Genetic modification holds the promise of bringing locally grown food crops to climates where farming has been traditionally difficult. Doing that means optimizing the genetics of crops in some ways without impacting them in others.

A new tool for rice genetics has made that a little bit easier. It allows rice breeders to surgically inactivate genes that confer unwanted properties.

There are many different strains of rice grown in different parts of the world and they have thrived because they are adapted to the region they grow in. In the past, introducing a gene with a beneficial modification would require years and years of breeding so that the other genes responsible for the target strains being so well adapted to their local environment were not impacted.

LEIPZIG, Germany, March 19 /PRNewswire/ --

- PC-WARE Recognized as a Leading Altiris Solutions Partner at Symantec's Annual APEX Event

PC-Ware Information Technologies AG, one of the leading manufacturer - independent IT enterprises in Europe, today announced that Symantec recognized the company as one of the award winners at Symantec's annual "Altiris Solutions Partners in Excellence" event - APEX 2007- in Coronado, CA in February.

PC-WARE was recognized for its dedication and commitment to selling Symantec's Altiris management solutions, as well as its overall performance in revenue, deal registration, technical and marketing investments, and certifications.

China’s growing participation in international trade has been one of the most prominent features of its economic reform. It is the world’s third-largest exporter, and the fastest growing exporter among members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which it joined in December 2001.

The secret of China’s exporting success may lie in unfair production subsidies, according to new research presented at the Royal Economics Society annual conference by a team from The University of Nottingham’s Globalisation and Economic Policy Centre (GEP).

The economists behind the research say it raises serious questions about whether China is being fair with its trading partners.

Sleep apnea is a condition characterized by temporary breathing interruptions during sleep, in which disruptions can occur dozens or even hundreds of times a night. According to the National Institutes of Health, it affects more than twelve million Americans.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have provided a detailed look at the molecular pathways underlying sleep apnea and found that, in an animal model of sleep apnea, poorly folded proteins accumulate in one compartment of a muscle nerve cell, which, under certain conditions, tells a cell to heal itself or destroy itself.

The vision system used to process color is separate from that used to detect motion, according to a new study by researchers at New York University’s Center for Developmental Genetics and in the Department of Genetics and Neurobiology at Germany’s University of Würzburg.

The findings run counter to previous scholarship that suggested motion detection and color contrast may work in tandem.

Whether motion vision uses color contrast is a controversial issue that has been investigated in several species--from insects to humans. In human vision, it had been widely believed that color and motion were processed by parallel pathways. More recently, however, the complete segregation of motion detection and color vision came into question.

BIRMINGHAM, England, March 19 /PRNewswire/ --

ATTN: England Editors

Community groups across England are all set to spring clean their neighbourhoods with the launch of a GBP50 million lottery-funded grants programme today, Wednesday 19 March.

The Community Spaces programme will provide grants and support to community groups wanting to make their neighbourhoods cleaner and greener. Community Spaces will help local people improve and create play areas, community gardens, parks, wildlife areas, ponds, courts and village greens.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have set the stage for building the “evolutionary link” between the microelectronics of today built from semiconductor compounds and future generations of devices made largely from complex organic molecules. In an upcoming paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a NIST team demonstrates that a single layer of organic molecules can be assembled on the same sort of substrate used in conventional microchips.

The ability to use a silicon crystal substrate that is compatible with the industry-standard CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) manufacturing technology paves the way for hybrid CMOS-molecular device circuitry—the necessary precursor to a “beyond CMOS” totally molecular technology—to be fabricated in the near future.

Researchers at NIST and the Joint Quantum Institute (NIST/University of Maryland) have developed a new method for creating pairs of entangled photons, particles of light whose properties are interlinked in a very unusual way dictated by the rules of quantum physics. The researchers used the photons to test one of the fundamental concepts in quantum theory.

In the experiment, the researchers sent a pulse of light into both ends of a twisted loop of optical fiber. Pairs of photons of the same color traveling in either direction will, every so often, interact in a process known as “four-wave mixing,” converting into two new, entangled photons, one that is redder and the other that is bluer than the originals.

If you had one hundred unlabeled DNA samples, taken from people all around the world, could you use that DNA to determine where the original donors came from?

With major improvements in genotyping technology, geneticists are now getting better and better at this game, and a recent paper in Science reports the largest study to date of human genetic diversity: 650,000 genetic differences scrutinized in nearly 1000 different individuals from 51 different populations.

Studies like this one lay important groundwork to help us understand how human genomes differ around the world, how differences in our genes and environments together make us healthy or sick, and how very ancient migrations led to the structure of today's human populations around the globe.