global Hawk to monitor Atlantic storms, hoping to peer inside them as some develop from tropical disturbances into hurricanes. Multiple teams are developing other research missions, and NASA is now working on a mobile communications centre that will give the aircraft truly global coverage.

With Global Hawk about to start its science runs, support is growing for unmanned research planes. A report from the US National Research Council last month called unmanned vehicles an "extremely exciting complement" to NASA's current aerial fleet. And NOAA is pondering whether to develop its own fleet of science drones.

David Parrish, a colleague of Fahey's at NOAA who conducts intensive atmospheric research campaigns with a converted passenger aircraft, the P3, emphasizes that manned missions are unlikely to end any time soon. His team loads a P3 with so much instrumentation that the plane, which is designed to hold 80–90 passengers, can seat just five or six scientists.

"It's very difficult to develop instruments with the needed precision and accuracy, yet small enough to fly on these unmanned platforms," Parrish says. He adds, however, that "the atmosphere is so big and so complex" that there is certainly room for both types of aircraft.

news20100304bbc1

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 16:55 GMT, Wednesday, 3 March 2010
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News, The Woodlands, Texas
Clues to Antarctica space blast

{The team's findings could help in the search for other ancient "airbursts"}

A large space rock may have exploded over Antarctica thousands of years ago, showering a large area with debris, according to new research.

The evidence comes from accumulations of tiny meteoritic particles and a layer of extraterrestrial dust found in Antarctic ice cores.

Details of the work were presented at a major science conference in Texas.

The event would have been similar to the Tunguska event, which flattened a large area of Siberian forest in 1908.

It is thought to have been a so-called "airburst" in which a space rock does not reach the ground, but rather explodes in the atmosphere.

The research is based on a study of extraterrestrial debris found in granite from Miller Butte, in the Transantarctic Mountains, and a layer of cosmic dust represented in two Antarctic ice cores.

The debris from the mountains includes micrometeorites and tiny particles called spherules. The study's authors think these spherules could be material eroded from a stony meteorite as it was heated up on its way through our atmosphere.

The spherules could potentially provide a signature to look for evidence of "airbursts" in the geological record.

Wide area

The results were the subject of a presentation at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in The Woodlands, Texas.

{{ What makes [the] work so exciting is that it may give us a way of spotting these events in the geological record}
Phil Bland
Imperial College London}

A layer of extraterrestrial dust has been found in both the Dome C and Dome Fuji ice cores from Antarctica. The dust in both cores is dated to about 481,000 years ago - and is therefore likely to derive from the same event.

The team, comprising Luigi Folco and Matthias van Ginneken from the University of Siena, Italy, and Phil Bland from Imperial College London, UK, now conclude that the Dome C and Dome Fuji dust layers are also paired with debris from the Transantarctic Mountains.

They point to strong similarities in the texture and composition of the debris found in the ice cores and that found in the granite.

However, the sites are more than 2,900km apart. For cosmic debris to be spread over such a wide area, the researchers propose that an airburst is the most likely explanation.

They estimate that it could have been caused by an object weighing 100,000 tonnes.

"We've got similar material spread over a very large area. It's difficult to do that with any other mechanism," said co-author Dr Bland.

The Tunguska impact was caused by a space rock some tens of metres across that detonated 5-10km above the ground. The blast flattened some 2,000 sq km of Siberian forest, knocking people to the ground about 60km from the epicentre.

Airbursts on the scale of the Tunguska event are thought to occur every 500-1,000 years on Earth. This figure is based on computer modelling by Dr Bland and his colleagues.

These results are consistent with an analysis of airbursts in the atmosphere gathered by US Department of Defense satellites from the 1960s onwards.

"These events are tricky to spot after they happen. If you go to Tunguska now, you've really got your work cut out trying to find any trace of that event - and that was 1908," Dr Bland told BBC News.

"What makes [the] work so exciting is that it may give us a way of spotting these events in the geological record. If these spherules are the signature, we know what to look for in future."


[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 00:07 GMT, Thursday, 4 March 2010
By Victoria Gill
Science reporter, BBC News
Dinosaur's oldest relative found

{Asilisaurus kongwe was a very close relative of the dinosaurs}

Scientists have discovered a dinosaur-like creature 10 million years older than the earliest known dinosaurs.

Asilisaurus kongwe is a newly discovered herbivore that lived during the middle Triassic period - about 245 million years ago.

The scientists say that its age suggests that dinosaurs were also on the Earth earlier than previously thought.

They described their findings in the journal Nature.

The study was led by Dr Sterling Nesbitt from the University of Texas at Austin in the US.

He said: "This new evidence suggests that [dinosaurs] were really only one of several large and distinct groups of animals that exploded in diversity in the Triassic period, including silesaurs [like this one], pterosaurs, and several groups of crocodilian relatives."

Dr Randall Irmis from the Utah Museum of Natural History in the US was also involved in the study. He said that this group of creatures - the silesaurs - were the "closest relative of the dinosaurs".

"It was to dinosaurs much like chimps are to humans - kind of cousins," he told BBC News.

{Asilisaurus stood up to 1m tall and walked on all fours}

"Since we have one line of the family tree, the other branch must have existed at the same time. So this suggests there are other very early dinosaurs that we haven't found yet."

He also said that the creature was not what the researchers expected an early dinosaur cousin to look like.

"It was a weird little creature," he said. "We always thought the earliest relatives were small, bipedal, carnivorous animals.

"These walked on four legs and had beaks and herbivore-like teeth."

'Failed experiment'

Dr Paul Barrett, a palaeontologist from the Natural History Museum in London said that the finding provided scientists with important information about how dinosaurs evolved.

"The creatures share a lot of features with dinosaurs," he said. "They show us an intermediate step between more primitive reptiles and the more specialised dinosaurs."

The fossil record indicates that this group of primitive creatures went extinct approximately 45 million years after they emerged.

The dinosaurs, on the other hand, were far more successful and walked the Earth for about 165 million years.

Dr Barrett said: "[Silesaurids] were like a failed experiment in how to build a dinosaur."

news20100304bbc2

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 18:06 GMT, Wednesday, 3 March 2010
By Doreen Walton
Science reporter, BBC News
Human gut microbes hold 'second genome'

{Clostridium difficile bacteria, a normal inhabitant of the human gut}

The human gut holds microbes containing millions of genes, say scientists.

In fact, there are more genes in the flora in the intestinal system than the rest of our bodies. So many that they are being dubbed our "second genome".

A study published in the journal Nature details the analysis of the genes, carried out to better understand how the gut flora is affected by disease.

"Basically, we are a walking bacterial colony," said Professor Jeroen Raes, one of the researchers involved.

"There is a huge diversity. We have about 100 times more microbial genes than human genes in the body. We also have 10 times more bacterial cells in our body than human cells," he told BBC News. Most of the microbes present in our bodies live in the gut.

{{We're basically living in symbiosis with these microbes}
Professor Jeroen Raes}

The study was led by Professor Jun Wang from the Beijing Genomics Institute-Shenzhen.

Scientists from Germany, Brussels, Denmark, Spain, France and the UK also took part in the international effort, named the European MetaHIT consortium, which has been co-ordinated by Dr Stanislav Dusko Ehrlich.

"Everyone was so motivated," said Dr Dusko Ehrlich. "To have such an exciting project to run - it's a piece of cake. The work went much faster than we expected."

Professor Raes, who works at Vrike Universiteit Brussel, explained why the microbes warranted such an intensive study: "Gut flora is crucial for our health. We're basically living in symbiosis with these microbes.

"The bacteria help digest food, provide vitamins, protect us from invading pathogens. If there's a disturbance, people get all sorts of diseases such as Crohn's disease, Ulcerative colitis, and a link has also been made to obesity."

Untangling a mess

The researchers have developed what is called a metagenome, a combined genome of all the bacteria sequenced at once.

"This creates a huge dataset that has to be disentangled," explained Professor Raes. "The untangling of this mess is what I do; it's my role in the study."

The team analysed faecal matter from 124 Europeans and found each person had about 160 bacterial species. The samples were more alike than they had expected and a significant fraction of the bacteria was shared between all the people who took part.

{{We already have very exciting results in terms of differences between healthy and sick people}
Dr Stanislav Dusko Ehrlich}

By mapping the genes, the scientists have found a way around the problem of having to culture bacteria in order to study them.

Many bacteria are very difficult to grow in cultures in the lab. From looking at the genes, the researchers hope to be able to investigate how the flora changes when a person has a disease.

"It will allow us to understand diseases better," said Professor Raes. "We know there is a microbial component but we don't know exactly how [it works]. We will use it for prognostic and diagnostic markers so we can predict disease severity or sensitivity to these diseases."

Dr Dusko Ehrlich said the work was showing promising results: "We have extremely interesting findings based on the results of this gene catalogue. We already have very exciting results in terms of differences between healthy and sick people."

Professor Elaine Holmes from Imperial College, London, who was not involved in the research, said it was a welcome advance on previous studies.

"The article is extremely timely given the escalating interest in the influence of the gut microbiota in many aspects of health ranging from Irritable Bowel Disease, sepsis and obesity to autism," she told BBC News.

"It uses a large number of participants and therefore one assumes it is more representative of the 'real' microbial composition than previous studies. Also, it is an amazing feat of data processing."

news20100304reut1

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
LONDON
Wed Mar 3, 2010 4:10am EST
EU carbon flat ahead of German permit auction

LONDON (Reuters) - European Union carbon prices were little changed on Wednesday ahead of an emissions permit auction, defying lower gas and power prices.

EU Allowances for December-delivery were slightly firmer at 0820 GMT, gaining 2 cents to 13.32 euros a tonne.

Volume was light at around 200 lots traded, with most emissions traders attending a conference in Amsterdam this week.

Germany will sell 570,000 tonnes of EUA futures later on Wednesday. The British government will auction 4.5 million EU permits on March 18.

In its weekly spot auction, Germany sold 300,000 spot EUAs on Tuesday for 13.08 euros a tonne.

EUAs also defied lower gas and power prices to trade near Tuesday's close.

German Calendar 2011 baseload power prices slipped by 40 cents to 47.35 euros per megawatt hour while British gas prices lost 0.1 pence to 31.50 pence per therm.

Oil was steady below $80 on Wednesday after an industry report showed U.S. crude inventories climbed more than expected on growing imports, while distillate stockpiles tumbled.

CER futures had not yet traded, but the EUA-CER spread was set around 1.45 euros.

Companies with excess carbon permits are stock-piling them rather than selling them off in anticipation of tighter emissions caps and higher carbon prices from 2013, industrial firms and utilities said at the carbon conference on Tuesday.

Several analysts have been concerned that industrial users such as steel and cement firms would dump surplus permits, causing prices to crash, but with most of the 27-nation bloc having now issued their 2010 EUAs, traders said there has been little evidence of a major sell-off so far. (Reporting by Michael Szabo; Editing by William Hardy)


[Green Business]
BERLIN
Wed Mar 3, 2010 4:13am EST
German cabinet agrees solar power incentive cuts

BERLIN (Reuters) - Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet has agreed, as planned, to a proposal to cut state-mandated incentives in July, a government source told Reuters on Wednesday.

After passing the cabinet, the measure will head to the Bundestag, or lower house of parliament, where Merkel's center-right coalition has a comfortable majority.

The government wants to cut the incentives for rooftop solar power by 16 percent from July 1 and eliminate support for converted farmland.

The cuts in the feed-in tariff will also include a 15 percent cut for non-agricultural fields.

So-called feed-in tariffs -- prices utilities are obliged to pay to generators of renewable energy -- are the sector's lifeline as long as grid-parity, the point at which renewables cost the same as fossil fuel-based power, has not been reached.

(Reporting by Markus Wacket; writing by Erik Kirschbaum)


[Green Business]
Susan Taylor
OTTAWA
Wed Mar 3, 2010 3:54pm EST
Manulife sees Canada green financing demand surging

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Manulife Financial, Canada's largest life insurer, sees a funding shortfall for the country's renewable power developers, as demand for cash outpaces the debt market's recovery from the credit crunch.

For its part, Manulife plans to finance a host of clean power projects this year, including a C$200 million ($194 million) wind power deal in the next two weeks.

"There's certainly a lot of opportunity here," said Bill Sutherland, senior managing director and head of Manulife's Canadian project finance team, launched in 2002. "There's going to be a massive requirement."

Over the past five years, the Toronto-based unit has arranged C$1.4 billion in funding, including C$800 million of its own cash, to finance 11 projects.

Abandoned by banks until recently, Canada's debt capital market for clean energy projects remains tight, even as the life insurance companies that dominate the sector begin increasing capacity, Sutherland said.

That is bad news for the scores of sun, wind and hydro power projects planned in response to lucrative tariffs and favorable government policy.

"I'm concerned that even if the banks return, even in a sizable way, there will not be enough to finance the construction of all the worthwhile projects that have been proposed," said Sutherland.

"As a rough guess, I'd say there's probably a C$10 billion-plus requirement over the next four years and between the banks and the life insurance companies here in Canada, we're going to fall well short of that. ... At best we can do half."

In total, Manulife has 22 separate wind investments in seven regions of North America, including deals with Canadian renewable power developers Plutonic Power Corp and Innergex Power Income Fund

It is now looking at what Sutherland calls a large number of projects in Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia and the United States.

It expects to close a C$200 million financing for an Ontario project in the next two weeks, with about half raised through a syndicate and the remainder from Manulife.

That will follow its C$179 million financing deal with Invenergy LLC to build and run a 78 megawatt wind farm in western Ontario. Manulife was agent and lead lender in the arrangement, which closed in late January.

ACCELERATING DEMAND

Despite a stingy supply of debt capital, there is a big appetite for cash from Canada's renewable energy sector, which has flourished under favorable government plans.

Ontario's Green Energy Act and lucrative, long-term rates for clean energy have sparked a flurry of project proposals. In Quebec, several projects awarded deals in a big 2008 wind power call are now seeking funds for construction.

British Columbia also promises to be fertile ground for green power, as developers anxiously await imminent awards under a provincial call for clean energy.

There are modest signs that capital market conditions are improving, Sutherland said.

In the last five months, some European banks have made a cautious return. Before the market meltdown, foreign banks dangled attractive terms to secure deals and gain a foothold in Canada, but those projects failed to materialize, he said.

"They are coming back now with a tighter standard, but I expect of course that those standards will again be relaxed as they jockey for position," Sutherland said.

($1=$1.03 Canadian)

(Reporting by Susan Taylor; Editing by Frank McGurty)


[Green Business]
Timothy Gardner
WASHINGTON
Wed Mar 3, 2010 4:42pm EST
US EPA says to ease carbon rules on small business

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration will give small businesses a break on coming carbon dioxide emissions rules but big emitters like coal-fired power plants will face a crack-down, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said on Wednesday.

President Barack Obama has pushed the EPA to begin regulating gases blamed for warming the planet, in part to force polluters to support the climate change bill. The legislation is his preferred method of climate control, but it is stalled in the Senate.

The EPA said late last year it would require polluters that emit more than 25,000 tons a year of greenhouse gases to obtain permits demonstrating they were using the best available technology to reduce emissions.

Jackson raised that threshold on Wednesday, saying the regulations would exempt factories emitting under 75,000 tons of carbon annually in 2011 and 2012.

"If you're smaller than 75,000 tons, you will not need a permit for the next two years," Jackson told reporters after a Senate hearing.

The 75,000-ton threshold would exempt sources like hospitals, big buildings, and schools, but not heavy industry like coal-burning power plants, which emit 1 million tons a year or more of carbon dioxide, said Frank Maisano, an energy company advocate at Bracewell and Giuliani.

TIME OUT

Republicans and some Democrats in Congress oppose EPA regulation of greenhouse gases, and some hope to block it.

Senator John Rockefeller, a Democrat, told reporters on Tuesday he is preparing legislation giving the EPA a two-year time out on regulation of stationary sources of the pollution.

The White House has said it opposes such a move. It is working with lawmakers to pass the climate bill that would help reduce U.S. emissions, the highest in the developed world.

The bill has had trouble getting off the ground in the Senate, due to opposition from lawmakers representing coal and oil states. Since Democrats lost their Senate supermajority after an election in Massachusetts, prospects have worsened. A Reuters poll found key Senators doubted a climate bill could pass in this election year.

EPA's Jackson said the agency is still weighing the threshold for regulating long-term carbon emissions from smaller factories.

In February, Jackson wrote a letter to Democratic senators from coal-producing states, saying the EPA would not put regulations on smaller plants before 2016.

The definition of "smaller" plants had been ambiguous, leaving even tiny businesses wondering if their emissions would eventually be regulated. But on Wednesday Jackson said such a long-term threshold would be higher than 25,000 tons per year.

"It's safe to say we're looking at a number like 50,000, rather than 25,000," Jackson said.

(Additional reporting by Richard Cowan, Ayesha Rascoe and Tom Doggett; Editing by David Gregorio)

news20100304reut2

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
Nigel Hunt
LONDON
Wed Mar 3, 2010 11:19am EST
Vireol to build third major UK bioethanol refinery

LONDON (Reuters) - Biofuels company Vireol is set to break ground in July on Britain's third major refinery making bioethanol from feed wheat and further expansion could be on the cards, the company's chief executive Dave Knibbs said.

"I think you could see some more plants here...We are the most efficient place to produce feed wheat in Europe, our yields are better than anyone else's and there is room for more growth (in yields)," he told Reuters in an interview.

Vireol's refinery, at Grimsby in eastern England, will use 530,000 tonnes of grain, most likely feed wheat, to produce about 200 million liters (44 million Imp. gallons) of bioethanol as well as protein rich by-product DDGS (dried distillers grains with solubles), which is used for animal feed.

"I do believe it is something the UK can excel at. We should be leading the charge in Europe, not bringing up the rear," Knibbs said.

Britain's bioethanol industry got off to a slow start and was limited until recently to a British Sugar refinery with a capacity to produce about 70 million liters using sugar beet as its feedstock. It began operating in 2007.

Ensus is currently bringing into commercial production Britain's first wheat-based bioethanol refinery in Teesside in northeast England with capacity to produce about 400 to 450 million liters from about 1.1 million tonnes of wheat.

Vivergo Fuels is building a second major bioethanol refinery in Hull, eastern England, with a similar capacity to the Ensus plant. It is due to come on line either late this year or early in 2011.

Ensus is owned by two U.S. private equity funds, the Carlyle Group and Riverstone while Vivergo Fuels is a joint venture of British Sugar, BP and Du Pont Co.

OFFTAKE AGREEMENT

Future Capital Partners is in the final stages of completing the financing of the Vireol plant, which already has a 10-year agreement to sell all its bioethanol to a major investment bank.

Knibbs said confidentiality clauses meant he could not name the investment bank.

Vireol also has an agreement with UK merchant Gleadell to supply wheat to the refinery. Gleadell is a joint venture of ADM controlled Toepfer and French co-op Union Invivo.

Knibbs said the refinery should come on line in 2013, coinciding with Britain's target date for obtaining five percent of its motor fuels from renewable sources.

The European Union has also mandated that 10 percent of motor fuel should come from renewable sources by 2020, which Knibbs said would equate to about six billion liters for the UK market.

He noted the combined capacity of the Ensus, Vivergo and Vireol refineries would, however, amount to only about one billion liters.

"My personal sense is the rest of the world will only be able to supply a limited amount," he said, adding most of the production of top exporter Brazil was likely to be used up supplying the United States and meeting domestic demand.

Wheat production in Britain may, however, need to rise if it is to support a further expansion in the bioethanol industry.

Britain's exportable wheat surplus currently ranges from about 2.0 million tonnes to 3.5 million tonnes and the three refineries could consume more than 2.5 million.

All three are, however, located at ports providing the option of imports if domestic supplies are tight.

Knibbs said there was plenty of scope for UK wheat production to rise, adding there had been little emphasis on expanding EU wheat yields in the last few years.

"Europe is probably working at 50 to 60 percent of capacity when it comes to the amount of crops it could produce," he said.

(Reporting by Nigel Hunt; Editing by Anthony Barker)


[Green Business]
Alexander Haislip
Wed Mar 3, 2010 1:12pm EST
Startup GreenRoad gets funding from Gore, Branson

SAN FRANCISCO (Private Equity Week) - Sir Richard Branson and former Vice President Al Gore share a passion for environmentalism and are now co-investors in startup GreenRoad Technologies.

Branson invested in Redwood City, California-based GreenRoad www.greenroad.com/ in early 2008 via his Virgin Green Fund and has been active in the company's operations, despite not personally taking a board seat, said a GreenRoad spokesman.

Last week, an investment firm, co-founded by Gore, put an additional $10 million behind the startup, which develops technology that uses computers and online reporting tools to help ensure drivers stay safe. Its product identifies risky driving behaviors and offers feedback to improve safety and decrease excessive acceleration and braking, which can decrease fuel economy.

Gore's $683-million Generation Investment Management Climate Solutions Fund backs companies in the alternative-energy and efficiency spaces. A spokesman for GreenRoad said he did not know if Gore would become personally involved with the company's decision-making. Neither did the spokesman know if Gore, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient in 2007, would join the board.

The company has now raised $42.5 million from venture capitalists since launching in 2002. In addition to Gore's and Branson's investment vehicles, GreenRoad's other investors include Amadeus Capital, Balderton Capital, Benchmark Capital and DAG Ventures.

GreenRoad's information-gathering devices are used by corporate car and truck fleets to track employee driver behavior. It gives drivers immediate feedback, using a three-inch LCD monitor and sends information about their driving habits to a website monitored by company managers.

GreenRoad claims installing its device can save corporations between $1,000 and $4,000 per vehicle per year by reducing fuel consumption as much as 10 percent and decreasing the likelihood of accidents. The GreenRoad monitoring service costs $420 annually per vehicle, a spokesman said.

There are more than 3 million cars and trucks in corporate, government and rental fleets nationwide, according to a recent report by industry trade publication Automotive Fleet. GreenRoad reported it had secured AAA and T-Mobile as customers for its corporate fleet system, along with some 80 other corporate customers.

"By deploying GreenRoad through their fleets, companies can play an important role in reducing fuel consumption, lowering harmful emissions and fostering safe driving habits," Branson said of the company when he first financed it. "This in turn benefits a company's bottom line and also benefits the community."

Beyond the ecological benefits, GreenRoad's devices may help encourage safer driving. The company reports its customers have reduced accidents by an average of 54 percent and lowered the cost of accidents by an average of 65 percent.

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 42,642 people died in automobile accidents during 2006 and another 2.57 million people sustained injuries. That's more than 10 times the number of U.S. soldiers that have died during the Iraq War.

GreenRoad has no immediate plans for a consumer version of its product, but a spokesman said it was looking to partner with a mobile phone company on a new product in the coming months.

news20100304reut3

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
Chang-Ran Kim and Christiaan Hetzner
GENEVA
Wed Mar 3, 2010 9:32am EST
Little room for hybrids, EVs in Europe for a decade

GENEVA (Reuters) - Hybrid and electric cars are the stars of motor shows, but the expensive technologies could take a decade to really hit European roads as automakers improve petrol and diesel cars to meet short-term emissions targets.

The planned launch of the first zero-emission electric cars from Nissan Motor Co, Daimler AG and Mitsubishi Motors Corp this year, as well as debut of hybrid cars from a growing number of European brands has renewed the buzz around electric powertrains as promising solutions to reducing emissions in carbon dioxide-conscious Europe.

But most automakers gathered at the Geneva auto show this week said the most practical road to meeting Europe's 130g/km CO2 emissions target by 2015 was to improve conventional gasoline engines, downsize their cars, or offer more diesel engines, which are 20 to 30 percent more fuel-efficient than their petrol cousins.

"I think the opportunity for hybrids in Europe is quite small," said Hyundai Motor Europe Vice President Allan Rushforth.

While Hyundai Motor has hybrid and pure-electric cars in the production pipeline elsewhere, Rushforth said the introduction of clean diesel engines and improved gasoline cars alone would help South Korea's top automaker reduce its CO2 emissions in Europe to 115g/km by 2015, from 142g/km last year.

Generous subsidies have helped hybrids gain traction in Japan and the United States, but European consumers have favored diesel cars for better mileage and lower CO2 emissions.

With sales volumes so small, at less than 1 percent of the overall European market last year, having hybrid models in its line-up has done little for Japan's Honda Motor Co -- one of the few mass producers of gasoline-electric cars in the world. Its average emissions were above 140g/km last year.

"Hybrids don't have the same recognition in Europe as they do in the United States or Japan," Honda Motor Europe CEO Shigeru Takagi told Reuters at the auto show.

Takagi added that while Honda hoped the launch of the new sporty CR-Z showcased in Geneva and Jazz subcompact hybrids would help boost sales, Honda would also have to boost mileage on the Accord and other volume sellers to bring its emissions down.

Honda would eventually also need a small diesel engine to meet targets beyond 2015, he said.

"I think the Europeans were in no hurry to launch hybrids because they are not necessarily that much better in terms of fuel efficiency than diesel," said Michael Tyndall, auto specialist at Nomura International.

"The cost benefit trade-off doesn't really work for European consumers because a diesel car will be cheaper to buy and the comparative fuel saving is not enough to justify that extra cost," he added.

Hybrid leader Toyota Motor, meanwhile, slashed its emissions to 130.1g/km last year, only trailing Italian small-car maker Fiat, but that was thanks to the penetration of its Yaris subcompact, according to research firm JATO Dynamics.

Toyota sold just 44,000 units of the Prius hybrid in Europe last year, compared with about 210,000 for the Yaris.

Even the Renault-Nissan alliance, which has been the most aggressive in pursuing a zero-emission strategy, said EVs would only go so far to meet European targets.

"We're projecting a 10 percent share of the global market for EVs by 2020, and that's said to be a very optimistic target," the partners' zero-emissions project leader, Hideaki Watanabe, told Reuters.

"Even at that level, we'd have to work on the remaining 90 percent, which is based on internal combustion engines."

Japan's Mazda Motor Corp is taking just such a strategy, making improvements to its internal combustion engines to raise fuel economy by 30 percent until 2015, and adding hybrid and other electric options beyond that.

HYBRIDS FOR 2020?

Still, automakers say a further reduction in CO2 targets to 95g/km by 2020 would require hybrid technology or zero-emission electric or hydrogen fuel-cell cars, which is why automakers such as BMW and Volkswagen have plans to bring gasoline-electric cars to showrooms, albeit just in the high-end segments for now.

"(This) can only be achieved with a mixture of vehicles," said BMW CEO Norbert Reithofer.

"You will need electric cars, very good diesels, and hybrids," he said, adding BMW will expand its new 5-series generation to include a full hybrid.

Opel's R&D chief Rita Forst clarified Chief Executive Nick Reilly's recent break with his predecessor's aversion to offering hybrids in addition to the vaunted Opel Ampera electric car that will likely hit showrooms late next year.

She said the German carmaker was in fact planning to add a start-stop system for the Corsa soon as a "micro hybrid" and did not exclude the possibility that a "mild hybrid" with brake energy recuperation might also be offered in low volumes.

France's top automaker, PSA Peugeot Citroen, also expects electric powertrains to play a bigger role in a decade.

"If you look at the market in 2020 compared to what it is today... our assumptions are that if you add up the electric vehicle and the hybrid it will add up to potentially 15 percent of the market," PSA CEO Philippe Varin said.

(Additional reporting by Helen Massy-Beresford; Editing by Hans Peters)


[Green Business]
Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON
Wed Mar 3, 2010 3:36pm EST
Common weedkiller turns male frogs into females

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Atrazine, one of the most commonly used and controversial weedkillers, can turn male frogs into females, researchers reported on Monday.

The experiment is the first to show such complete effects of atrazine, which had been known to disrupt hormones and which is one of the chief suspects in the decline of amphibians such as frogs around the world.

"Atrazine-exposed males were both demasculinized (chemically castrated) and completely feminized as adults," Tyrone Hayes of the University of California Berkeley and colleagues wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The chemical had been shown to disrupt development and make frogs develop both male and female features -- termed hermaphroditism. This study of 40 male frogs shows the process can go even further, Hayes said.

"Before, we knew we got fewer males than we should have, and we got hermaphrodites. Now, we have clearly shown that many of these animals are sex-reversed males," Hayes said in a statement.

"Atrazine has caused a hormonal imbalance that has made them develop into the wrong sex, in terms of their genetic constitution."

SIMILAR EFFECTS ON HUMANS?

Whether the effects translate to humans is far from clear. Frogs have thin skin that can absorb chemicals easily and they literally bathe in the polluted water.

The European Union banned atrazine in 2004. The finding may add pressure to the United States to more closely regulate the chemical, used widely in agriculture.

"Approximately 80 million pounds (36,287 tonnes) are applied annually in the United States alone, and atrazine is the most common pesticide contaminant of ground and surface water," the researchers wrote.

"Atrazine can be transported more than 1,000 km (621 miles) from the point of application via rainfall and, as a result, contaminates otherwise pristine habitats, even in remote areas where it is not used," they added, citing other researchers.

"In fact, more than a half million pounds (227 tonnes) of atrazine are precipitated in rainfall each year in the United States."

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in October it was reviewing the health impacts of atrazine.

Syngenta AG, one of several companies that makes atrazine, has long defended its safety. The company says it is one of the best-studied herbicides available and pointed to prior safety reviews from the EPA and World Health Organization, among others.

Hayes and colleagues studied 40 African clawed frogs, keeping them in water contaminated with 2.5 ppb (parts per billion) of atrazine. The EPA's current drinking water standard is 3 ppb.

"Ten percent of the exposed genetic males developed into functional females that copulated with unexposed males and produced viable eggs," the researchers wrote.

"Regardless of the mechanism, the impacts of atrazine on amphibians and on wildlife in general are potentially devastating," they wrote.

"The negative impacts on wild amphibians is especially concerning given that the dose examined here (2.5 ppb) is in the range that animals experience year-round in areas where atrazine is used as well within levels found in rainfall, in which levels can exceed 100 ppb in the Midwestern United States," they added.

(Editing by Sandra Maler)

news20100304reut4

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
Nina Chestney - Analysis
AMSTERDAM
Wed Mar 3, 2010 11:23am EST
Hopes for $2 trillion global carbon market fade

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Investors are becoming less convinced that a global carbon market, estimated to be worth about $2 trillion by the end of the decade, can be established as uncertainty over global climate policy persists.

The absence of legally binding global climate deal and a federal emissions trading scheme in the United States are standing in the way of the market in global emissions trading growing to achieve yearly turnover of $2 trillion by 2020.

"There will only be a $2 trillion market if the U.S. gets on board," Trevor Sikorski, head of carbon research at Barclays Capital, told Reuters at a carbon conference in Amsterdam.

The market for carbon credits was worth around $136 billion last year, according to analysts Point Carbon.

Highlighting these fading hopes, a Point Carbon survey on Wednesday showed 61 percent of respondents said they expected a U.S. emissions trading scheme by 2015, down from 90 percent last year. They also predict a lower global carbon price of 31 euros ($41.92) a tonne in 2020, compared to 35 euros.

Carbon markets allow polluters to buy and emit carbon dioxide, blamed for global warming. Under such "cap-and-trade" schemes, companies or countries face a carbon limit. If they exceed that limit they can buy allowances from others.

The EU's Emissions Trading Scheme, launched in 2005, is the 27-member bloc's main weapon in fighting greenhouse gas and together with a U.S. scheme, is viewed as a crucial first step toward creating a global market.

The EU Commission has said it wants to see national schemes in OECD countries by 2013 and for those to be linked by 2015.

But cap-and-trade legislation faces stiff opposition from Republicans in the U.S. Senate and strong doubts persist that a bill will pass this year.

A new climate change bill could make its debut in the Senate soon in what would likely be the last big effort by Democrats to enact major environmental reforms this year.

The U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer on Wednesday warned that the debate on how to use public and private funding to fight climate change must be resolved if upcoming climate talks in Cancun later this year are to yield the global agreement that failed to materialize in Copenhagen last year.

BACKWARD TRACK

Participants at a carbon conference in Amsterdam were equally downbeat, as carbon prices in the EU ETS are weak and range-bound and expectations are low for a climate pact being agreed this year at the talks in the Mexican city of Canucun.

European Union carbon prices are roughly half what they were in mid-2008, trading around 13.45 euros ($18.35) a tonne.

Market players were already labeling 2010 as a "year of uncertainty" or a "bridge year." Moving to a $2 trillion market would be slow, they said.

"We will get there to a $2 trillion market but with slow steps," said Abyd Karmali, managing director and global head of carbon emissions at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch.

"If anything, we seem to be on a backward track to that mark, considering delays to the Australian scheme and the lack of anything from the U.S.," a carbon trader at a utility said.

Australia's troubled plan for a multi-billion dollar carbon trade scheme hit a new delay in February when parliament's upper house, the Senate, postponed debate on the package of 11 bills until at least May.

However, regulatory measures or even carbon taxes were widely ruled out effective alternatives to cap and trade schemes as a means to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

"In terms of size, the U.S. market would be 30 or 40 times bigger than that of the UK. With new markets in China and Asia, it really adds up. There is no other mechanism. Carbon taxes or regulation would not allow us to meet emissions targets," said Jorgen Kildahl, executive vice president at Statkraft.

Others were more upbeat about the future.

"We are used to weathering the storm. This is not unusual and I am sure there will be ups again. I have a strong belief in the carbon market and that something will develop in the U.S.," said Per Otto-Wold, chief executive at Point Carbon.

(Reporting by Nina Chestney; Editing by Amanda Cooper)