Sustainability & Climate Change
Food production needs are expected to roughly double over the next 35 years as the world population grows and people in under developed countries become more affluent and demand more calories. Healthy ecosystems are vital to the survival of all organisms. How can we grow crops without harming the environment? How can we balance technology and global food security? What is the right balance of organic and conventional farming? What role can genetics and biotechnology play without compromising the needs of tomorrow?
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Podcast: Could domesticated bacteria help break our dependence on fossil fuels?
Microbes surround us and enhance our lives in almost innumerable ways. These helpful micro-machines catalyze key reactions required to produce ...
Treating nutrient-stripped soil with charcoal made from plants could boost US crop yields 6%
Farmers in the US can expect to see an increase in crop yield of between 4.7 and 6.4%, on average, ...
Want a more sustainable food system? Convince young westerners to eat insects
The rapidly changing climate and an expanding global population are serious risks for worldwide food security. Edible insects have a ...
Viewpoint: GMOs pose ‘systemic threat to humanity’? Debunking Nassim Taleb’s apocalyptic assault on crop biotech
Nassim Taleb is a statistician and financial risk analyst. As interesting as his observations about the uncertain risk of large ...
Farmer’s open letter to skeptical consumers: We know science, glyphosate and GMOs are safe, and we need both to fight climate change
Despite repeated assurances from the mainstream science community that our food supply is safe, many consumers remain highly skeptical of ...
New insight into how plants breathe could lead to more water-efficient crops
Scientists have discovered how plants create networks of air channels -- the lungs of the leaf -- to transport carbon ...
Book review: ‘The Lives of Bees’ offers 14 tips to help keep honeybees healthy and pollinating our crops
What were the lives of wild honey bees like before humans began intensively managing them and moving them all over ...
3 things we should do to preserve insect biodiversity
Insects make up the bulk of terrestrial diversity. Reports of insect declines, best documented in Europe and North America, suggest ...
‘Innovative’ GMO Impossible burger could help support US soybean growers, says USDA chief Sonny Perdue
Sonny Perdue may be a champion of agriculture and agribusinesses in all its forms. But even he isn’t immune to ...
Uganda set to embrace artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, but biotechnology languishes
'Something fundamentally detrimental to the progress of scientific and technological innovations in the agriculture of our nation is happening.' ...
Argentina approves fifth GMO cotton variety in effort to boost crop yields, spare natural resources
Argentina's Minister of AgroIndustry Luis Miguel Etechevehere and Christian Monty, Head of Global Cotton from BASF have announced the release ...
German farmer’s group calls for updated EU GMO crop rules to combat climate change
German farmers want access to new breeding technologies to protect against climate change. This would require a change in the ...
Saving bees ‘to death’? Our efforts to grow the honeybee population by using artificial hives may harm other pollinators
Everyone wants to save the bees. But as populations decline every year, we may be saving them to death. Human ...
The first gene-edited soybean opens door to a slew of new CRISPR foods
The number of crop gene-editing projects underway around the world is astonishing ...
New CRISPR-based platform detects plant pests, identifies useful traits for crop breeding
SHERLOCK technology is a new CRISPR-based platform that is rapid and portable and enables detection and quantitation of plant genes ...
If US banned neonicotinoid insecticides, pesticide use could increase, posing threat to humans and pollinators, study suggests
New research from Gian Carlo Moschini at the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University and Ed ...
Podcast: CRISPR immunizes pigs against PRRS—deadly viral disease that costs $600 million annually
Christine Burkard, assistant professor of infection and immunity at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, says her team has devised a ...
‘RoboDUCK’: Weed-killing robot could cut chemical use in rice farming
An engineer working for Japanese carmaker Nissan has built a robot to help farmers reduce the use of herbicides and ...
Impossible Foods vs. Beyond Meat: Arms race to control booming plant-based burger market is on
Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are served in almost 20,000 restaurants across the country, and the list of restaurant chains ...
Podcast: As more US farmers retire, here’s how to recruit a new generation of growers to feed us
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‘Third way’ agriculture: How technology, good judgement can save our food supply from climate change
Imagine waking up in a world that has become so hot and so crowded that most of what you eat ...
Newly identified rice gene could help develop drought-tolerant biotech crop varieties
Drought is one of the abiotic factors that affect the yield of crops. Studies have shown that basic leucine zipper ...
Naturally occurring phosphorous in soil could cut synthetic fertilizer pollution, major threat to sustainable farming
Cornell University engineers have taken a step in understanding how iron in the soil may unlock naturally occurring phosphorus bound ...
US college cafeterias, restaurants could be first to serve controversial GMO AquAdvantage salmon
Inside an Indiana aquafarming complex, thousands of salmon eggs genetically modified to grow faster than normal are hatching into tiny ...
Attacking single gene in deadly parasite could protect honeybees from untreatable infection
Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists have taken the first step towards a weapon against the major honey bee parasite Nosema ...
Podcast: More fearful of crop losses than jail, Indian farmers grow illegal GMO Bt eggplant
While Indian farmers have benefited tremendously from growing insect-resistant GMO cotton, the government has outlawed the cultivation of genetically engineered ...
People in Africa eat GMO foods. So why do they oppose new crops developed by their own scientists?
GM foods are already sold in supermarkets throughout Africa, but the fear remains ...
