Press releases

The Kempe Award for Distinguished Ecologists for 2008 has been granted to Professor Stephen P. Hubbell, University of California, Los Angeles, USA.

In this week’s issue of Science, a US and Swedish research team report on a newly identified factor that controls the natural input of new nitrogen into boreal forest ecosystems.

A new vegetarian food that boosts the uptake of iron and offers a good set of proteins. This could be the result of a doctoral dissertation by Charlotte Eklund-Jonsson at the Department of Food Science, Chalmers University of Technology, in Sweden.

Fire-derived charcoal is thought to be an important carbon sink. However, a SLU paper in Science shows that charcoal promotes soil microbes and causes a large loss of soil carbon.

Charles Darwin maintained that the domesticated chicken derives from the red jungle fowl, but new research from Uppsala University now shows that the wild origins of the chicken are more complicated than that. The researchers mapped the genes that give most domesticated chickens yellow legs and found to their surprise that this genetic heredity derives from a closely related species, the grey jungle fowl. The study is being published today in the Web edition of PLoS Genetics.

The young pine tree asked his neighbour on the Greek hillside in 2010, where did I come from?, where is my mother and father?, did they die in the forest fires of 2007? That pine tree came from a seed orchard. Seed orchards were the business of an international Treebreedex conference at SLU (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences), Umea, September 26-28.

SLU researcher Achim Grelle is a co-author of an article in Nature this week. The article states that human activities, such as agricultural fertilization and biomass and fossil fuel burning, are pumping more nitrogen into the atmosphere, which in turn is having a positive effect on the growth of Northern Hemisphere forests.

The finding that mercury is associated to reduced sulfur groups in organic material from soil, written by Swedish and American soil scientists, has been chosen the most valuable scientific contribution out of 1100 papers published in the highly ranked journal Environmental Science and Technology last year.

The Marcus Wallenberg Foundation proudly announces that the Marcus Wallenberg prize for 2007 is awarded to professor Ove Nilsson, Umeå, Sweden, for his pathbreaking discovery on the regulation of flowering in trees and its translation into tree growth and development.

Can dietary phytoestrogens play a role in reduction of breast cancer risk?
This is one of the crucial questions for a research project dealing with a subgroup of phytoestrogens called lignans, conducted within the CASCADE Network of Excellence. Lignans are naturally found in grains, berries and vegetables.