- University of Hawaii’s work on taro summarized.
- Watch out for FAO’s new NWFP-Digest. Non-timber, non-wood; what’s the difference?
- The transition of maca from neglect to market prominence. Free download.
- Maize and malaria in Ethiopia.
- Gary Nabhan interviewed. Again.
- NPR on the limits of the Green Revolution.
- Cocks still fighting in India.
- The early Egyptians “…were very aware of the benefits that natural additives can have—especially if dissolved into an alcoholic medium, like wine or beer.”
- Brosimum alicastrum to the rescue.
- Uganda’s biofuel hopes dashed by virus? Say it aint so.
The Future of Plant Genetic Resources
The Future of Plant Genetic Resources is a one-day meeting to be held on 14 May 2009 at the Linnean Society in the heart of London’s fashionable West End. The meeting honours Jack Hawkes, Past President of the LinnSoc, who
devoted his long and illustrious career to the study of plant genetic resources. His meeting with the Russian plant geneticist Nicolai Vavilov in St. Petersburg in 1938 was in his own words “an experience that changed my life”; working with Jack was an experience that changed the lives of many of today’s plant breeders. Jack’s work on potatoes and their wild relatives was at the centre of a broad interest in the conservation and utilization of plant genetic resources, and his vision and legacy are widely celebrated – he has been called “the father of germplasm banks”. In this day meeting we will honour Jack and his many contributions by examining the future of plant genetic resources in today’s scientific setting.
There’s a pretty stellar line-up of speakers, and of course we’d be interested in a report, if you go.
Nibbles: Drugs, Horticulture, Nutritional composition, Health, Rice, Coconut
- “Coffee and cocoa yes, coca no.”
- 1st All Africa Horticulture Congress.
- Carotenoid and vitamin content of Micronesian atoll foods: Pandanus (Pandanus tectorius) and garlic pear (Crataeva speciosa) fruit.
- A Family Year: a 5-part television series focusing on the health and environmental threats facing families in Russia and Central Europe.
- Natbar Sarangi: one man Indian rice genebank.
- Climate change “might hinder coconut production“.
Shock horror! Natural selection true!
Just fancy that. A survey of farmers and their weeds has come up with some fascinating results.
Bill Johnson, a Purdue University associate professor of weed science, said farmers who plant Roundup Ready crops and spray Roundup or glyphosate-based herbicides almost exclusively are finding that weeds have developed resistance. It is only a matter of time, Johnson said, before there are so many resistant weeds that the use of glyphosate products would become much less effective in some places.
“We have weeds that have developed resistance, including giant ragweed, which is one of the weeds that drove the adoption of Roundup,” Johnson said. “It’s a pretty major issue in the Eastern Corn Belt. That weed can cause up to 100 percent yield loss.”
So, let me get this straight. You repeatedly subject a living, reproducing organism to a particular environmental stress, and it evolves so as to adapt to that stress? Well, I’ll be.
The best part:
“Monsanto, the maker of Roundup, funded the survey. … [T]he next step is studying the differences among management strategies in grower fields to see which will slow the build-up of glyphosate resistance.”
Fibre scans online
The International Year of Natural Fibres has a great website, and the latest thing on it is a selection of beautiful micrographs of different kinds of fibres, from abaca to yak.