Category: Threats

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UG99 in the internet mainstream

It was Lord Beaverbrook, I think, who said that if something had not been reported in his once-mighty Daily Express, then it hadn’t happened. ((No, I’m not going to check.)) For netizens of the modern age, much the same could be said of MetaFilter; if it isn’t there, it’s nowhere. And so it came to pass that UG99, recently covered by Wired magazine and Nibbled here, is officially a threat; it says so on MetaFilter.

I’m not actually a member, nor do I care to be. ((Too much on my plate.)) But if I were, I’d be responding to some of those comments, oh yes. And thanks to those comments, I’ve learned that the Wired piece’s author keeps a blog, which contains stuff that had to be left out. Cool.

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Nibbles: Genomes, Sorghum squared, Tropical forests, UG99, Vanilla, Himalayan agriculture

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Worried in Tajikistan

The Guardian has a photo essay on how farmers are trying to cope with climate change in Tajikistan. ((The images are also on Flickr.))

Turaqulov Saidmuzator, a farmer in Temumalik district, is experiencing the effects of climate change. ‘I think the weather has become warmer in the last four or five years and that is affecting our crops,’ he says. ‘The sickness of our crops is increasing but the pesticides are expensive and we are losing almost 30% of our crops to diseases.’

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Three good ideas

I think I have already pointed out that Nigel Chaffey does an entertaining round-up of botanically themed items from the world’s media on every issue of Annals of Botany. The latest one has three stories — on training, innovation and information — of great relevance to some of our recurring obsessions here at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog.

  • “Teaching Tools in Plant Biology is a new, online feature of The Plant Cell consisting of materials to help instructors teach plant biology courses. Each topic includes a short essay introducing the topic, with suggested further readings, and a PowerPoint lecture with handouts. The materials are peer reviewed by leaders in the field to ensure accuracy, like all material in The Plant Cell.” Anyone want to volunteer to do one on agrobiodiversity conservation?
  • InnoCentive, the global innovation marketplace, “where creative minds solve some of the world’s most important problems for cash awards up to $1 million,” is to tackle the problem of the European corn borer, though the solvers of this one get only $20,000, and must relinquish all intellectual property rights. Will be interesting to see if anyone bites. The deadline for submission just passed.
  • Annals of Botany is going to take part in a project “to establish whether content in various formats from disparate sources (e.g. literature from publishers and data from public databases) can be delivered to a central ‘knowledge brokering service’, which then makes the content machine-readable and allows key pieces of information to be extracted by data-mining approaches.” I really like this idea as a way of aggregating information on germplasm accessions, data from databases but also published results from papers etc.