MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Australian grape growers reckon they are the canary in the coalmine of global warming, as a long drought forces winemakers to rethink the styles of wine they can produce and the regions they can grow in.

The three largest grape-growing regions in Australia, the driest inhabited continent on earth, all depend on irrigation to survive. The high cost of water has made life tough for growers.

Entomologists Ted Schultz and Seán Brady at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History have been providing new insight into the agricultural abilities of ants and how these abilities have evolved throughout time. Using DNA sequencing, the scientists were able to construct an "evolutionary tree" of fungus-growing ants, which revealed a single pioneering ancestor that discovered agriculture approximately 50 million years ago.

As of the end of 2005 there were something like 2 billion cell phones in service worldwide. Certainly there are more than that now.

Without lithium batteries cell phones would be a completely different animal. Bigger and heavier, you wouldn’t be stuffing one into a pant’s pocket. Now that the standard is set the cell phone industry is reliant on lithium for its existence.

The pulp is a fiber-rich byproduct of sucrose extraction procedures used by sugar beet processors. Most of the 40 million tons of U.S. sugar beet pulp generated each year is used as an inexpensive livestock feed or pet-food ingredient. But ARS chemists Victoria Finkenstadt and LinShu Liu aim to breathe new economic life into the pulp.

Jill Kohl was a healthy young woman in early August 2006.

A marathon runner, the 2000 Wahlert High School graduate was attending graduate school in Milwaukee. She ran regularly and was careful to eat a diet of healthy foods.

But just a few days after eating a spinach salad late that month, Kohl started to experience flu-like symptoms.

An organization led by North America's top environmental officials has issued a new report calling for greater international collaboration to build green.

The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), formed to address environmental concerns within North America's free-trading nations, stated the need for "a lasting and achievable vision" of green buildings. The vision for Canada, the United States, and Mexico includes the creation of stakeholder task forces in each country, targets to build net zero-energy buildings, and the promotion of private sector financing.