Can you help provide a precis of this broadcast, “Results of evaluation conducted by the expert commission regarding the state of lands belonging to the Pavlovsk Experiment Station.”
And thanks to commenter Mike H for the link to the VIR site.
Scientist of bees gets genius grant
Latest MacArthur Fellows include: 1
Marla Spivak … an entomologist who is developing practical applications to protect honey bee populations from decimation by disease while making fundamental contributions to our understanding of bee biology.
A pedant speaks: Let’s hope she can also tackle some of the diseases that do more than decimate.
Fine words feed
“Malnutrition,” “hidden hunger,” and “stunting” are just a few of the buzzwords currently being heard throughout the development community.
Buzzwords? Let’s hear it for the buzzword that will render them obsolete: “biofortification.”
Coincidentally, or not, The Lubin Files points to a useful page of FAO statistics on nutrition.
Nibbles: Carnival, Local food, Rice, Yacon, Coffee
- Science for the People blog carnival is up, answering questions.
- How fashion turns the local glamorous, exotic and desirable — foods edition.
- Sub-1 rice gene takes over local varieties, changes nothing except flood tolerance.
- Rhizowen may be suffering from inadvertent introgression, in his yacon.
- New variety — just the one — resistant to coffee berry rust and leaf rust released in Kenya.
Viva the agrobiodiversity revolution
A final dispatch from the front lines of agrobiodiversity conservation and use. That is, the 6th Henry A. Wallace/CATIE Inter-American Scientific Conference on “Agrobiodiversity in Mesoamerica — From Genes to Landscapes” at CATIE in Costa Rica.
The participants at the last day of the 6th Wallace Symposium shared a warm glow. The people who I chanced to talk to all raved about the conference. Although agrobiodiversity suffers from being a vague term, it has the attractive ability to bring together a crowd of scientists from worldwide institutes, who obviously see great relevance in each other’s research. Everyone can appreciate the needs of farmers for a suite of integrated and sustainable options, including biodiversity at all scales, to enable them to cope with markets, pests and diseases, soils, climate, and — maybe most importantly — changes.
CATIE is in a prime position to integrate options with its stronghold in forest and agroecology research, watershed management, enterprise development and its international collections of cacao, coffee, peach palm and many other crops. Dr Ronnie De Camino, CATIE’s Deputy Director, stressed to the audience that the drivers of change are not slowing down and our actions are too slow. What is needed is a revolution. After this conference, I will certainly be looking to CATIE and the Mesoamerican region to lead the way in this agrobiodiversity revolution.