- Microbiologist makes Guardians of Microbial Diversity award. Agromicrobes awaited.
- Fabulous giant new superinteresting megablog scheduled to launch today.
NoRSS.Yet? - Who likes which yams (by which they mean Dioscorea) in Madagascar? Kew will have answers.
- Genetic diversity invades the zeitgeist, or something.
- Or would you prefer something a little more down to earth?
- Oldest ploughed fields in Czech lands.
- Crazy mixed up report on this weeks new genebank, in
OmanQatar. “Up to 10,000 genes”? Be still my beating heart. - Ich bin ein coco-de-mer-nut.
- Heat speeds up wheat aging. I know how it feels.
- A “Starbucks Of Tortillas”? Sounds worse than it is.
- Welcome news of fundamental work on a “minor” millet.
- IITA goes to jail.
- Genetically modifying cannabis to make it safe to eat. Such a bad idea. On so many levels.
European Botanic Gardens Congress calling for papers one last time
But you’ve only got a few more days! The Congress itself will be in late May on the island of Chios. Word around the campfire has it that Nigel Maxted will be putting together a workshop on “Wild Species Conservation in Genetic Reserves.”
Nibbles: FIGS, Wassailing, Rice breeding, Mobile apps, GI, Coffee, Art, Symposium
- Probably way more than you ever need to know about FIGS. In one handy PowerPoint.
- The British love affair with the apple comes to a head. And goes over the top.
- 100 years of the Paddy Breeding Station. No, nothing to do with the Irish.
- Another damn app competition.
- Geographical Indications in Brazilian law deconstructed.
- Not too late for a cappuccino. But make mine a civet cat shit one.
- More rewriting of Amazon pre-history.
- Marianne North, botanical artist, in the Amazon and elsewhere, remembered.
- Starting now FAO Symposium: applying information on food and nutrition security to better decision making. There’s even a hashtag — #isfsi2012 — but nobody seems to be using it.
Brainfood: Cassava in Colombia, Tubers in Peru, Breadfruit diversity, Hominins and elephants, Evolution, Domestication, Mongolian sheep, Roads, Econutrition, South Asia food composition
- Informal “Seed” Systems and the Management of Gene Flow in Traditional Agroecosystems: The Case of Cassava in Cauca, Colombia. Farmers move cassava around a lot.
- Ecological and socio-cultural factors influencing in situ conservation of crop diversity by traditional Andean households in Peru. Farmers should be supported in moving tubers around more.
- Nutritional and morphological diversity of breadfruit (Artocarpus, Moraceae): Identification of elite cultivars for food security. There’s a lot of it.
- Man the Fat Hunter: The Demise of Homo erectus and the Emergence of a New Hominin Lineage in the Middle Pleistocene (ca. 400 kyr) Levant. Disappearance of elephant led to replacement of Homo erectus. Quite a difference from the more recent hominin-elephant dynamic.
- Fitness consequences of plants growing with siblings: reconciling kin selection, niche partitioning and competitive ability. All agriculture is about reconciling kin selection.
- Cultivation and domestication had multiple origins: arguments against the core area hypothesis for the origins of agriculture in the Near East. Revisionism rules.
- Tracing genetic differentiation of Chinese Mongolian sheep using microsatellites. Five populations clustered by fancy science into, ahem, five populations.
- Road connectivity, population, and crop production in Sub-Saharan Africa. Fancy science reveals better roads would be good for agriculture. Hell, my mother-in-law could have told them that.
- Econutrition: Preventing Malnutrition with Agrodiversity Interventions. Home gardening is the way to go.
- Carotenoid and retinol composition of South Asian foods commonly consumed in the UK. Palak paneer is not just good, it’s good for you.
Nibbles: Bees and climate change, Native American seeds and health, Sustainable harvesting and cultivation, Tree death, Grass and C, Vegetables, Fishmeal, Big Milk
Today: Connections Edition, in which we pick low-hanging fruit, think outside the box, and join up the dots.
- The return of a US bumblebee. Is it due to climate change?
- “These foods have meaning” for a Native American tribe (and for Africans for that matter). So will they be able to check out their seeds? And sequence the hell out of them, like rice?
- If you want to harvest palm heart sustainably in the Colombian Andes, only take 10% of any population a year. Is cultivation an option?
- Trees are dying in the Sahel. And yet boffins don’t know how to kill them. No word on what the grass is doing.
- Vegetables and nutrition: the theory and the practice. Of course, a lot of them are grown in cities.
- Why is so much fish made into fishmeal rather than eaten? Location, location, location. Of markets, that is. Kind of like for milk.