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NOTTINGHAM, England, Dec. 29 (UPI) — A drug derived from a mushroom — cordycepin — may be used to treat some cancers, British researchers say.

Dr. Cornelia de Moor of The University of Nottingham in England and colleagues are investigating the drug originally extracted from a rare parasitic mushroom called cordyceps that grows on caterpillars.

“Our discovery will open up the possibility of investigating the range of different cancers that could be treated with cordycepin,” de Moor says in a statement.

“We have also developed a very effective method that can be used to test new, more efficient or more stable versions of the drug in the petri dish. This is a great advantage as it will allow us to rule out any non-runners before anyone considers testing them in animals.”

The researchers say low-dose cordycepin seems to inhibit the uncontrolled growth and division of cells and at high doses it also inhibits growth by stopping cells from sticking together. Both of these effects, they say, probably have the same underlying mechanism — interfering with the production of cell proteins.

The findings are published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Copyright 2009 by United Press International

CHICAGO, Dec. 29 (UPI) — Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota have joined forces to seal Illinois waterways from the Great Lakes in a fight against an invasive carp, officials said.

Minnesota Monday joined Ohio and Michigan in a U.S. Supreme Court petition that asks for closure of the Chicago and O’Brien locks — waterways in downtown Chicago and south suburban Burnham that handle hundreds of millions of dollars in shipping and recreational boating each year.

Closing the locks would have major repercussions for the Chicago area and require rerouting an enormous amount of freight overland, including jet fuel, coal and road salt, the Chicago Tribune reported Tuesday.

Officials in Michigan, Ohio and Minnesota argue those obstacles are worth protecting the lakes’ $7-billion-a-year fishing industry.

Federal and state officials from Illinois deliberately poisoned the locks several weeks ago, creating a massive fish kill after DNA samples showed the carp had evaded electronic barriers in the locks.

Copyright 2009 by United Press International

RENO, Nev., Dec. 29 (UPI) — The U.S. Bureau of Land Management says it is proceeding with a controversial roundup of wild horses in Nevada.

Bureau spokeswoman Heather Emmons said Monday that contractors using helicopters and on horseback had begun herding some 2,500 wild horses into corrals over the objections of activists who say the roundup isn’t necessary, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The newspaper said U.S. officials believe the roundup, which will stretch over 1,750 square miles, is needed because Nevada’s Black Rock Range — a chain of mountains 100 miles north of Reno — can’t support that number of mustangs and is necessary to protect the environment and to help the horses survive.

Animal activists say the mustangs are healthy and contend that livestock do more damage to the area.

“It’s a brutal process no matter how they do it,” activist Elyse Gardner told the Times. “Legs get broken, horses get sick, foals can’t keep up and get separated from their mothers.”

Copyright 2009 by United Press International

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 29 (UPI) — The nuclear reactor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won’t be converted to a safer fuel for at least five years, authorities said.

The university’s 50-year-old reactor is to be switched from highly enriched uranium to low enriched uranium, which cannot be used to make nuclear weapons.

The safer fuel, however, will require at least five years for design and testing to ensure it provides the same performance as the current fuel, said David Moncton, who oversees the reactor.

The delay in converting the university’s reactor could be used as a reason for countries to delay converting reactors of their own, The Boston Globe reported Tuesday.

The United States has been pressuring other Iran and other countries to switch to low enriched uranium to prevent the spread of atomic weapons.

Copyright 2009 by United Press International

SEOUL, Dec. 29 (UPI) — South Korea’s carbon dioxide emissions increased 2.9 percent — totaling 620 million tons — in 2007, the government announced Monday, Xinhua reports.

That represents the highest growth rate since 2002 and is nearly three times faster than the growth rate in 2006. It is also a 103-percent increase from 1990 greenhouse gas emission totals.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, South Korea’s emissions are the fastest growing of all industrialized states.

Seoul attributes the sharp rise to increases in fossil fuel output because of a fall in nuclear power generation as well as energy consumption in the country’s steel and petrochemical sectors.

Yet South Korea regards carbon dioxide reduction not as a burden but a “business model,” the country’s climate-change ambassador, Rae-Kwon Chung, told Der Spiegel during the Copenhagen climate-change conference.

Rae-Kwon, who has been active in climate negotiations since they began internationally in 1991, is sometimes referred to as the “godfather” of the green growth movement, which contends that countries can boost wealth by reducing emissions.

In an interview with The Los Angeles Times during the Copenhagen talks, Rae-Kwon said world leaders need to capture the “opportunity” of renewable energy technology. To do so, he said, they need to rethink some fundamentals of daily life: tax structures, transportation patterns and, most importantly, to accept that cheaper energy is better for economic growth.

“They’re walking the walk” in South Korea, Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, who has worked closely with Chung on climate issues, told the Times. Schmidt said Chung “has had a very big impact in how South Korea views their role” on emission limits, domestically and internationally.

Recent announcements may confirm Schmidt’s observations.

Last week South Korea said it plans to officially register by the end of January its goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent from the projected emission level in 2020 compared with 2005.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak announced Dec. 17 that $10 million would be used to establish a Global Green Growth Institute, bringing economists and top researchers together to develop new ideas.

And South Korea said Monday it would launch a carbon emissions trading scheme aimed at reducing the country’s emissions 1 percent to 2 percent of 2005 to 2007 averages, reports Xinhua.

The Korea Stock Exchange would serve as a platform for the three-year pilot program, starting as early as late 2010, said the Ministry of Environment. A total of 641 organizations will participate, including South Korea’s 14 local governments and 446 public organizations.

Copyright 2009 by United Press International

BEIJING, Dec. 29 (UPI) — China has the world’s third largest economy but a report says 40 million of its farmers live in poverty, making less than $175 annually.

Fan Xiaojian, head of China’s national poverty and development office, told the Web portal ifeng.com the global financial crisis has hit the poor hard in China.

“China has invested 20 billion yuan ($2.9 billion) to reduce poverty this year, an increase of 3 billion yuan ($439 million) from last year, and the largest investment in poverty-relief in the last ten years,” he said, China Daily reported.

Fan, however, said the income of the most poverty-stricken counties in the country rose 9.6 percent in the first three quarters of this year.

The report said China, the third-largest economy after the United States and Japan, is the first developing country under the U.N. Millennium Development Goal to reduce the number of its people living in poverty by half.

Copyright 2009 by United Press International

JUNEAU, Alaska, Dec. 28 (UPI) — Melting glacial ice in the Gulf of Alaska affects the marine food chain from microbes to the fish that feed on them, scientists said.

The organic matter of the gulf’s watersheds is “remarkably” biologically active and is likely to decrease as glacial ice melts and the biomass is not replenished, said Rick Edwards, an aquatic ecologist with the Pacific Northwest Station in Juneau, Alaska.

The organic matter supports life to the highest level of the marine food chain, Edwards and his team wrote in a recent issue of the journal Nature.

Some of the organic matter discharged from the watersheds is almost 4,000 years old, yet more than 66 percent of it is rapidly metabolized by marine microbes into living biomass to support the food chain, said Eran Hood, a researcher from the University of Alaska Southeast.

“We don’t currently have much information about how runoff from glaciers may be contributing to productivity in downstream marine ecosystems,” Hood said. “This is a particularly critical question given the rate at which glaciers along the Gulf of Alaska are thinning and receding.”

Copyright 2009 by United Press International

NEWCASTLE, England, Dec. 28 (UPI) — Soil studies show antibiotic resistance in nature is growing despite tighter control over antibiotic use in medicine and agriculture, British scientists said.

Bacterial DNA taken from soil samples collected between 1940 and 2008 in the Netherlands revealed a rise in the level of antibiotic resistant genes, said David Graham, a professor at England’s Newcastle University.

Scientists fear a resistant gene in a harmless bacteria could be passed to a disease-causing pathogen, Graham said in this month’s issue of the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

“The big question,” Graham said, “is that with more stringent European regulations and greater emphasis on conservative antibiotic use in agriculture and medicine, why are antibiotic resistant gene levels still rising?”

Graham said he and his team expect to find similar results when they expand their study to include soil samples from other parts of the world.

Copyright 2009 by United Press International

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz., Dec. 28 (UPI) — The Navajo Nation says it will build a $200 million wind farm near Flagstaff, Ariz., in conjunction with Foresight Wind Energy and Edison Mission Energy.

The Navajo Tribal Utility Authority confirmed in a press release that plans for the wind farm on the Big Boquillas Ranch were approved by the Navajo Nation Council last week, The (Flagstaff) Arizona Daily Sun reported Monday.

As part of the approved plan, the Navajo Nation will construct a 48-turbine array on the targeted farm lands by December 2011.

The planned 85-megawatt wind farm is expected to produce enough electricity when at full capacity to power more than 20,200 homes.

NTUA General Manager Walter W. Haase applauded the plan, calling it the Navajo Nation’s first major wind farm project, the Daily Sun reported.

“This is historic,” Haase said in a statement. “For the first time, the Navajo Nation is a majority owner of an energy project that will introduce a new economy to the Navajo Nation for the benefit of the Navajo people.”

Copyright 2009 by United Press International

DETROIT, Dec. 28 (UPI) — The water levels of the Great Lakes in the Midwestern United States increased in 2009, new data show.

The Detroit News said the latest U.S. Army Corps of Engineers data shows water levels at Lake Superior and the Michigan-Huron lake system increased by as much as 9 inches compared to a year ago.

Meanwhile, Lake Erie’s water levels increased by an inch compared to 2008 figures.

As of the end of November, historical water levels were found at Lake Ontario, Lake Michigan/Huron, Lake Erie and Lake Superior, Army Corps data show.

Doug Martz, the St. Clair Channel keeper, told the News while Lake St. Clair was an inch below 2008 water levels, he is hopeful higher water levels are due in 2010.

“If we have good ice cover on the Great Lakes and get a lot of snow in the Upper Peninsula this winter, I have no doubt that by spring that the water levels will be back to where they used to be,” Martz said.

Copyright 2009 by United Press International