Mainstream

Nibbles: Book, Sorghum, Plant breeding, Quinoa, Herbal medicines, Compensation, New varieties, Beers

Here’s a bunch of better-late-than-never links, some of which will be good this time next year.

A new book on Plant Genetic Resources and Climate Change.
I expect it covers sorghum, which NPR calls the “camel of crops”.
Wonder whether they’ll cover sorghum at the Tucson Plant Breeding Institute course in January 2014. h/t Crops for the Future.
Last week’s International Congress on Quinoa. Pretty sure our invitation got lost in the mail.
As was our invitation to Kew’s one-day symposium on herbal medicines and food supplements.
Annals of Botany explains how compensation may underly the benefits of genetic diversity – in Arabidopsis. (And thanks for the shout-out.)
ICRISAT struts its stuff in Nigeria with new varieties of groundnut and millet. As ever, we ask: who’s looking after the old varieties?
Diverse beers for Halloween – one to cut out and keep.

Take that, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys. England boasts oldest eaten anuran legs.
Ban potatoes NOW! You know it makes sense.
As American as industrially harvested, intellectually protected apples.
Step aside Golden Rice; the Golden Cucumber is just over the horizon. That and much more from deep re-sequencing.
Also just over the horizon, hordes of new, public domain banana varieties, although they don’t actually own the domain the video points to. Oops. h/t Bifurcated Carrots.

‘Nuff said.

There’s a straw shortage? Well, of course there is.
And this week’s prize for most straw-clutching headline goes to “Mathematical study of photosynthesis clears the path to developing new super-crops”.
On the other hand, why bother mimicking C4 when you could just reinvent photosynthesis?
Speaking of C4, maybe less US maize will be turned into fuel next year.
The “portal” to the diversity of bananas gets an update. But don’t go looking for plantains.
Perennial grains still under discussion.
The Right To Food and Nutrition Watch – a name to sow confusion – has made its 2013 articles available.
Nutrition, these days, means adequate fibre, so of course the natural way to do that is to add citrus fibre to meatballs. Smacks forehead.
Science Friday does fermentation, with nutritional benefits.
And a little something for the weekend: Colombian artists sing in solidarity with farmers. Waiting for a review from Our Man in Cali.

We missed the first UK fungus day yesterday.
And the new world record pumpkin. Love that wide-angle lens, BTW.
And a training course on plant genetic resources and genebank management.
But not plant biodiversity to regenerate more productive pastures.
Nor efforts to conserve navara red rice.
Kudos to Ghana, the first country with a national yam strategy.
And to Australia, for muddying the linguistic waters with something called a PlantBank.
Local farmers supply the food for school meals in Africa.
By far the strangest thing I’ve seen since a seed exploded a spliff some while ago.