- Boffins to brew Jurassic Park beer.
- Boffins fingerprint weeds.
- Boffins scour arctic for antifreeze proteins.
- Boffins to reclaim Garden of Eden.
- Boffins fight to save pines in Europe.
- Boffins improve production of rice and fruits in Mekong Delta.
- Boffins to spend $US3.5billion on GM in China.
- Boffin “disgraces himself”.
- Boffin says insects are agrobiodiversity too.
- Boffin wants you to plant sunflowers and count bees. Other boffins dig up evidence of bliblical beekeeping.
- Boffins find endogenous retroviruses in sheep different to ones in wild relatives. Via.
- Boffins kill beautiful theory about pre-Columbian chickens with ugly fact.
Nibbles: Sheep, Media, Potato
- A sheep breed back from the brink in Tunisia.
- IIED paper on Biodiversity and the media. Thanks, Susanna.
- Lima to boast Potato Museum.
Cow Parade
There was an article in the local paper on Saturday which described how some of the exhibits at the recent Cow Parade in San Jose were a bit worse for wear and were being repaired. Well, I’d never heard of Cow Parade, but it sounds like fun. You can check out the entries for the San Jose event online. I just wish there was more phenotypic diversity on show, all the entries in the Wikipedia article look like basically the same breed.
News from the road
Apologies for the light blogging lately, but both Jeremy and I are on the road and busy with other stuff. When last seen, Jeremy was on vacation in Maine, dealing what will probably be the mortal blow to its lobster population. And I’ve been in and out of meetings all week, but I’ve got a couple of days off now and may have time to catch up on the old feed reader.
This is a good place to do that. I’m visiting the Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (CATIE) in Turrialba, Costa Rica. They have a very pleasant campus in a spectacular area with a well-developed ecotourism industry:
CATIE has a botanic garden and an active seedbank for forest species. But it also has an interest in agrobiodiversity conservation, with very important field genebanks of cacao, coffee and peach palm, and a crop seed genebank specializing in local vegetables, maize and beans. More later.
Nibbles: Economics, Agricultural origins, Slow Food, Pollinators, India
- An economist designs a sustainable agricultural system. Good news: it includes genebanks, if only as an additional thought.
- Peruvian rock art marks transition between hunting/gathering and agriculture.
- A food garden on the White House lawn? Via Slow Food Nation, get your tickets quick. And follow the blog. Thanks, Colinski, and have a good time there.
- “The total economic value of pollination worldwide amounted to €153 billion, which represented 9.5% of the value of the world agricultural production used for human food in 2005.”
- “I want the farmers to get the message that what we are doing, what they will be doing when they embrace natural farming, is revolutionary.”