- Great photos of swimming pigs.
- Great photos of Indian spice market.
- British agriculture to go Mediterranean.
Connecting through food
In Bittersweet, a new column on GlobalPost, Matt McAllester writes about how food connects us and the people who cook it to faraway lands.
Last month he went looking for wild boar meat in Baghdad. Obviously like to set himself ambitious targets, our Matt. Anyway, well worth a read. Unfortunately you can’t subscribe to his stuff alone, but GlobalPost is an excellent general news site.
Digesting Annals of Botany
Annals of Botany have what I think is quite an innovative feature where they ask Prof. John Bryant of the University of Exeter, UK to take “a closer look at some of this month’s Original Articles.” Each issue he picks four of his favourite papers and writes an summary of the work done and the key results, all in a succinct and elegant paragraph. The latest example describes two pieces of work on mechanisms which maintain diversity in ecosystems, allelopathy and herbivory. And an earlier installment highlighted a paper from Probert et al. at Kew which found that the longest-lived seeds are from warm, dry climates. I’ve set up an email alert for Prof. Bryant’s little nuggets, and no doubt I’ll be mentioning them in future.
Nibbles: Cheese, Dog genetics, Olives on Crete, Polyploidy, Pollination
- Making French cheese in the Himalayas.
- The latest on how to build your perfect dog.
- “The scientists are putting the all the trees which must be saved into a data bank.” Clever scientists.
- Polyploidization so, so much more than merely the sum of genomes.
- “The expected direct reduction in total agricultural production in the absence of animal pollination ranged from 3 to 8%…” Thank goodness for Operation Pollinator, eh?
CGIAR gets itself a climate change blog
The Communications Team in the CGIAR Secretariat launched a new blog a few weeks ago called “Rural Climate Exchange: Connecting Agricultural and Environmental Science to the Climate Agenda.” It looks nice. It seems to have all the requisite bells and whistles. You can subscribe to an RSS feed or email notifications. We’ll be keeping an eye on it, and contributing as appropriate. Welcome to the blogosphere, Nathan, Danielle, Amelia et al.!