- Celebrating Charles Heiser and Bob Chambers.
- Quinoa coming into its own in Bolivia.
- Earthscan and Bioversity International team up for new Issues in Agricultural Biodiversity book series.
- Crop wild relatives not just useful to breeders, eggplant edition.
- Vitamin D 101 in pictures.
- Improving pitaya.
- Cassava production trends in Africa in 28 slides. Twenty slides too many, but it’s always good to have the data.
- Beetroot’s colour deconstructed.
- Worldwatch’s 2011 State of the World was released yesterday. Gives a “compelling look at the global food crisis, with particular emphasis on global innovations that can help solve a worldwide problem.” At $19.95 a pop. But supporting material available. Here comes the commentary.
- The genebank at the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council gets its 15 minutes of fame.
Millets go back home
You’ll have to take my word for it, unless you read Chinese, or can make head or tail out of the Google translation of the announcement on the Environmental Information E-News website, but it looks like a number of accessions of Setaria millet from the USDA collection have been “repatriated” to some Taiwanese hilltribe communities who had lost them over the years. Me, I’d have asked for stuff from other places too while I was at it, what with climate change and all, but anyway. There will apparently be more on the project on the website of the Department of Agronomy, National Taiwan University, but again you’ll need some language skills to get the full benefit. Prof. Warren H.J. Kuo is the man in charge. The word is that Taiwan’s Public Television Service will upload something in English to youtube very soon. Looking forward to that.
Nibbles: Neanderthal, CWR, Bioinformatics, Svalbard, Old Armenian wine, Maple syrup, Plants databases, Bananas in trouble
- Neanderthals cooked and ate plants, but did not use toothbrushes.
- Andy Jarvis talks up a crop wild relatives storm.
- Towards an information infrastructure for the global genebank system. Maybe.
- Aussies send seeds to wrong Global Seed Vault.
- Oldest winery found in Armenia. Search still ongoing for oldest wino. Maybe in Lebanon?
- Oh, to be at the Bigleaf Maple Syrup Festival!
- The most important thing to happen in botany in, what, a couple of weeks? Ah, but the backlash is here.
- Colbert finally works out why his high school teacher put condoms on bananas. Here’s his informant.
Nibbles: Squash etc, Potatoes, Economics, Pharaonic palm, goats, Chickpea
- Native American eating “best museum cafeteria in town”. “Makes up for the museum,” sniffs Jeremy
- Catalog of advanced clones and improved varieties going like hot potatoes.
- The Economic Impact of Bioversity is apparently “a seriously problem-rich, solution-craving topic”. Innovation Investment Journal says so.
- Pharaonic palm not immortal. Medemia argun “critically endangered”.
- Goat lineage diversity delineated. Paywalled.
- Chickpea diversity includes variability in resistance to salinity. Paywalled.
Nibbles: Oranges, Pigs, Roundup, Agave
- The Human Flower Project uses Christmas oranges to teach about diversity and traditional knowledge.
- The New York Times discovered the hairy Hungarian Mangalitsa pig … so it must be real.
- SciDev.net’s highs and lows of 2010.
- “The genetic resources from landraces ignored by the tequila industry may be valuable for both ethanol production and conservation.” Uh-huh. h/t Jacob.