Forests & trees

Nibbles: Camel sweets, UG99, British woods, Rice, India and climate change, Soay sheep, Fish, Seed fair, Barn owls, Food maps, Earthworms

Chocolate made from camel milk for the first time. And last?
“Slow rusting” genes from Ethiopian wheat landraces.
Brits (and Yanks, for that matter) look for ancient trees in woodlands becoming ever less distinctive.
The world needs GM rice, but alas “the environment for accepting genetically modified crops is not as good as it should be.” Meanwhile, IRRI keeps hammering away at drought tolerance and resistance to other assorted stresses. It’s hard being rice.
ICAR looks at the likely effects of climate change on crops and what can be done about it.
Climate change making Soay sheep (and, incidentally, European fish too) not just smaller, also darker. Speaking of fish, there’s trouble in the Zambezi too, but not necessarily due to climate change. Although…
A Greek seed bazaar.
FAO turns to barn owls to stop Laotian rodent plague.
US food policy destinations on Google Maps.
Vermicomposting is good news for the Indian textile industry. Vermicomposting: I like saying that word.

Climate change shrinking sheep, exploding insect populations.
Japanese boffins sequencing tuna genome, planning super-tuna. Godzilla unavailable for comment.
Birds eat beetles which eat seeds. So no birds, no forest. Such is the wonderful web of life.
Buffalo cloning and its future. But what is that guy in the picture doing?

European are growing more vegetables. But how much of that is heirlooms?
Canadian boffins grow wild potatoes for the leaves.
Chinese wasp going to roast Italy’s chestnuts.
The genetics of swine geography. Or is it the geography of swine genetics?
The diversity of sauces.
Cooking Flipper.
Genetically engineered brewer’s yeast + cellulose-eating bacterium + biomass = methyl halides.
Wild sheep runs wild in Cyrpus.
“It can be planted in farms because it does not compete for resources with corn, coffee or bananas and acts as a nitrogen-fixing agent in the soil. The mpingo is also considered a good luck tree by the Chagga people who live on the slopes of the Mt. Kilimanjaro.”