A bit of cash for biodiversity

This looks potentially rather interesting.

The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Department of Energy invite applications for the establishment or continuation of “International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups” (ICBG) to address the interdependence of biodiversity exploration for potential applications in health, agriculture and energy, with investments in research capacity that support sustainable use of these resources, the knowledge to conserve them, and equitable partnership frameworks among research and development organizations in the U.S. and low and middle income countries.

That’s from the announcement of about US$3-4 million of new funding available in the US. It’s hard to know exactly what it might cover, but it is nice to see agriculture in there explicitly, along with health and, somewhat less appealing, energy. I found it at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, but you can go straight to the government source. And, hey, let us know if anyone lands a big grant.

Roman antibiotics

Also from Tangled Bank comes news of a study looking at the evidence for various infectious diseases from the skeletons of people killed at Herculaneum by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. ((That’s the one that also destroyed Pompeii, though in a somewhat different way.)) Among the diseases was brucellosis, evidence for which was also gleaned from the carbonized cheeses found at the site. Herculaneum was apparently famous for its goat cheeses, which seem, however, to have been badly infected. Which is all amazing enough. But one of the commenters on the article points to another paper which adds a twist to the story.

It seems the inhabitants of Herculaneum, despite their brucellosis and tuberculosis, were relatively free of non-specific bone inflammations. And that may be because:

Pomegranates and figs, consumed by the population, were mainly dried and invariably contaminated by Streptomyces, a bacterium that produces natural tetracycline, an antibiotic.

Is there similar evidence from contemporary populations of the protection conferred by natural antibiotics?

Plucked from the Tangled Bank

The latest Tangled Bank (a blog carnival all about science) is up ((So, welcome anyone who arrived from there.)) with a couple of posts of potential interest to agriculture. Walking the Berkshires describes how to rationally decide how invasive a weed might be. And if you’re interested in pests and diseases, Discovering Biology in a Digital World will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the screwworm, one of my personal all-time favourites.