- Wiki for African forest information. Go, make it multilingual, fill in the gaps, use it.
- Canola (rape) desalinates, gives fuel and enriched fodder. Jeremy comments: “I’m a tad skeptical.”
- Diversity of intestinal flora good for your figure. Or the other way around.
- Edamame bean comes to Britain. Why, one wonders.
- Golf courses good for salamanders. I wonder if anyone’s looked at how many CWRs they support.
- Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
- Rice domestication unpacked.
- More extreme beer. Oh, and the phylogeny of yeast.
Nibbles: Carbon, Oaks, SALT, Gardens, Wild horses, Rural depopulation, Finnish cows, Dabai
- You can monitor carbon dioxide from fossil fuels by analyzing wine (and maize leaves for that matter).
- Yes, we have no acorns.
- “Salt is sort of a diversified farming system.”
- “There’s a lot to learn from the past and how Native cultures have gardened“
- The end of the mustang?
- Urbanization and biodiversity conservation.
- Convicts conserve cows.
- Freezing technique opens door to commercialization of Canarium odontophyllum in Sarawak.
- Zero Mile Diet Seed Kit.
Nature with a capital N
The Prince of Wales is at it again. In The Times he writes about our need to reconnect with Nature.
You may believe that I have some reactionary obsession with returning to a kind of mock medieval, forelock-tugging past. All I am saying is that we simply cannot contend with the global environmental crises we face by relying on clever technological “fixes†on their own.
His enemy is Modernism. His answer is Harmony. “In denying the invisible ‘grammar of harmony’ we create cacophony and dissonance.”
Complexity is key to life. The diversity that made up this complexity was bulldozed in the pursuit of simplicity and convenience, creating an appeal that continues to fuel the conspicuous consumption and throwaway societies we see everywhere.
Not a Darwinistic struggle but a community effort, then: “Biology shows that (…) life seeks balance. Every organism works together to produce a harmonic whole.” Well, I try.
Got a thing about exotic fruit?
Here’s a video of some people you can probably relate to. Via.
Nibbles: Radishes, Fungi, Genomics, Bagel, Eels, Barack Hussein, Pomegranate
- Vavilov does radishes.
- “How would you describe the smell and taste of a fresh white truffle?“
- “The gene … is in an identity crisis.”
- “The basic roll-with-a-hole concept is centuries old.”
- “He slid her gently into a nylon sack and hung her from a scale on which she clocked two kilograms, then slid her out and into the V of a varnished plywood measuring board, where she lay quietly, like a metre-long slab of tenderloin.”
- “Activists” buttonhole Obama.
- The Afghan pomegranate to hit supermarket shelves.