- Cary Fowler on the need to breed.
- MRIs of fruits and vegetables. Well, why not?
- The genetic consequences of bovine inter-specific sex explained. SFW.
- How Mrs Joséphine Enoce Bouanga makes milk from squash seeds in Pointe-Noire.
- Gates Foundation orange sweet potato project in Mozambique. Still waiting to hear what they’re going to do with all those useless landraces they’ll be replacing.
- Nourishing the Future does Lost Crops of Africa 101. Beginners, start there, but don’t expect to be taken anywhere interesting.
- Blog carnival Scientia Pro Publica #35 is up, but what’s with the verse alphabetical order? Harummph.
Call for nominations for William L. Brown Award open
The William L. Brown Award recognizes the outstanding contributions of an individual towards the study of useful plants and their conservation. It is administered by the William L. Brown Center at the Missouri Botanical Garden and is made possible through a generous endowment from the Sehgal Family Foundation, in cooperation with the family of Dr. Brown.
If you want to nominate someone for this year’s award, you have until 31 August.
Multimedia cacao
A couple of days ago we Nibbled a set of cacao photos from Sustainable Harvest International. I thought at the time it probably deserved better exposure, and I’m happy to be given the excuse to provide it by the appearance on YouTube of a sweet little cartoon on the cacao tree, courtesy of Kew. And by the start of a series of posts on how chocolate is made, by Rachel Laudan.
And speaking of cacao, this just in: A London hedge fund last week took delivery of contracts for about 7% of the world’s cacao producction, according to a report in The Guardian. (h/t The Tracing Paper). Coincidentally, or not, the price of cacao has increased 150% over the past 18 months.
CIFOR corrects itself
Those of you who headed over to CIFOR’s Facebook page to see whether they really did link there to a piece from the oil palm advocacy group Palmhugger trashing Greenpeace, as I said in my Nibble of a few minutes ago, will have been disappointed. It has gone. When I tried to comment on it, I was not allowed to, for the very good reason that the thing was not there any more. No, really. I’m almost 100% sure I didn’t imagine the whole thing. Did someone at CIFOR actually read the article and think better of publicizing it? What do they know about Palmhugger? I think we should be told.
Nibbles: Oil palm, Breadfruit, Barcoding, Guyana genebank, Wheat and heat
- Palmhugger, an oilpalm advocacy group, likens Greenpeace to Goebbels. Who are they really? CIFOR is linking to them on Facebook, so they’re probably kosher, right?
- Nice story on breadfruit in Hawaii.
- More barcoding stuff.
- Reader: We must have a bank of seeds of our fruits and vegetables. Minister of Agriculture: We do!
- Australian wheat boffins: “Adaptation strategies need to be considered now to prevent substantial yield losses in wheat from increasing future heat stress.”