For Healthier Rice, Bacteria Deployed to Fight a Poison

Mature rice panicle against blue sky. Part of the image collection of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By CARINA STORR


When Harsh Bais grows rice plants in trays of water in his greenhouse at the University of Delaware, he can easily spot the ones that have been exposed to arsenic: They are stunted, with shorter stems and shrunken leaves.

Dr. Bais is working to develop rice plants that take up less arsenic, a common contaminant in the fields of his native India and other Asian countries. Chronic exposure to arsenic has been linked to heart disease, diabetes and genetic damage associated with elevated risks for cancer.

But instead of trying to breed new strains of rice or alter its DNA, he and other scientists are looking at the vast microbial community that lives near the rice’s roots.

These bacteria are the botanic equivalent of the human microbiome – the trillions of organisms that live in our guts, many performing beneficial tasks like digesting food and fighting off infection.

The hope is to find bacteria that will somehow block arsenic. In the past three years, Dr. Bais has isolated about a dozen bacterial species, added them to plants and looked for signs of arsenic poisoning.

Now, he says, he has zeroed in on one species, Pantoea agglomerans, that seems to reduce arsenic in the stem to one-eighth its former levels.

“Research on the plant microbiome is very hot because everyone is trying to find things that can increase growth and yield,” said Dr. Bais, an associate professor at Delaware.

For scientists interested in tweaking plant traits, there is a list longer than ever of bacteria to investigate. Advances in DNA sequencing have made it possible to identify large groups of related bacteria from different plant types and soil conditions.

Agricultural companies are already using bacteria on seeds of major crops such as corn and soybeans to help them bear more fruit or require less fertilizer. This year, Monsanto entered a partnership with Novozymes, a Danish company that sells more than 200 biologic products, to test organisms from the corn and soybean microbiomes at thousands of field sites.

A study of the rice microbiome is underway in the lab of Venkatesan Sundaresan, at the University of California, Davis. Using DNA sequencing, he has found at least a quarter-million bacterial species in the rice microbiome.

Dr. Sundaresan is also interested in the functions of individual microbes. So he is collaborating with Dr. Bais, shipping him soil from rice roots in his test field in Davis.

P. agglomerans is the first microbe that has been shown to reduce arsenic in rice. While the microbe appears to keep most arsenic out of the rice’s stem and leaves, the crucial question is how it affects the grain.

“Microbes for crops have the reputation of being finicky.” said Tom Adams, vice president for chemistry technology at Monsanto. But he added that new technology could help predict which microbes would work best in different soil and environmental conditions.


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, September 27, 2014

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Success Is Not Just About Smarts

English: Logo of One Laptop per Child (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I like this article. Not that it disregards technology, but it enforces the truth, that with or without technology, our basis for success is not only intelligence. I mean, being smart gives you a headstart, but grit - fortitude and determination, coupled with persistence, and all of the other good values - these what makes the basis for making it good in life. But then again, it is not a guarantee...
-----


TOM BRADY


Technology has been promoted as the great equalizer in education. Initiatives like One Laptop Per Child and Massive Online Open Courses were supposed to democratize learning, but when the $400 laptops given to poor children around the world broke, and failure rates of some MOOCs were as high as 75 percent, reality set in.

Though many believe that computers can shrink the education gap, research shows that giving students from poor families online access is more likely to widen the divide, Susan Pinker reported in The Times. Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd, economists at Duke University in North Carolina, tracked a million disadvantaged middle-school students for five years after they were given networked computers and found “a persistent decline in reading and math scores,” they wrote. The scores of boys and African-Americans dropped drastically because many used their machines to play games, surf social media and download entertainment.

The same thing happened in the One Laptop project, with children spending less time on their homework than before, researchers found.

New findings suggest that educators should focus more on low teacher-student ratios, early intervention and character traits.

Chicago has introduced an intensive program where black and Latino boys work two on one with a tutor, and participants have ended up as much as two years ahead of students who haven’t gotten help, David Kirp wrote in The Times. This math success also has put them on track to graduate, helped them engage in school and made them less likely to be arrested for a violent crime.

Many programs address the time between birth and age 3, but the teen years may be just as important. Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, points out in his new book that neuroscientists have realized that adolescence, like early childhood, Is a “period of tremendous ‘neuroplasticity,’ ” during which the brain changes through experience.

The Time’s Nicholas Kristof wrote that early help for disadvantaged children not only reduces inequality but also can save public money. He quoted James Heckman, a University of Chicago professor and Nobel Prize-winning economists, who says the cheapest way to reduce crime is to invest in early childhood programs. Mr. Heckman has calculated that to get the same reduction in crime by adding police officers would cost five times as much.

“Early education” includes counseling at-risk pregnant women not to drink, smoke or take drugs, and then after birth, helping them breast-feed and read to the child. These help, Mr.Kristof wrote, “apparently because the first few years are the window when the brain is forming and when basic skills like self-control and grit are developed.”

At some schools, grit, self- control and curiosity are now part of the curriculum. Scientists say personality could be more important than intelligence when it comes to success in school.

Arthur E. Poropat, an Australian psychology professor, cites data showing that a tendency to be “diligent, dutiful and hardworking,” and qualities like creativity and curiosity, are more predictive of student performance than intelligence. This is good news, Dr. Poropat wrote in a paper last year, because “personality has been demonstrated to change over time to a far greater extent than intelligence.”

“We probably need to start rethinking our emphasis on intelligence,” he told The Times.

Mandy Benedix, who teaches a class on grit at Rogers Middle School in Pearland, Texas, told The Times: “We know that these non-cognitive traits can be taught. We also know that it is necessary for success. You look at anybody who has had long-term sustainable success, and every one of them exhibited at some point this grit, this tenacity to keep going.”


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, February 28, 2015

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The Artificial Leaf Unfurled… Yet Again

Macro of Wet Leaf (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BY JACK HITT



 
General Electric is promoting a feel-good collection of videos these days.

Each film chronicles an innovative idea, like Daniel Nocera’s. This Harvard chemist has pioneered the artificial leaf, an invention that generates energy the way a tree does. Light strikes a container of water and out bubbles hydrogen, an energy source.

The short film about his idea has Mr. Nocera saying that his device will one day be in people’s homes, pumping out energy.

“Close your eyes,” he says, and “think about your house being its own power station.”

Such artificial-leaf optimism could also be found a year ago in a Los Angeles Times article that held the artificial leaf “could create enough clean fuel to power a home for a day in developing countries.” And the year before that, in The New Yorker. Or go back one more year, to The New York Times, where Mr. Nocera said, “Our goal is to make each home its own power station.”

So, where are the power stations?

Prowl the edges of contemporary invention, and you experience a lot of this frustration. A scientist announces a breakthrough in battery technology or algae biofuel, and the talk ramps up quickly.

But there always seems to be an obstacle between the big idea and self-sufficiency. Sometimes, it’s the idea itself – a technological bug that seems fixable turns out to be weird and inscrutable. But in this case, the technology is sound, say researchers including David Tiede of the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago.

Mr. Nocera’s idea is based on Photosynthesis. When light bombards a leaf, it splits water in the leaf into oxygen, and then binds the hydrogen with carbon dioxide to make carbohydrates, its food.

Mr. Nocera’s leaf mimics this process. A vessel of water is exposed to light. A silicon strip coated in catalysts breaks down the water molecule such that on one side oxygen bubbles up, and on the other, hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel.

The issue isn’t the invention – it’s how to use it.

“If I give you a canister of hydrogen that we got from the artificial leaf, you can’t use it right away,”
Mr. Nocera said.

 You need a fuel cell, which can turn hydrogen into electricity.

There are efforts to begin incorporating such energy technology into daily life, such as the development of hydrogen-powered cars.

“If we had fuel cells in your house and your car, then everybody would be trying to implement the artificial leaf right now,” Mr. Nocera said.

The other obstacle is the market place.

A few years ago, he was asked to produce the energy equivalent of a gallon (3.78 liters) of gasoline and keep costs around $3. As he neared that number, the fossil-fuel industry upset his plans with a surge in cheap natural-gas extraction, driven by hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

But therein lies a glimmer of hope. Hydrogen can be produced by fracking, but it comes at a cost of carbon pollution. Still, widespread fracking might lead to widespread hydrogen use.

“Fracking could drive the establishment of an infrastructure for using hydrogen at the home,” Mr. Nocera said. “And then the next thing everybody might say is, yeah, but that hydrogen is making CO2. Then the artificial leaf would show up.”

Unable to resist, he said, “Your house will be its own gas station.”


 
Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, April 12, 2014

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