- IRRI tries to raise $300 million for rice in Asia. Including for that genebank of theirs?
- Sheep phylogeographic genetic structure weak, but not completely absent, thank goodness.
- Examples of sustainable biofuels. No snickering at the back there.
- How to manage tree genetic resources under climate change. By some friends.
- Almonds 101.
- “…testing the genetic and immunological limits of poultry.” And then eating the results.
- Grassland restoration needs to take into account functional diversity. And DNA?
- Presentation on community forestry management in Niger. Nice story.
- Senegalese vegetable farming project uses terra preta but modern seed. Go figure.
- Ancient farmers off the hook for loss of key wheat gene. Plant breeders to blame, apparently.
Would you like some broccoli with that sesame (street)?
Annals of Important Research: An Economist blog post alerts me to a study that has apparently roiled the blogosphere, and that I slept through. Elmo ((A Sesame Street character, M’Lud.)) can make broccoli attractive to children. ((I find it hard to believe that there’s an actual Elmo Broccoli, but who knows?)) Bottom line:
[I]n the control group (no characters on either food) 78 percent of children participating in the study chose a chocolate bar over broccoli, whereas 22 percent chose the broccoli. However, when an Elmo sticker was placed on the broccoli and an unknown character was placed on the chocolate bar, 50 percent chose the chocolate bar and 50 percent chose the broccoli. ((Bloggers have sneered at the “fact” that any child would voluntarily choose broccoli; I’m not one of them.))
Then you dig (or rather, you read someone who dug) and discover that the fight wasn’t broccoli vs chocolate, it was photo of broccoli vs photo of chocolate. But then that’s OK, because on the basis of 104 kids looking at photos of foods, the Sesame Street Foundation scored a big grant to see how a larger number of kids would relate to actual food items. As the Man Who Dug reports:
Hmmm. And what happened to this study? Beats me. If it ever got completed, I can’t find it. That might be because I don’t know how to search for it properly, or it might be because it produced null results and therefore got tossed in the same dustbin as all the other null results that make for boring reading and never find a home. If anybody knows anything about it, let us know in comments.
Commenters did indeed supply some extra information, including this study, which showed that 10 low-income African American children were more likely to choose and eat a healthy food after playing an “advergame” in which the goal was to get their computer to character to eat healthier foods and beverages.
Every little helps.
Ya don’t suppose parental example might have something to do with the foods children choose, do ya?
The data suggest that children begin to assimilate and mimic their parents’ food choices at a very young age, even before they are able to fully appreciate the implications of these choices.
Nibbles: Heirloom store, Leaf miners, Mongolian drought, GPS, Coca, Ag origins, Aquaculture, Lice, Bud break in US, IFAD livestock, biofuels, Pig history
- “Housed in the towering old 1926 Sonoma County Bank, it’s hard to miss the Seed Bank.” And who would want to anyway.
- Of apples, leaf miners and bacteria. Great story.
- Best synthesis and analysis of the Mongolian dzud story so far.
- Visualize your GPS data! Not agrobiodiversity, I know, but I don’t have another blog.
- Coca myths debunked. Sniff sniff.
- “Crop domestication and the first plant breeders” book charpter online.
- Rebranding Asian carp. Hard row to hoe. Thanks, Don.
- 190,000 year old clothes had lice. 190,000 year old humans had clothes?
- More citizen science stuff, this one on effect of climate change on plant phenology in the US.
- IFAD publishes bunch of livestock-related papers. ILRI, are you listening?
- “It’s 36 percent more efficient to grow grain for food than for fuel.” Good to have a number.
- Boffins do their aDNA thing on Chinese pigs, find continuity, multiple domestication, sweet and sour sauce recipe.
- Soil Association begs to differ on that whole
UKworld-needs-to-double-food-production thing.
Nibbles: Food Security, GIS, Neoliberalism, Herbaria
- Food security? Can you say Eyjafjallajökull? Well, no, neither can I. But I know a man who can.
- Got something worth saying on GIS in Africa?
- From government intervention to the free market and back again. Neat trick if you can do it.
- Restoring Kabul’s herbarium “will vastly improve Afghan research capacity”.
Nibbles: Aubergines, Opuntia, Amazonian ag, Kenya, Swiflets, Coconut and Web 2.0, PROTA, Mexico, Fruit wild relatives
- More either-or stuff from the Guardian on the Indian GM brijal story.
- The USDA prickly pear cactus germplasm collection gets some exposure. And how many times can one say that.
- Much better title from Discover on that ancient northern Amazonian earthworks story.
- Kenyan foresters tell people to eat bamboo. Luigi’s mother-in-law politely demurs. On the other hand, she might like this.
- Swiflet farming? Swiflet farming.
- Really heated exchange on paper on coconut lethal yellowing in Yucatan develops on Google Groups. I love the internet.
- PROTA publishes expensive book on promising African plants. Promises, promises. NASA promised us the personal jetpack. Where are we with that?
- Nice summary of that Mesoamerican agricultural origins story we blogged briefly about a few days ago. So what exactly do you call hunter-gatherers who also grow crops?
- First International Symposium on Wild Relatives of Subtropical and Temperate Fruit and Nut Crops will be held March 19-23, 2011 in Davis, California on the campus of the University of California, Davis. Book early.