Category: Featured

Andy Nelson replies to a query about his global accessibility map:

We’ve been asked about the exclusion of Antarctica a few times.

Find out what the reasons are.

Christopher Taylor reminds us of the uses of other Urticaceae:

One thing I discovered a while ago when looking up ramie was that nettles themselves (Urtica) contain fibre that can be used in weaving. Nettle fibre isn’t used so much currently because, to be honest, it’s kind of rubbish, but it did have a usage spike in Britain during World War II when better-quality materials such as linen were in short supply.

The multifarious uses of nettles, as coincidence would have it, Jeremy nibbled about only a few days ago.

Meike, on GMO introgression “risk” mapped:

We have not only uploaded the maps … but also the raw data that we have used for mapping the distributions of the crop wild relatives (as grid, Google Earth kml, and excel files). So before searching GBIF, SINGER and other online databases: you might save yourself some (a lot!) time if you have a look here first, because we have already done this for most of the wild relatives of 20 different crops!

Jacob points out:

“The retail price in Russia today is lower for a liter of vodka than a liter of milk.”

Yikes.

Evil Fruit Lord on “better” tomatoes:

There are a couple of disturbing factual issues I have with the SciAm article (I hope Steve Tanksley is being misquoted or quoted out of context, because I generally regard him as some one who knows what he’s talking about).

Read the entire comment to discover what those “disturbing factual issues” are.