Nibbles

November 18, 2007

Agricultural spread in Europe

Black Sea flood “causedÂ spread of agriculture in Europe.” Noah unavailable for comment.

November 16, 2007

Elephants free to drink in peace

We were had. Paris Hilton does not care about drunken elephants or rice wine. What does she care about?

November 16, 2007

Cooling begins at Svalbard genebank

Arctic monkeys start to chill.

November 16, 2007March 31, 2008

Mongolian megafish

Mongolians protect giant trout by not eating it. More for everybody else, I guess.

November 14, 2007November 13, 2007

Phytochemicals in yams

Yoruba twins due to yams?

1. Grinding, fermenting, and detoxifying our way to bigger brains — an anthropologist makes the case that food processing, historically women’s work, did as much for human evolution as the mammoth-spearing got credit for.
2. Speaking of transforming raw ingredients into something civilization-defining: a Japanese temple has been quietly perfecting vegan cooking for 700 years, no marketing department required.
3. Meanwhile in the Philippines, Naturland, the international association for organic farming from Germany, is linking up with Global Seed Savers Philippines, to help farmers get their hands on indigenous crop diversity before it disappears.
4. If you want to see what “future-proofing seeds” looks like at scale, the National Soybean Germplasm Collection just turned 100: a century of squirreling away soybean diversity, just in case.
5. Kazakhstan wants in on the squirreling too: plans are moving forward for a new genebank to safeguard agricultural biodiversity across Islamic Organization for Food Security member states.
6. The University of Reading is also 100, and in celebration scientists there harvested beans from the university’s cacao collection (yes, it has a cacao collection) to make Britain’s first homegrown chocolate bar since 1932, a novelty act with a serious undertone: climate change is squeezing cocoa’s traditional growing belt.
7. And in Italy, the squeeze is already showing up on the balance sheet: Parmesan’s “Fort Knox” — $350 million of cheese squirreled away as loan collateral — is feeling the heat, with rising cooling costs and falling yields rattling wine and olive oil too.
Published on August 16, 2026