Plant Gene Ring Tones: “My species ring tone sounds a lot like Arabidopsis thaliana. How can I find a better one?” Science and Nature become one: “readers will have the option of Skyping authors directly to share their thoughts and feelings about a paper simply by clicking that author’s name” Cover of the first issue [...]
Posts under ‘Link Posts’
BBC on drought tolerant maize/corn
There’s a new episode of BBC’s Discovery: Feeling the World out this morning. It’s only 26 minutes long, and the full piece is definitely worth a listen, but if you don’t have 26 minutes, the meat of the post can be summarized in 8 minutes: 3:20-7:54: Introducing the subject, developing drought tolerant varieties of maize [...]
Paintings of the last supper reflect growing abundance of food.
“The last thousand years have witnessed dramatic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food…. We think that as art imitates life, these changes have been reflected in paintings of history’s most famous dinner.” – Brian Wansink (Cornell University) Read more at Discoblog. Note that these results are normalized to head size, [...]
Chromosomes and Ploidy at PATSP
When plant lovers/growers can explain chromosomes more clearly than some professors I could name, we all win! (This is a compliment to the plant lovers, not a insult to the professors, not most of them anyway.) Click through for a great example.
Food Nostalgia
Nostalgia for the food of the past isn’t something new. Of course the past is a moving target. Links to James McWilliams at the nytimes, and Michael Roberts at Greed, Green, and Grains
The Dragon Genome
Sequence the dragon genome! (Enjoy your Friday everyone)
Plant Links of the Day: Diverse Citrus, Extinct Cucurbits, and more
A genomicist’s post on citrus, a ecologist’s post on an extinct cucurbit known only from a single 175 year old specimen, and “Sex, Drugs, and Paleo-botany!”
Ford Denison on Why Creating Drought Resistant Crops Is Complicated
From the post in question: … natural selection is unlikely to have missed simple, tradeoff-free improvements. So I’m always skeptical when someone speculates that we could double crop yield just by increasing the expression of some newly discovered “drought-resistance gene.” My rationale is that mutants with greater expression of any given gene are simple enough [...]
An Interview with Roger Beachy
Pam Ronald, writing at Tomorrow’s Table points out an interesting interview with Roger Beachy the new head of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (itself a newly created government organization) in Nature Biotechnology. He talks about everything from restoring support for the, very successful, programs that used to fund the training of plant breeders [...]
More Bill Gates
Bill Gates has an interesting new post up on the risks of of buying into the false choice between sustainability and productivity: The global movement to help small farmers is increasingly divided into two camps. On one side is a technological approach focused on improving productivity. On the other side is an environmental approach that [...]