I don’t know why it should feel weird to be sitting in Kuala Lumpur International Airport, drinking a cappuccino and reading about the joys of caffeine on the free wifi. But it does. Maybe the lack of sleep. Maybe the fact that I wouldn’t be able to do it nearly so easily in an airport in the land of cappuccino.
Profile of Russian genebank
Profile of the Vavilov Institute: Nikolai Ivanovich unavailable for comment.
Hittite plague explained
Hittites “used infected sheep as biological weapon.”
Carolina Gold
In the early 1700’s, rice was South Carolina’s main export — no wonder the variety grown was called Carolina Gold. But where did it come from?
The first reported import in the New World of what is thought to be Carolina Gold occurred in 1685, when a slave ship from Madagascar unloaded a cargo of rice in Charleston, South Carolina.
So was that Indian Ocean island the ultimate source of Carolina Gold? USDA geneticists think they know, and have written about it in a new paper. Anna McClung and Robert Fjellstrom looked for molecular markers for Carolina Gold among the material in USDA rice germplasm collection. The best genetic fit — confirmed by close morphological similarity — was actually with an accession from Ghana, not Madagascar.
Questions remain. Maybe material from Carolina — originally derived from somewhere else — found its way back to Africa.
But geographer Judith Carney of the University of California, Los Angeles, says a Ghanaian origin of Carolina Gold fits with the idea that Carolina Gold arrived in the colony as food on slave ships and was then planted by the slaves.
Efforts are underway to bring this historical variety back into commercial cultivation.
Pioneer agriculture
Photos of Frontier Culture Museum, including agrobiodiversity.