- Slate puts a fork in, well, the fork.
- Gotta love the Prairies.
- Mysterious Cattle Deaths Caused by GMO Grass: not GMO, not particularly mysterious.
- Gotta love the Spice Islands.
- How scientists can extract impact from their
navel-gazingresearch. - Gotta love online mapping platforms.
- Another journal starts a blog.
- Horses in agriculture, and history.
- Gotta love za’tar. It’s about thyme.
- Sweeter than sugar. Mauritius goes for fair trade and diversification.
- Dying for batik.
Nibbles: MCPD, Coffee pollination, WACCI & IITA get into bed, Quinoa value addition, Plant chemicals
- Rejoice, the new edition of the FAO/Bioversity Multi-Crop Passport Descriptors (MCPD) are now available on-line!
- Pollinators good for pollination shock. No, kidding apart, this is Pollinator Week and we should take note.
- Another step in building plant breeding capacity in West Africa.
- How to get quinoa cake on the menu of posh Bolivian coffee shops.
- Virtual tour of my old stomping ground at the Cambridge University Botanical Garden includes a chemical trail. Which alas does not in turn include the main chemical we used to consume there.
Nibbles: Gathering, Tubers, Quinoa, Africa-American heirlooms, Deforestation
- Edible weeds, anyone?
- Nope, Slate says the answer is tubers. And they may have a point.
- But Evo Morales thinks it’s quinoa.
- Meanwhile, Ms. Kimble cultivates her vegetable garden.
- And Luigi enticed by new mapping tool to explore deforestation on Sumatra.
Nibbles: Maize genome, Mapping plants in the US, Sixth extinction, Finding species, Korean dog, IUCN guidelines, Ginkgo evolution, Churro sheep, Malaysian trees, Nutrition training
- Maize diversity sliced and diced to within an inch of its life.
- Mapping invasives sometimes = mapping crop wild relatives. Compare and contrast.
- Red List hits 20,000 species.
- And yet we keep finding new ones, even in Europe.
- Reconstructing a Korean dog breed.
- You too can help IUCN with its genebank guidelines.
- Video history of ginkgos. “Are we watching them as they evolve, or are they watching us?”
- Video history of Navajo sheep. Touching.
- Malaysian forest tree genebank at work. Any ginkgos in it?
- Hurry! You have 2 days to apply for a Training course on Food Systems: From Agronomy to Human Health, in Benin.
Nibbles: Coconut origins, Microbe genebank, Stay-green barley, Sachs may suck, Cap in hand, Wheat information, IITA birthday, Cat art, Poppy biosynthesis, Correcting names
- Coconut origins, the quick version.
- Chile gets a bugbank.
- Stay-green barley genes located. In a genebank collection, natch. What now, a Stay-green Revolution?
- New Economist blog agnostic about Millennium Villages.
- Plant scientists call for $100 billion investment in, er, plant science.
- Wheat pedigrees online.
- IITA a youthful 45.
- Cats in Islam.
- Noscapine production in poppies is complex, but not so complex that boffins can’t figure it out.
- Want help in getting taxonomic names right? What you need is the Taxonomic Name Resolution Service. Does that mean we don’t need this any more?