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Featured: Seed longevity
Jeremy explains Luigi’s overly telegraphic post on seed longevity:
Laconic, possibly to a fault. The point being that Olivia Judson’s normally impeccable science-writing has failed her this once, but comments there are closed, so Luigi is taking the opportunity to set her straight here. If she notices …
A reply to Dr Tatiana
From The Guardian‘s science columnist:
…the massive Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built inside a mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, opened its doors last year. Yet there may be little point to such a project if seeds, in general, last only a few years.
If.
Distributed herbarium documentation
Distributed computer projects are taking off in a big way. “Many are run on a volunteer basis, and involve users donating their unused computational power to work on interesting computational problems.” That usually means looking for extraterrestrial life or working out the structure of black holes or proteins while your computer idles away. Herbaria@home is a bit different. When you sign up as a volunteer, you receive scans of herbarium sheets, you digitize the label information, and these data are then added to the herbarium’s information system. Actually, there are other examples of such projects, which use the public’s spare brain-power, as well as their spare computer-power. I wonder if this approach could be used to improve genebank documentation. Perhaps to geo-reference tricky accessions? Or how about to characterize the morphology of different varieties from photos?
Human beings don’t need honeybee pollination
Yes, but “quality of life in a developed economy does.” I got the quote via a post at LEISA’s Farm which makes the point that most information on the recent bee die-off has come from the USA and Europe. If you know of similar observations from other part of the world, let them know (leisasfarm at gmail.com).