WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Agriculture Department said on Monday it will not lift a voluntary moratorium on selling meat and milk from cloned animals to consumers any time soon.

In January, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ruled that products from cloned cattle, swine and goats and their offspring were as safe as milk and meat from traditional animals.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in grayingJapan by 2025, a thinktank says, helping to avert worker shortages as the country's population shrinks.

Japan faces a 16 percent slide in the size of its workforce by 2030 while the number of elderly will mushroom, the government estimates, raising worries about who will do the work in a country unused to, and unwilling to contemplate, large-scale immigration.

The world’s largest tidal turbine, weighing 1000 tonnes, has been installed in Northern Ireland’s Strangford Lough. The tidal turbine is rated at 1.2 megawatts, which is enough to power a thousand local homes. It was built by Marine Current Turbines, and it will be the first commercial tidal turbine to produce energy, when it begins operation later this year.

The turbine has twin rotors measuring 16 meters in diameter. The rotors will operate for up to 18-20 hours per day to produce enough clean, green electricity.

An enzyme from a microbe that lives inside a cow’s stomach is the key to turning corn plants into fuel, according to Michigan State University scientists.

The enzyme that allows a cow to digest grasses and other plant fibers can be used to turn other plant fibers into simple sugars. These simple sugars can be used to produce ethanol to power cars and trucks.