Author: Luigi Guarino

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Illustrating cow dung

One of the joys of social networking is the serendipitous juxtapositions that it regularly throws up. Case in point. This morning a piece from ILRI turned up in my Facebook newsfeed:

Climate change may be combated by changing the diet of livestock, whose farting and manure, along with the feed crops produced, contribute to 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study.

Nothing strange about that. ILRI blog posts get automatically sucked up into Facebook via NetworkedBlogs. But how weird is it that just below that item there was one of a photo by the wonderful Claude Renault featuring cow dung? You can also see it on Claude’s Flickr site, along with a number of others on the same topic. Any of which would have been a much more interesting accompaniment to ILRI’s otherwise perfectly fine piece than the rather boring picture of a cow they actually used. I’m not sure even Claude Renault could have managed to produce a compelling illustration of cows farting, mind, though people have tried.

LATER: Not that social networking doesn’t have its problems. Facebook didn’t allow me to post this note as a comment to either of the posts mentioned above, claiming that some of the content was found offensive by some users.

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Nibbles: Maize RNA, Hybrids, Cacao, Banana stats, Biofuels, Barley water, Ecosystem services, Coca, Chinese medicinals, Hunger

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Nibbles: Kew, Diversity, Allanblackia and Acacia, Pulses, GIS, Poverty, Early morning flowering, Agrobiodiversity and climate change, Breeding, Genebanks, Perenniality, Blogs, AGRA, Potato diversity, Witchweed, Mexican potatoes, Salvia, Old Sicilian chestnut, Tropical maize

  • Guardian has whole piece on the importance on Kew’s collections without once mentioning Millennium Seed Bank. Anyway, the Paris herbarium is not so bad either, though they are no match for the Kew press machine.
  • Hybridization is good for plant diversity. Well, yeah. What am I missing here? Oh and here’s more about things that maintain variation, and more still. You see what I did there?
  • Allanblackia is the next big thing in agroforestry. Which probably means its name will soon be changed.
  • Conclave meets to discuss election of next Pope pulse productivity.
  • Videos from Africa GIS week.
  • Meeting to review 10 years of research on chronic poverty. Must have been deeply depressing.
  • Helping rice to keep its cool. A crop wild relatives story.
  • “The Ministry of Science and Technology should emphasize the need to undertake research programmes on unexplored and underutilized crops as these could constitute the genetic base for genes for improved nutritional quality of foods.” In India, that is.
  • “We need to mine that diversity to provide genetic material in an adapted background more readily to be used by plant breeders.” From CIMMYT. How many times have I heard that? Here’s my problem: who will do it?
  • That IRIN feature from a few days ago recycled with a new pic. Which is of a genebank not included in the list in the text. The person shown is my friend Dr Jean Hanson, recently retired head of the ILRI genebank.
  • DIY perennial cereals.
  • “Biodiversity scientists and agricultural scientists have tended to approach their interests in very different ways. I think there’s a lot we can learn from each other.” Wait, what?
  • Another best biodiversity blogs list. Ahem.
  • A “very clear action plan” for a ‘Green Revolution’ in Africa emerges from AGRA meeting. You will however look in vain for the details on the scidev.net piece.
  • The last Inka treasure. Yep, the potato.
  • Boffins find anti-Striga gene. No, not really, settle down.
  • Rachel Laudan is really rude about Mexican potatoes.
  • Cur moriatur homo cui salvia crescit in horto? Good question.
  • Finding the 100-Horse Chestnut.
  • Getting to grips with photoperiod sensitivity in maize.