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August 11, 2011
· Mexican produce storming across US border
· Washington on tap for monster apple crop?
· Genome dissection leads to better varieties
· Federal agency vows to protect GPS system
· Meet the team behind the GPS scene
Mexican produce storming across US border
(mySA.com)
– Business is booming in the
“There is a boom. There are a lot of companies coming every week to the area,” said Joaquin Spamer, president of Colimar International Logistics, a Mission company that is expanding its cooling space to accommodate the increased amount of produce coming across the border. “I think this is just the beginning.”
Already, the USDA figures the total value of fresh fruit and
vegetable exports from
“Those people put a lot of food on our table in this
country,” said Pharr Mayor Leo Palacios Jr. who hopes to see the
More
“
“Consumers want the freshest produce they can get year-round. It's supposed to be there every day of the year,” said DeBerry.
While
USDA data through June shows that approximately 3.8 billion
pounds of produce moved through
High diesel costs are forcing shippers to be more efficient,
and a soon-to-be completed Mexican highway across the treacherous
“If you ship produce from
The new highway, which is scheduled for completion next
year, could bring twice as much produce to
“It's a matter of logistics and money saved,” he said. “ It's going to change things quite a bit.”
Border sees cold boom
Guillermo Nunez, executive director of an association
representing importers of Mexican agricultural products into
Already, cold storage facilities and cooling units that keep
perishable fruits and vegetables fresh until they are picked up and distributed
by
Loop Cold Storage in
In nearby
The city of
“People want to invest more money in this sector, for sure,” Nunez said.
Over the years, more and more producers like Boerne's Progreso have found that
McClung said while
“The
Fruits like mangoes and grapes are produced in
One San Antonio-based firm, formerly known as Desert Glorybut now operating as NatureSweet
Ltd., grows tomatoes in more than 1,000 acres of greenhouses near
Bobby Patton, NatureSweet's vice
president for marketing, said
Challenges
“It's changed the way business is conducted, but it has not changed the trends in volumes,” said McClung. “People are a lot more cautious than they used to be on both sides of the border.”
The sector faces other challenges, like strict food safety
regulations in the
Jaime Chamberlain, president of J-C Distributing Inc. in
But consumers are hungry for fruits and vegetables. The
produce trade with
Washington
(yakimaherld.com)
In addition to the normal uncertainties of harvest weather, the crop's late start is complicating the task of estimating production.
"The number is even fuzzier than it normally is," Jon DeVaney, executive director of the Yakima Valley Growers-Shippers Association, said Tuesday.
The Yakima-based group and its sister organization in
Should that admittedly squishy number pan out, the 2011 harvest will fall short of the 2010 crop that will end up being a record at about 109 million boxes.
The 2011 crop would still be the third largest in the industry's history. Growers sold 108 million boxes in the 2008-09 marketing season.
"A lot of our members are saying much will depend on (fruit) size and that depends on if the good weather we are having will continue," DeVaney said.
The recent trend of warm days and cool nights is good for growing the fruit and giving it color.
The industry should know more in about two weeks, when
growers from across the country gather in
Kirk Mayer, manager of the Washington Growers Clearing House
in
"We have a very manageable crop this year. We are coming off a successful year and the stage is set for another good marketing season," he said.
The clearing house tracks sales and pricing for its membership.
DeVaney said production of Red Delicious and Gala variety apples is about the same as last year. The increasingly popular Honeycrisp will see higher production, while volumes of other varieties are down.
Genome dissection leads to better varieties
(EurekaAlert.org) – Scientists on the Norwich Research Park, working with colleagues in China, have developed new techniques that will aid the application of genomics to breeding the improved varieties of crop needed to ensure food security in the future. By dissecting the complicated genome of oilseed rape they have been able to produce maps of the genome that are needed for predictive breeding.
Traditional breeding involves crossing two varieties and selecting the best performing among the progeny. Predictive breeding is a more advanced technique where specific parts of the genome most likely to contain beneficial genes are identified.
Genomic sequencing and the availability of genetic linkage maps can play a major part in predictive breeding efforts by linking beneficial traits to specific parts of the genome. Researchers and breeders use genetic markers to construct linkage maps, which help to identify useful genes. They are also vital to marker-assisted crop breeding, where the maps and markers can greatly accelerate the breeding in of new improved traits.
However, for key crops such as bread wheat and oilseed rape, the use of this kind of genomics-based predictive crop breeding is severely hampered due to the complicated genomes that these species possess. Many important crop plants are polyploid, possessing several sets of chromosomes. Bread wheat, for example, contains three pairs of chromosomes derived from multiple hybridisation events that occurred between two other wheat species relatively recently in its ancestry. To try to overcome this problem, a team from the John Innes Centre and The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC), which are strategically supported by the BBSRC, combined sequence data from different sources to construct genetic linkage maps.
The team led by Professor Ian Bancroft worked on oilseed rape, which as well as being an important oil crop also plays a key role in crop rotation strategies. Its oil has industrial applications and its straw can be used for biofuel production. Like bread wheat, oilseed rape (Brassica napus) has a complicated genome, having recently been formed from related species Brassica rapa and Brassica oleracea.
The strategy adopted by the group involves integrating the available sequence data for oilseed rape with that of its ancestral progenitors, and also that of a more distantly-related species for which high-quality genome sequence data is available, in this case the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana.
Instead of trying to sequence the DNA, the team focussed on the RNA transcribed from the DNA when the genetic code is expressed. The complete set of all of this transcribed RNA is known as the transcriptome.
TGAC used the Illumina GAII platform for the study, producing a series of consistently high quality sequence datasets from expressed genes.
The team analysed the transcriptome in juvenile leaves, which gives an overview of all of the genes that are expressed in that tissue. Using the sequence variation the researchers were able to construct genetic linkage maps in oilseed rape, eventually identifying over 23,000 markers. This allowed them to align the oilseed rape genome with that of Arabidopsis thaliana and also to sequence data from oilseed rape's two progenitor species.
This method of dissecting the genome of polyploid crops is likely to be equally applicable to other important crops. Bread wheat is a prime candidate for this, using the model grass Brachypodium distachyon in the place of Arabidopsis.
"Dissecting the genome of oilseed rape like this opens up the possibility of using predictive breeding techniques that will really help with the production of improved varieties" said Prof. Bancroft.
Federal agency vows to protect GPS system
Washington (CNN) -- The government promises to keep your GPS safe from potential interference that could be caused by a new broadband wireless system now under review by federal regulators.
The system being developed by the company "LightSquared" would use satellites and relay transmitters on the ground to pass high speed Internet data. But an early design involved signals that could potentially block reception of those used for GPS -- the locating service used by consumers, aviation, agriculture, boaters and cellular 911 systems, among others.
Construction of the new system is on hold as federal regulators wait for the industry to eliminate the risk of interference with GPS receivers.
"We're not gonna do anything that creates problems for GPS safety and service," said FCC chairman Julius Genachowski at a briefing Tuesday with reporters. Congressional lawmakers, responding to concerns that began to be raised months ago by the GPS industry and grassroots groups, have demanded to know why the agency failed to realize the potential problem.
In a letter among colleagues this past May, several members of the U.S. House of Representatives warned, "These new transmission stations will emit signals that are one billion times more powerful than satellite GPS. These ground-based signals will interfere with GPS usage and could render the technology useless in many areas of the country."
The letter urged fellow lawmakers to ask the FCC to reconsider their decision granting tentative approval to the project.
Also in May, a bi-partisan group of U.S. senators expressed concern in a letter sent to the FCC chairman, asking that "the full Commission be involved in the process of making sure GPS is not compromised in any way, that the FCC require an objective demonstration of non-interference with GPS, and that the waiver for LightSquared be withdrawn until this demonstration is met."
LightSquared has since proposed a greater distance in frequency between its system and the signals used by GPS, minimizing the chance for interference.
But the FCC is not yet convinced the problem has been solved, even as the FCC chairman continued to defend LightSquared's idea to "both protect GPS and allow a new service to launch that will lead to billions of dollars in private investment, real job creation, and competition."
At a background briefing between FCC staff and reporters, the agency's technical experts and a government attorney explained the interference would not be LightSquared's fault, but rather, would be from the design of GPS receivers that makes them vulnerable to powerful nearby signals.
The GPS industry has disputed whether its receivers are the problem, since they were designed without a presumption a loud neighbor would move to frequencies nearby.
Nonetheless, two working groups are trying to cooperate in developing a plan to situate the LightSquared transmitters far enough away to not cause problems for GPS. And FCC staffers say the agency would frown on setting aside too much spectrum as a buffer, preventing a new use merely to insulate another service.
The agency could provide no timetable as to when continued testing, design modification, and FCC review of the project would be complete.
Meet the team behind the GPS scene
(The Telegraph) – Stock markets, war, your trip to the country: we rely on the Global Positioning System for an awful lot these days. Yet the entire network is controlled by eight men and women who - in every sense - carry the world on their shoulders
At 23 years old, Joshua Williams seems a little young to be
in charge of the Global Positioning System. Three years ago, it was still
illegal for him to buy a drink. Two years before that, he was back home in
Williams’s official title is payload system operator. It’s his job to monitor the signals from each of the satellites and a network of 16 tracking stations around the world and provide a constant supply of timing corrections to ensure the system is perfectly synchronised.
But his boss, Jennifer Grant, commander of the 2d Space Operations Squadron, the United States Air Force unit that operates GPS, has another, more informal, name for him. She calls him “Atlas”. He is, she says, “carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders”. If anything goes awry on-board any of the satellites, Joshua is the first line of defence. Unless he keeps a close eye on the heavens, all kinds of chaos could ensue back on Earth.
GPS is now such an integral part of our lives that we hardly give it a second thought. More than 18 million motorists in Britain currently use satnav to get from A to B, and, far from standing slack-jawed in admiration when a machine the size of a pack of playing cards tells us where we are, and where we should go next, we simply turn on the radio, lean back in our seat and follow the directions. If, God forbid, the machine takes more than 30 seconds to plan our route, doesn’t know a street is one-way or takes us up a blind alley, we curse its incompetence.
Even the abbreviation “satnav” distances the gadget from the technology, the satellites, that makes the whole thing possible. Pressing a button and finding out where we are has become as unsurprising to us as receiving pictures on a television.
Of course, the fact it has become so unremarkable is
testament to its power. GPS was designed, first and foremost, for the
It has improved many other areas of our lives too. In agriculture, the system enables more accurate sowing, reaping and treatment of crops; in aviation, it has cut flight times and operating costs; and in shipping, it’s massively reduced the number of lost or misdirected containers. It’s also benefited the environment by cutting journey times and, as a result, the fuel consumption of millions of vehicles every day, and it has saved countless lives by reducing the time it takes paramedics to get to emergencies and aid agencies to reach the victims of natural disasters.
Power firms rely on the free, accurate time signal from GPS satellites to control electricity supplies and financial institutions use it to time payments. Less essential, but increasingly pervasive, are the hundreds of smart phone apps that use GPS to help us find our nearest cash point machine or the real-time locations of our friends on Facebook or Twitter.
As Martyn Thomas, a visiting
professor in software engineering at the universities of
But the GPS signal is also incredibly vulnerable. In a study published earlier this year, Dr Thomas warned that the world had become too reliant on GPS and explained how the signal could easily be compromised, either in outer space by a violent solar flare, or down on Earth by terrorists armed with primitive jammers. A single 50-watt jammer, positioned somewhere high, could, he warned, take out every GPS-connected service in the whole of southern England, crippling banks, emergency services, power plants and airports.
And if a terror group wasn’t satisfied with southern
Schriever Air Force Base, which houses the 2d Space Operations Squadron, or 2 SOPS, takes this threat extremely seriously. A 4,000-acre complex 13 miles east of the city of Colorado Springs, Schriever is also the control centre for 135 other Department of Defense satellites, under the umbrella of the 50th Space Wing, which provide crucial communication and surveillance capabilities to the whole of the US military.
I had to wait a month just to have my visit approved. Then, once at the base, The Sunday Telegraph’s photographer, his assistant and I had to make our way through several layers of security. All our equipment was inspected by a sniffer dog and we were kept to a tight schedule and on a carefully circumscribed route.
In case we still hadn’t got the message, once we’d arrived,
we were shown a DVD (more like a trailer for a Hollywood war film, complete
with gruff voice-over) underlining Schriever’s
central role in the
“Just ask the guys on the ground if they would want to be in that fight if they didn’t have space on their side,” said one interviewee to the camera.
After such a build-up, the Master Control Station, where 2 SOPS flies the GPS satellites, is something of a let-down. It looks more like an open-plan office than a top-level military installation, with operators sitting at desks in front of computer screens (blanked out, for “security reasons”, while we are in the room). But three things betray the room’s purpose: the army fatigues worn by the eight-man crew; a plasma screen showing a computer graphic of the Earth and its orbiting satellites; and a digital clock on one wall counting the time from the beginning of the year in days, hours, minutes and seconds.
Nowhere in the world will you get a more accurate time check because, at the heart of GPS, are the most precise clocks known to man.
Throughout history, battles have been waged over who to credit for some of our most important scientific and technological advances. Three hundred years ago, Sir Isaac Newton fought a bitter war of words over who was responsible for the invention of calculus. Today, people have similar arguments over the invention of GPS. Both the US Air Force and the Navy lay claim and scientists from each have been honoured for the part they played.
But one thing which no one disputes is that the turning
point came one day in March 1958 in the office of Frank McClure, the director of
the research centre of the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at
A Canadian scientist who had won awards for his contribution to ballistics research during the Second World War, McClure was regarded as one of the most brilliant scientists of his generation, with an exceptional ability to see the practical applications of abstract scientific theories.
In March 1958, McClure was at his desk reviewing the work of
two of his junior physicists, William Guier and George
Weiffenbach. Like most of the world, Guier and Weiffenbach had been
caught by surprise the previous October when the
But while politicians and journalists called for answers and President Eisenhower tried to control public hysteria, the Johns Hopkins scientists did something rather enterprising: they rigged up a listening station on the roof of their laboratory and managed to pick up Sputnik’s signal.
As they listened to the broadcast – a simple beep-beep-beep in A-flat – they noticed that the radio frequency of the satellite’s transmitter kept on changing. And they quickly realised that, if they monitored this shift, they could determine the exact position of the satellite in its orbit.
But tracking satellites wasn’t exactly in their job descriptions. When McClure called them into his office to ask them to explain what they’d been doing, he asked them a simple question: “Are you diddling me or are you doing genuine research?” The scientists assured him they were doing genuine research and as they explained their methodology, McClure’s brain went into overdrive.
“If you can find out where the satellite is,” he began, “then you ought to be able to turn that problem upside down and find out where you are.” This was no small revelation. McClure knew that the Navy had faced significant navigational challenges during the war. Ships and submarines had strayed off course during bad weather and navigators had had to rely on guess work and celestial navigation to locate themselves. Now a solution to those problems seemed at hand.
McClure hurriedly relayed his idea to his colleague at APL, Richard Kershner, and over the weekend, the two men created the blueprint for a new satellite navigation system which APL, led by Kershner, went on to develop for the US Navy. Called Transit, the new system featured five satellites in low polar orbits, about 600 miles above the Earth, broadcasting their locations via radio waves. Receivers on the ground then picked up the satellites’ signals and worked out their own locations on Earth.
The first satellite – Transit 1B – was launched into space in April 1960 and by 1964 the system was fully operational.
It was used, first, on the new fleet of Polaris nuclear submarines, and, as time went by, on thousands of other warships, freighters and private vessels.
It lent a crucial advantage to the
Secondly, because the five satellites were spread out over the entire globe, vessels normally had to wait between one and two hours before a satellite was in the right position in the sky for their receiver to get a fix. And even then, the receiver, which had to be static, took about 15 minutes to churn through its calculations.
Transit also depended on the receiver being at sea level, so it was useless for anything other than maritime expeditions. The Air Force thought it could do better.
As early as 1964, a top-secret programme – 621B – was set up to develop an alternative to Transit and, over the next two years, the pros and cons of 32 possible systems were assessed. One of these, called “triple delta rho” stood out. It promised to collect data not from just one satellite, like Transit, but from four or more simultaneously, allowing a user to determine his position in three dimensions, on land or sea or up in the air, and to do so while moving at great speed any time of the day or night. It worked so fast that it could be used to guide missiles travelling at 2,000mph.
But the Global Positioning System (as “triple delta rho” was eventually renamed) was also the hardest to build. For a start, it required a constellation of at least 24 satellites at a time, when the average lifespan of a satellite was under two years, so the scientists had to think of a way of building longer-lasting satellites. The team, led by Brad Parkinson, a 37-year-old chief engineer, also had to design a new way of transmitting the satellites’ signals so they could all broadcast on exactly the same frequency. They had to design new, affordable receivers (that weren’t 6ft high) and, most importantly, they had to work out a way for the satellites to broadcast extraordinarily precise time checks, because, if the receiver knew the exact time it had taken for each signal to travel through space, it could work out where the satellites were and, therefore, where it was.
To solve these problems, Parkinson assembled a crack team of
the best brains the Air Force had to offer. Now 76 and living with his wife,
Ginny, in southern
“My job was to spot when we were on the wrong track and find
an alternative path as soon as possible,” he says. Just in case the team lost
focus, a sign was pinned to a wall at their base in El Segundo,
When you consider how GPS has revolutionised our lives, Brad Parkinson and his team must be among the greatest unsung heroes of the 20th century. However, at the time, many senior figures in the Air Force vehemently opposed the project.
“The Air Force is populated by pilots,” says Parkinson. “They don’t see any need for navigators. They were also coming out of a couple of wars in which precision weaponry was a misnomer. They didn’t have any.” None the less, in February 1978, the first GPS satellite was launched.
Over the next seven years, nine more were put into orbit and, when the Gulf War began in 1990, the world witnessed the system’s awesome power for the first time as television footage captured missiles flying up streets and disappearing down ventilator shafts. On April 27 1995, the system was finally declared fully operational.
Keeping it that way is a Herculean task. Back at 2 SOPS’s Master Control Station at Schriever, Lt Col Jennifer Grant, a softly spoken woman who stands no more than 5ft tall in her Air Force flightsuit, gives me a run down of the personnel currently on the operations floor.
“We have three space system operators,” she says, gesturing towards a row of desks to her left. “One space vehicle operator, one network administrative operator, one payload system operator, one mission chief and one mission commander.” These people can expect to have 70 contacts with the satellites every day. (Slightly worryingly, when I was invited to watch a “contact” in another control room earlier in the day, the software crashed and a familiar, blue Microsoft Windows screen appeared on the wall.)
A contact can range from the routine – checking the temperature in the fuel tanks or the strength of the on-board battery – to the urgent; when a satellite goes “white” and it stops broadcasting a signal.
This can happen for a multitude of reasons. Flying the
satellites, after all, is like flying a plane over the
If one drifts off course or malfunctions, it’s the crew’s job to fire the thrusters and either move the satellite back into position or park it in a safe configuration while it’s repaired.
“On a bad day,” says Joshua Williams, the 23-year-old payload system operator I meet on my tour, “there isn’t even time to go to the bathroom.” Other members of the 50th Space Wing are working just as hard, out of sight, to protect the various fleets. The biggest threat to the satellites is not solar flares or any on-board malfunctions, but space junk: the thousands of pieces of debris – from small discarded components, such as bolts, to an astronaut’s glove – that currently circulate the planet. They might be small, but they’re travelling so quickly that they can cause enormous damage.
A team at Schriever keeps track of around 15,000 of these and is under orders to alert the relevant operations crew if it thinks a collision is imminent. Schriever also maintains a standby power plant to keep the base going in the event of a power cut. The largest standby plant in the Air Force, it’s the domain of a former US Navy engineer and Robert Shaw-lookalike called John Paulson, who sports a checked shirt, jeans, and a moustache down to below his chin. One of 5,000 civilian employees on the base (hence the mufti and extravagant facial hair) Paulson has been supervising the facility for 10 years and has yet to have a “major incident”. The base also regularly practises a series of emergency procedures designed to protect the mission during a natural disaster, like an earthquake or a tornado.
The site is not prone to the former but a tornado hit the
town of
Grant points out that all of this is done to maintain a GPS
signal, currently accurate to within three metres,
which the
It wasn’t always so generous. Up until May 2000, the Air Force deliberately degraded the civilian signal, a technique known as “selective availability”. But this was stopped on the orders of the president at the time, Bill Clinton.
It was a decision that cleared the way for satnav and all the other GPS applications that have so changed the world we live in. It also made some people very, very rich.
TomTom, which, along with Garmin and Magellan, provides most of the in-car satnavs in the world, saw its revenues go from €39million in 2003 to €192million the following year, to €720million the year after that, to €1.5billion in 2010. Harold Goddijn, the CEO, and his wife Corinne, who together own 24 per cent of the company, are today worth around £235 million.
But, if you talk to Goddijn, a Dutch man with a passion for sailing, he will remind you that his company, which started off making applications for mobile phones, was far from an overnight success.
“TomTom was founded in 1991,” he
says. “And we were already a respected, moderately successful company [by
2000].” So, when
“We knew something was there,” he says. “In the early days of hyper growth, we just couldn’t make enough of them.” Nevertheless, like all GPS businesses, the company remains at the mercy of the men and women at Schriever.
Martyn Thomas believes a human error at the base, which knocked the accuracy of the system by a fraction, would actually be more disastrous than a “complete failure” because it would produce information that was wrong, but not obviously so. Aeroplanes, cars and ships could all crash as a result.
Grant waves away such concerns. “Our focus here is to provide as accurate a signal as we can, and, in fact, the signal today is the best it’s ever been. GPS sets the gold standard.”
There will always be problems and dangers, she adds, but she is confident they will be overcome.
Thirty-three years after Brad Parkinson and his team sent the first satellite into orbit, a new team of unsung heroes continues to innovate and experiment: testing different solutions, running the maze.
End Transmission