If you've noticed the cost of a cup of coffee at your local shop has been inching up lately, it's because a fungus has decimated Central America's Arabica bean crop. Now the US is stepping in to try to eliminate the deadly coffee rust fungus.

Leaf rust, or la roya in Spanish, is a yellow- and orange-colored, plant-choking fungus that has devastated coffee crops from Peru to Mexico over the past three years, costing $1 billion in damages in Central America in the late harvest season of 2012 alone. The fungus is especially ruinous to the Arabica bean, which is used in higher-end coffees, as it is said to produce better-tasting coffee than the other major commercially grown coffee species. It contains less caffeine but a more robust flavor. Arabica accounts for 75 to 80 percent of the world's coffee production, according to the Coffee Research Institute.

The effects of leaf rust have decimated local economies.

"Big farmers hire fewer workers to pick the ripe coffee cherries that enclose the beans. Smaller farmers go into debt and sell livestock or tools to make up for the lost income. Sales fall at local merchants," the New York Times reported. "Teenagers leave school to work on the farm because their parents can no longer hire outside help. At the very end of the chain are the landless migrant workers who earn just a few dollars a day."

Central America has been particularly hard hit. Four million people there and in southern Mexico rely on coffee for their living, according to the Inter-American Development Bank. In Guatemala, twenty percent of the half-million jobs directly tied to growing coffee have already disappeared, estimated Nils Leporowski, the president of Anacafé, the country's coffee board.

Los Alamos National Laboratory packed 57 barrels of nuclear waste with a type of kitty litter believed to have caused a radiation leak at the federal government's troubled nuclear waste dump, posing a potentially "imminent" and "substantial" threat to public health and the environment, New Mexico officials said Monday.

State Environment Department Secretary Ryan Flynn issued a formal order giving the lab two days to submit a plan for securing the waste containers, many of which are likely stored outdoors on the lab's northern New Mexico campus or at a temporary site in west Texas.

The order says 57 barrels of waste were packed with nitrate salts and organic kitty litter, a combination thought to have caused a heat reaction and radiation release that contaminated 22 workers with low levels of radiation at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad in February.

The kitty litter soaks up any liquid before drums of waste are sealed and shipped. Officials are investigating whether a switch from non-organic to organic litter is to blame for the leak.

According to the order, two of those containers are known to be at WIPP. It doesn't say where the rest of the barrels are, but Los Alamos was in the process of transferring the last of thousands of barrels of waste from decades of nuclear bomb making to the underground dump when the leak shuttered the half-mile-deep mine.

Some containers were then transferred to temporary storage at a commercial nuclear waste dump in Andrews, Texas. But all shipments were stopped when investigators earlier this month zeroed in on the Los Alamos container as the likely source of the leak.

"Based on the evidence presented to NMED, the current handling, storage, treatment and transportation of the hazardous nitrate salt bearing waste containers at LANL may present an imminent and substantial endangerment to health or the environment," the order signed by Flynn states.

The movement to sell locally sourced, artisanal food and drink has picked up steam in recent years as many consumers demand better quality products with a smaller environmental footprint and traceable pedigree.

But some Dutch researchers are taking this idea a step further, proposing the creation of village-level "meat factories" that would produce unique flavors of artificial beef, pork or chicken, all from a biotech reactor.

The study builds upon work done last year, the so-called "test-tube hamburger" that was created by researchers at the University of Maastrict in the Netherlands and unveiled at a tasting in London.

This latest study by a pair of researchers at Wagenigen University proposes a device that can create meat cells in a metal container - enough to feed a small amount of "cultured beef" each month to a village of 2,650 people.

"We thought it was interesting and most promising to do cultured meat on a small scale," said Cor van der Weele, professor of philosophy who wrote the paper with biotechnology professor Johannes Tamper in the journal Trends in Biotechnology. "A small scale is also good from a biotechnology point of view."

Van der Weele said she was inspired to come up with this alternative to meat because of her concerns over animal welfare, as well as the environmental impact of land used to grow beef cattle.

"Raising small numbers of animals in a village is fine," Van der Weele said. "But the way animals are raised now is not in small amounts but in large scale and factory farms."

"Fairy circles" that form in the arid grasslands of Namibia have baffled scientists for decades. In the latest attempt to explain the cause of these mysterious circular patches, a group of researchers turned to aerial images.

From the aerial images, the scientists discovered that fairy circles are distributed in surprisingly regular patterns, which might rule out the popular theory that termites are the creators.

"The occurrence of such patterning in nature is rather unusual," study researcher Stephan Getzin, of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig, Germany, said in a statement. "There must be particularly strong regulating forces at work." [Image Gallery: Amazing 'Fairy Circles' of the Namib Desert]

Fairy circles are barren patches, typically surrounded by a ring of thriving vegetation. They can grow to be 65 feet (20 meters) in diameter and can linger for as long as 75 years.

For the past several years, scientists have offered up a variety of hypotheses for why these rings form in the arid grasslands transitioning into the Namib Desert. Their explanations have ranged from grass-killing seeps of hydrocarbons to carnivorous ants to termite feeding patterns.

Mitochondria not only come exclusively from an organism's mother, they are the power generators of the cells, creating a source of chemical energy known as ATP or adenosine triphosphate. The amount of mitochondria in a cell is based upon the metabolic requirements of that particular cell and the numbers present may range from only one up into the thousands. Therefore, the more demanding the cell's energy requirements, the more of these so-called cellular power plants are required. While mitochondria are inherited maternally, it is currently unknown as to what exactly causes the destruction of the paternal side.

Paternal mitochondria are not passed on to an organism. They are either prevented from somehow doing so or are simply destroyed before they can be passed on to any offspring. Scientists are currently looking at this phenomenon to try to find both the reason behind this evolutionary enigma and the manner in which it occurs. Recently, Dr. Eli Arama and colleagues from Weizmann Institute have discovered some specialized cellular vesicles which come from the egg to be fertilized. These vesicles not only locate but also actively cause the destruction of the father's paternal mitochondria during the fertilization process.

The team from the Institute's Molecular Genetics Department worked with fruit flies to conduct this study. Past studies to determine the cause of the absence of the father's power cells were undertaken using worms and mice. Unfortunately, the sperm of worms are very different from those of a human, not having the same head or tail structures as mammals. While other studies were preformed on mice, those studies were trying to determine whether the absence was caused by some passive dilution process. The passive dilution theory, however, could not explain why autophagy markers, where vesicles actually engulf the cell's unwanted structures, were still found. It appears that they actually seek out the paternal mitochondria in order to actively destroy them instead of relying on a passive method of dilution.

Going on a first date? The chance that it leads to wedding bells may depend, in part, on how similar his or her DNA is to yours.

New research finds that people tend to pick spouses whose genetic profile shares similarities with their own. The effect is subtle (other similarities, such as similarity in education, have a larger influence), but it's important to understand that mating isn't truly genetically random, researchers report today (May 19) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The genetic effect might even signal or contribute to social inequality, they write. The current U.S. social system might inadvertently sort people by genetics, for example, or contribute to schisms seen at the level of our very DNA.

Picking a partner

When it comes to marriage, the adage "birds of a feather flock together" is more on-point than the idea that opposites attract. Many studies have found that people tend to marry others who are similar to them in education, social class, race and even body weight. The phenomenon is called assortative mating.

The question, according to study leader and University of Colorado research associate Benjamin Domingue, was whether these assortative mating differences are visible at the genetic level.

The researcher analyzed genetic data from 825 non-Hispanic white Americans who participated in the U.S. Health and Retirement Study. They compared the similarity of the DNA of married couples with the similarity of random, non-coupled individuals.

The results, mirrored in a follow-up study with data from the long-running Framingham Heart Study, revealed that married people have more similar DNA segments than random pairs of people.

Dogs and people have more in common than a love of Frisbees and long walks on the beach. A new study finds that certain dogs, just like certain humans, carry a gene mutation that causes albinism - a condition that results in little or no pigment in the eyes, skin and hair.

The study by researchers at Michigan State University identifies the exact genetic mutation that leads to albinism in Doberman pinschers, a discovery that has eluded veterinarians and dog breeders until now. Interestingly, the same mutated gene that causes albinism in this dog breed is also associated with a form of albinism in humans.

"What we found was a gene mutation that results in a missing protein necessary for cells to be pigmented," study co-author Paige Winkler, a doctoral student in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, said in a statement.

Winkler said the gene mutation found in Doberman pinschers is responsible for a condition known as oculocutaneous albinism, which also affects humans. The condition expresses certain characteristics in both humans and dogs.

"With an albino Doberman, you see a white or lighter-colored coat, pink noses and lips, along with pale irises in the eyes," Winkler said. "These traits are very similar to the characteristics humans display with this particular condition, causing light-pigmented skin and hair, along with eye discoloration and vision disturbances."

A reader/professor has sent me an internal memo he recently obtained from a meteorologist and member of the Deutsche Meteorologische Gesellschaft [German Meteorological Society], abbreviated as DMG. Clearly grave concern is emerging over a large swath of the broader German meteorological-climatological community in the wake of the Lennart Bengtsson witchhunt.


The memo was authored by a group of dissenting DMG-member meteorologists and intended to be published in the DMG reports, but never saw the light of day.

It reveals a growing and widespread worry over the suppression of scientific views among German Meteorological Society members. One of the authors of the memorandum wrote an e-mail to the reader who provided the copy to me. He writes:

"A circle of mostly older colleagues of the Free University of Berlin, who very much reject the tone one finds in today's field of climatology, has asked me to draft a memorandum on the subject and to publish it in the Reports of the German Meteorological Society. Shortened by a half and totally watered down, the memorandum appeared in the last issue. I now take the liberty to bring the original version to your attention.

Greetings and cordial asscoication yours, ************ "

I've deleted the name to protect the source. What follows is the original, un-watered down version of the memorandum - translated in English:

Researchers have worked out how to make matter from pure light and are drawing up plans to demonstrate the feat within the next 12 months.

The theory underpinning the idea was first described 80 years ago by two physicists who later worked on the first atomic bomb. At the time they considered the conversion of light into matter impossible in a laboratory.

But in a report published on Sunday, physicists at Imperial College London claim to have cracked the problem using high-powered lasers and other equipment now available to scientists.

"We have shown in principle how you can make matter from light," said Steven Rose at Imperial. "If you do this experiment, you will be taking light and turning it into matter."

The scientists are not on the verge of a machine that can create everyday objects from a sudden blast of laser energy. The kind of matter they aim to make comes in the form of subatomic particles invisible to the naked eye.

The original idea was written down by two US physicists, Gregory Breit and John Wheeler, in 1934. They worked out that - very rarely - two particles of light, or photons, could combine to produce an electron and its antimatter equivalent, a positron. Electrons are particles of matter that form the outer shells of atoms in the everyday objects around us.

Over at his Website, Debunking Christianity, John Loftus has put up a very brief post titled, What About the Origins of Life Itself? It reads as follows:

We know that we descended from a common ancestor. We know this. Evolution is a fact. Many believers agree about this, even a growing number of evangelicals. But what about the origins of life itself? The answer is simple. Ready? Since the evolution of life has a natural explanation then so also does the origins of life, we just don't know how yet. Give science time. Don't punt to a god explanation just as believers shouldn't have done before Darwin. Comprende?

A commenter named formerlutheran responded:

Science has yet to figure out exactly how the first little spark of "life" began, so the honest answer is "don't know, but we are working on it." The apologists trumpet "You don't know, therefore God." The inevitable question is then, "Okay then, where did your God come from?" The apologist answer is, "It is a mystery." (Translation) the apologist is "don't know, but if we can shout loud enough and use really, really big words people won't notice."

Loftus then posted a follow-up reply, praising science at the expense of theism:

The difference between the mysterious answer the theist offers and science is that theists have no way to solve that mystery, which has remained a mystery from the beginning and will always remain a mystery. Science however, has a method and just might figure it out.

Another commenter named Luiz Fernando Zandra posed another objection to the theory of Intelligent Design:

Let's not forget that we can't argue for the fine-tuning argument and for a miraculous origin of life. If we need a miracle for life to start in this universe, then the universe is not fine tuned for life. Period. If the desire of the believer is to support the idea that the universe is fine tuned for life in order to produce evidence for a designer, then he must abandon the idea that life can't occur naturally.

In this short post, I'd like to set the record straight.