A Thirst for Meat: Changes in Diet, Rising Population May Strain China's Water Supply Author(s): Sid Perkins

Source: Science News, Vol. 173, No. 3 (Jan. 19, 2008), pp. 36-37 Published by: Society for Science & the Public Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20465169 . Accessed: 15/03/2011 05:45
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"The tricky part is going to be the [new] cell population," Badylak adds. Unlike in rats, taking cells from new borns would obviously not be a feasible way to reseed hearts for humans, and in any case newborns' cells don't have the mobility or flexibility to fully repopulate a heart. More research is needed to show whether stem cells from a patient's blood or heart tissue could do the job, Taylor
says. -PATRICK BARRY HOMEMADE resemble Researchers made balls this glowing that occur blob, about 6 centimeters across, which may the elusive lightning In nature.

DUSty

Fireball

Can lab-made blob

explain ball lightning?
By trapping and X-raying amysterious kind ofartificial fireball, researchers have demon strated a technique that may help answer whether chemical reactions power the ball lightning occasionally seen in nature. The fireballs first showed up in the late 1990s in the lab of Vladimir Dikhtyar and Eli Jerby, engineers at Tel Aviv Uni versity in Israel. The researchers were test ingtheir newlyinvented type of drill.Made in part out of pieces from conventional microwave ovens, the drill has a tip that concentrates microwave radiation into a 2-millimeter-wide spot that can pierce many materials and liquefy itsway through. One day, as the researchers extracted the drill tip from a sample, a glowing blob unexpectedly blew out ofthe molten mate rial. The blob made itswayback inside the drill and into the microwave generator. "It caused a lot of damage," Jerby says. With some tinkering, the researchers learned how to reproduce the phenome non with consistency by drilling into glass. They also found awayto cage afireball and sustain it for up to several minutes by zap ping itwith additional microwaves inside a glass-walled "oven the size ofa tissue box. Like other, similar phenomena that sci entists have learned to create in the lab, the fireballs only partly resemble natural ball lightning. Balllightning appears afterlight ning strikes soil, not after microwaves strike glass. It's often the size of a basketball or larger, tends to float inmidair or bounce on the floor, and can last several seconds or even minutes. By contrast, Dikhtyar and Jerby's fireballs were only centimeters wide, tended to travel upward, and, if left alone, vanished within 30 milliseconds. Still, the researchers were interested in

testing one of the more plausible among themany mechanisms scientists have pro posed to explain ball lightning (SN: 02/09/02,p. 87). In 2000, chemical engi neers John Abrahamson and James Dinniss of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, NewZealand, suggested that when lightning strikes soil and creates a glowing gas of ions and elec plasma-a trons-a dust of microscopic particles can alsoform. Inthedustparticles, carbon reacts with silicon dioxide, releasing silicon that then recombines with oxygen, which emits the energy that keeps the plasma glowing. Dikhtyar and Jerby teamed up with sci entists in France to measure how their plasma scattered an intense beam of X rays. As reported in an upcoming Phys ical Review Letters, the researchers found particles around 50 nanometers wide. That "supports the Abrahamson and Dinniss model,"Abrahamson says, and the particle size "lies in the range thatwe observed after simulated lightning strikes on soils." Lightning expert Martin Uman of the UniversityofFloridain Gainesville says the result is interesting, "but it's problematic whether ithas anything to do with ball light ning. -DAVIDECASTELVECCHI

AThirst for Meat

Changes in diet, rising population may strain China'swater supply
China's rapid industrialization and increas ing population, along with a growing dietary preference among its citizens for meat, are straining the country's water resources to the point where food imports will probably be needed tomeet demand in coming decades.

Economic growth inChinais brisk: Over the past 2 decades, the country's gross domestic product has risen, on average, about 8 percent per year. That's the highest rate of development in recent world history, says Junguo Liu, an environmental scien tist at the Swiss Federal Institute ofAquatic in Dubendorf. Science and Technology Accompanying that growth has been ajump in urbanization and per capita income, both of which have contributed to significant changes in the Chinese diet. Chinese consumption of staples such as corn, rice, and wheat has changed little in recent years, even dropping somewhat in the last decade, data suggest. However, con sumption of more water-intensive fruits and vegetables, now the largest part of the average Chinese diet, has more than quadrupled since the early 1960s. A more significant strain on water resources, says Liu, is the dramatic rise inmeat consump tion. Since 1980, the Chinese yen formeat has nearly quadrupled, he notes. While cereal crops such as rice or wheat require between 0.84 and 1.3 cubic meters ofwater for each 1kilogram ofyield, it takes about 12.6 m3 of water to produce 1 kg of beef. Even though meat and other animal products made up only 16 percent of the typical Chinese diet in 2003, those food stuffs accounted formore than one-half of the country's food-related per capita water consumption, says Liu. He and colleague Hubert H.G. Savenije of the Delft Univer sity ofTechnology in theNetherlands report their findings in an upcoming Hydrology and Earth System Sciences. Food-related water consumption per capita in theUnited States isabout 3,074 m3 peryear, almost four times the Chinese fig ure. The water needed to produce the typ ical U.S. citizen's consumption of meat alone exceeds that required to produce the average Chinese diet, the researchers note. The recent trend toward increased meat > consumption in China is aggravating the w

19, VOL. 36 JANUARY 173 2008

NEWS SCIENCE

country's relative shortage of water, says Sandra Postel, director ofthe Global Water Policy Project inAmherst, Mass. While the nation is home to about 21 percent of the planet's population, it has only 8 percent of its renewable water resources, she notes. More than one-third of the world's pop ulation lives in regions where water is con sidered scarce (SN: 7/20/02, p. 42). In 2003, production of the food con sumed inChina required about 1,023 cubic kilometers of water, Liu and Savenije esti mate. If current trends in dietary prefer ences continue, some population-growth scenarios suggest that the total water required for the country's food production could rise more than 11 percent by 2025, even taking into account proposed techno logical advances that could trim water use more than 1percent each year. Now, imports account for only 3 percent ofthe cereals and meat consumed inChina, says Liu. In the coming decades, growing the demand for these products-and county's limited supplyofwater-mayboost that figure to around 8 percent. Postel agrees: "Iabsolutelybelieve they'll need to import more food in the coming decades." That increase in demand, in turn, will probably boost prices in commodity

an allotment of lithium that's burned up as they age. Low abundances of lithium in both BP Piscium and TYCHO 4144 329 2 show that they're not newcomers. In addi tion, spectra of the stars reveal that both have relatively high surface gravity. That also indicates middle age because young stars, larger and still contracting, have lower surface gravity. Moreover, TYCHO 4144 329 2 orbits a companion that appears to be an ordinary old star, the researchers found. Analyzing the companion, Melis and his colleagues deduced that TYCHO 4144 329 2 must be at least 400 million years old, he reported inAustin, Texas, last week at ameeting of the American Astronomical Society. The age of BP Piscium remains uncertain, but observations suggest it should be classified as a giant star, an aging and bloated body.

tion," comments

theorist

Sara, Seager

of the

Institute of Technology. "If Massachusetts is indeed occurring planet formation around these unusual [older] stars, it gives hope that planet formation is truly ubiqui
tous." -RON COWEN

When
limbs

Mice
in mouse

Fly
embryos

Bat DNA lkads to longer

Give amouse embryo a stretch of bat DNA, and its limbs grow a little longer, a new genetic study shows. The change, though small, may illustrate one evolutionary step on the path towings. Charles Darwin suggested that a series of such minor changes would be key to build ing new body features, likewings, from old ones. "Ifyou have lots ofthese changes over time-and with natural selection-ulti mately you'll end up with some structure like a bat wing," says study leader Richard Behringer, a developmental biologist at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center inHouston. To support this idea, Behringer's team examined a gene called Prxl that controls bone growth by turning on other genes. the gene Lab mouse embryos missing grow puny limbs and misshapen heads, and pups die at birth. A short stretch of DNA near, but not part of, Prxl enhances its activation, helping a cell control how much of the gene's protein gets made. The short-tailed fruit bat, with wings of mice, has avir analogoustothefrontlegs tually identical version of Prxl. However, the enhancing stretch of DNAvaries greatly between bats and mice, which are separated by 80 million to 100 million years of evo lution. To test the effects of this difference, Behringer's team spliced the bat version of the enhancer into normal labmice. In the limb bones ofthe mutant mice, Prxl was 70 percent more active than in unaltered mice. More striking, themutant embryo limbs grew slightly longer than those of normal a couple of days mice, when measured before birth. The difference in forearm few tenths of length was just 6 percent-a a millimeter-but appeared consistently in dozens of mice, says Behringer, whose team reports its findings in the Jan. 15 The cells that Genes and Development. make bone also divided slightly faster in themice with the bat DNA. Six weeks after birth, however, the forearms of both kinds of mice had become similar in length, pos sibly due to differences in mouse size at birth and later variations in eating habits. Boosting Prxl gene activity isn't the whole story, Behringer cautions. When his team engineered mice that lacked this gene enhancing sequence, themouse limbs grew

-SID marketsworldwide,shenotes. PERKINS

Second Around
new planets

Time
YOUNG AT HEART Gas and dust star BP PISCIUM a surrounding (center) second wave the middle-aged Itmay of planet

Some old starsmay make

How do you transform an old coot into a virile young whippersnapper? For a puffy middle-aged star, the cosmic version oftak ingViagra seems to be ingesting a nearby burping up the stellar companion-then meal. That appears to be the best expla nation for how two aging stars, long past their birthing years, have once again an planets, become ripe for making reserved for the endeavor normally youngest stars in the universe. At first glance, the two stars in the new study appearyoung, notes CarlMelis ofthe University of California, Los Angeles. Both emit a lot of infrared light, a sign that they are surrounded by large, dusty disks that absorb starlight and reradiate it in the infrared. These disks provide the rawmate rial for planet making. Common around newborn stars, the disks usuallyvanish after 2 several million years. Melis andhis colleagues imagedthe disks 2 around the two stars, BP Piscium and < TYCHO 4144 329 2, using the largeKeck II Telescope atop Hawaii's Mauna Kea. Other features, however, indicate that s the stars aren't young. Newborn stars have

suggest

be undergoing formation.

Jets of gas

visible above tvlag-10 associated

and faintly below the star are mirmtesi_dae

with thttn usatce te-a iniatothe disk. hav aled beu tocalse Intagr rokbois around these The disks Inadiinlh_tikesso can a stars th dik suges thtec old betre be of rejuve explained only by a kind uhastellar lnto u by amsIveojc nation insayMei. aseod which each star recently swal is ~ "This~aiacntn,badnwsta lowed a neighboring body-either another

star or a lower-mass object called a brown dwarf, Melis asserts.Material subsequently ejected by the star could form a dusty, planet-making disk hundreds of millions to perhaps billions of years after these stars first formed planets. Melis says the team has evidence that a few other aging stars possess similar disks. No one has yet examined the dust cloaked stars for signs that they may har bor a previous generation of planets. But submilimeter observations of BP Piscium show that the star's dust grains are rela

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2008 173 JANUARY VOL. 37 19,