Category: Mainstream

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Meta-Brainfood for the weekend

Time to clean up a few things, I think. For a while now, I’ve been hoarding links to edited volumes. My idea was to do a special dedicated Brainfood on each one, but I now fear that just ain’t gonna happen. Too much other stuff on. So here they are. Maybe one of you will help me out? You know what to do. A pithy one or two sentences summarizing each paper, based on the abstract only if you’re into the whole brevity thing. Interested? Let me know in the comments below, and we’ll set something up. Our first guest-curated Brainfood…

Here they are:

  • Do you remember the 2017 book Against The Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott? I think we may have blogged about it. Anyway, it suggested that it was grain (as opposed to tuber) cultivation that led to the development of hierarchical states. Grain is visible and portable, and so easy to tax, you see. There are interviews with the author galore if you like podcasts. Ok, well, the Cambridge Archaeological Journal had a whole Review Symposium deconstructing that particular revisionist narrative.
  • In 2018, something called the 1st International Conference on Genetic Resources and Biotechnology was held in Bogor, Indonesia. A bit of a misnomer, it was really mainly about “[i]nformation system and exchanges of genetic resources for effective crop improvement.” These are the proceedings, and all of the dozens of papers are open access. Maybe someone out there could do their Top 10.
  • This one is not as relevant as the others, but it’s interesting nonetheless: Remote Sensing of Plant Biodiversity. Surely some of the 20 contributions have something to say about agricultural biodiversity? Who’s willing to have a look?
  • Then there’s the Special Issue of Application in Plant Sciences on Machine Learning in Plant Biology: Advances Using Herbarium Specimen Images. Yummy. Automated identification of CWR specimens, anyone?
  • And finally, just out, a Topical Collection in Agriculture and Human Values on Agriculture, Food & Covid-19. Come on, who can resist a hot-take (well, a Rapid Response Opinion) entitled Maybe there is an alternative after all?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

And don’t worry, there’ll be a normal Brainfood on Monday as usual.

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Switched on switchgrass

Do you live in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, eastern Indiana, western Ohio, eastern Iowa, western North Dakota, eastern Montana, northern Wisconsin, northern Michigan, or the southern Appalachian mountains? Basically the gappy areas below.

Ok, now, do you have any switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) around where you are? Might look something like this.

By Warren Gretz, DOE/NREL – National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Public Domain.

If so, Dr David Lowry at Michigan State University would like to hear from you.

NOTE: In the interest of full disclosure, I had to change the photo because I uploaded the wrong species having dowloaded a number of different ones from Wikipedia. Thanks to Dave Wood for pointing that out. I originally did it in a hurry and wasn’t paying close enough attention. Sorry.

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Nibbles: UN training, Genebanks double, CG spatial data, Fruit IPR, Citrus greening, Sikkim diversity, Bulgarian lavender, Biogenetic Paradoxes, Heroin, Palestinian eggplant

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More on making bread Down Under

Do you remember a Nibble from a few weeks back about the bread-making potential of Australian native grasses? If you do, you may have wondered, as we did at the time, what grasses they might be, because “mandadyan nalluk” or “dancing grass” just don’t yield very much additional information on googling.

Well, there’s now a piece in The Conservation that is basically about the same thing, but thankfully links to a scientific name. Or four scientific names, to be exact, for four species in Astrebla, which is a genus that is new to me.

I do love seeing vernacular names in multiple languages being quoted in articles, but I also think they should always be backed-up by a Latin binomial.

And vice versa, of course.

LATER: Wow, The Guardian really likes this stuff. Still no Latin names though.

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Seeds: the good, the bad, the ugly

Ah, seeds.

You can’t live without them.

But, as the weird, unsolicited packets that have been sent to numerous recipients in the US (and elsewhere) prove, you can have too much of a good thing.

At least they are fairly diverse.

LATER: Diverse or not, India is on alert.

LATER STILL: Ok, so it’s just a brushing scam? How boring.