Gizmorama - August 5, 2013

Good Morning,

A team of NASA scientists say that climate data will help to predict future crop fates. This break through could help farmers save their livelihoods months in advance.

Learn about this and other interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Study: Climate data predicts fate of crops months in advance --*
GREENBELT, Md. - Climate data can be used to help predict some crop failures several months before harvest, an international team including a NASA scientist says. In about one-third of global cropland temperature and soil moisture have strong relationships to the yield of wheat and rice at harvest, and a computer model using such data could predict crop failures three months in advance, a study published Sunday in in Nature Climate Change reported. "You can estimate ultimate yields according to the climatic condition several months before," Molly Brown, a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said. "From the spring conditions, the pre-existing conditions, the pattern is set." Reliable and timely crop failure forecasts could help governments, insurers and others to plan accordingly, the researchers said. The model can forecast both minor changes in crop yield and the devastating crop failures resulting from severe droughts or other weather extremes, they said. "The impact of climate extremes -- the kind of events that have a large impact on global production -- is more predictable than smaller variations in climate, but even variations of 5 percent in yield were correctly simulated in the study for many parts of the globe," said Andy Challinor, a co-author of the study and a professor with the University of Leeds in Britain. Climate can cause variations that lead to both good years and devastating years, the scientists said. "If you knew you were going to have a good year, you could plan, you could give out loans, you could do other things to boost food production to be prepared for bad years," Brown said in a NASA release Monday. "We're trying to bound how much the weather matters. For particular crops in particular places it makes a huge difference, especially with wheat."


*-- NASA spacecraft capture images of Earth from millions of miles away --*
PASADENA, Calif. - NASA has released images of Earth taken from two interplanetary spacecraft millions of miles away in space showing our planet and its moon. The Cassini spacecraft captured the color images of Earth and the moon from its position in the Saturn system nearly 900 million miles, while MESSENGER, the first probe to orbit Mercury, took a black-and-white image from a distance of 61 million miles as part of a campaign to search for natural satellites of the planet, NASA said Monday. In the Cassini images Earth and the moon appear as mere dots visible between Saturn's rings, the first time Cassini's highest-resolution camera has been able to capture Earth and its moon as two distinct objects. "Cassini's picture reminds us how tiny our home planet is in the vastness of space, and also testifies to the ingenuity of the citizens of this tiny planet to send a robotic spacecraft so far away from home to study Saturn and take a look-back photo of Earth," Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said. In the MESSENGER image, Earth and the moon are less than a pixel. Both the Cassini and MESSENGER images were taken July 19. "That images of our planet have been acquired on a single day from two distant solar system outposts reminds us of this nation's stunning technical accomplishments in planetary exploration," said MESSENGER Principal Investigator Sean Solomon of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "And because Mercury and Saturn are such different outcomes of planetary formation and evolution, these two images also highlight what is special about Earth. There's no place like home."


*-- Stem cells turned into photoreceptors could treat vision loss --*
LONDON - British scientist say embryonic stem cells turned into photoreceptors can integrate into a live retina, possibly promising new treatments for eye diseases. Writing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, researchers from University College London report producing rod-like photoreceptors from embryonic stem cells and successfully transplanting them into the retinas of mice. The result suggests embryonic stem cells may one day lead to treatment for eye diseases sush retinitis pigmentosa, macular degeneration or other degenerative conditions that can cause loss of vision. The researchers say they've developed a new method for growing embryonic stem cells that allows them to become immature eye cells and self-organize into three-dimensional structures similar to those seen in a developing retina. In laboratory tests, the structures were transplanted into the retinas of night-blind mice where they integrated with the natural cells of the eye and formed synaptic connections, the MIT Technology Review reported Monday. While the technique is probably years away from human trials, embryonic stem cells are already being tested in clinical trials in Japan for macular degeneration. Researchers there say an alternative source of stem cells, dubbed induced pluripotent stem cells, will soon move into human trials as a treatment for eye disease.

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