1 Iron rice
A strain of rice fortified with iron could give a new lease of life to some 2 billion rice-eaters worldwide who suffer from anaemia. The affliction, which has become more widespread in recent years, is responsible for an estimated 20 per cent of all deaths during childbirth.
Modern rice varieties contain very little iron; this is one of the most serious and least-discussed downsides of the green revolution. But the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, which bred these high-yielding but iron-deficient varieties, believes that 2003 will be the year it makes amends.
Trials of a new variety of “iron rice” have gone exceptionally well. Some 200 mildly anaemic nuns in the Philippines have emerged re-energised after six months eating the new rice, with their blood-iron levels raised. The results should herald one of the big agricultural success stories of 2003. And researchers hope to have new varieties of iron-fortified rice, tailored to local conditions, on the market across the world within two years.
IRRI researchers originally developed the new variety, code named IR68144, to tolerate low temperatures. Only later did they discover that it contains almost twice as much iron as conventional high-yielding varieties. Better still, the new variety has been produced by conventional plant breeding, so it will not fall foul of the controversies surrounding genetically modified crops.
2 Einstein’s toughest test
It has been 35 years in the making, but Gravity Probe B should finally lift off in April. One of the few NASA space missions devoted to fundamental physics, the probe will carry out experiments to test two predictions made in Einstein’s…
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
