Add Fungus The global population continues to grow and climate change is already tangibly reducing food harvests.
One answer to that question may be add fungus. Issie Lapowsky reports today for WIRED that a Seattle-based startup named Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies is almost ready to put a fungi-based product on the market that enables rice corn
and other crops to bear up amazingly well during drought and temperature extremes. According to Lapowsky the product called Bioensure is a blend of microscopic fungi that Dr. Rusty Rodriguez and his wife Dr. Regina Redman first discovered in the 1990s.
They had been trying to figure out how some plants were able to grow in the barren soil and peak 150 Degree-fahrenheit temperatures at the center of Yellowstone national park.
They discovered that fungi had colonized the plants and essentially lent them extra resilience. When the fungi were removed in the lab the plants failed under the same heat.
Since 2008 Redman has been tweaking fungi blends to work with wheat soybeans rice and corn crops.
Bioensure has been proven in real-world conditions Lapowsky writes: During the drought that destroyed much of the cropland in the Midwest in 2012 for instance Bioensure-treated corn crops generated 85 percent more yield than plants that were treated not.
#Abrasive Organic Herbicide Method Blasts Weeds To Deathone U s. Department of agriculture researcher is experimenting with a sandblasting-style method of killing weeds that could be certified organic Minneapolis'Star Tribune reports.
Agronomist Frank Forcella is blasting weeds with a spray of ground-up corncobs walnut shells corn gluten meal and other plant material.
Sounds like he's exfoliating the weeds to death. Working with engineers at South dakota State university Forcella has developed even a tractor-mounted nozzle system that blasts out organic grit using air pressurized to 100 pounds per square inch.
So how does this extreme exfoliation hit weeds but not the crop you're trying to protect?
Strangely enough Forcella's weed-killing method called Propelled Abrasive Grit Management is indiscriminate. You do hit your crop
which to blast weeds? What's the optimal time to blast weeds? Can we blast weeds more cheaply?
Here's one tantalizing possibility: Instead of using inert materials such as corncobs Forcella has tried blasting crops with corn gluten meal
which is gritty but fertilizing. That means organic farmers could kill weeds and fertilize with the same process.
From the crop's point of view I wonder if it's a bit like getting smacked really hard in the face with chocolate cake.
the perpetual moisture warmth and rich soil lead to extravagant growth of hundreds of varieties of tropical grasses plants flowers vines and trees furnishing favorable harbor for the insects;
and does not come from an animal into living baker's yeast cells temporarily turning the yeast into a so-called protein factory that produces milk protein.
The biohackers then extract that protein from the yeast and combine it with water vegetable butter and vegan sugar (instead of lactose) to make a milk substitute.
since yeast are renewable and the processes to cheese are nearly limitless and could also curb dairy farming's impacts on the environment such as emissions of methane a greenhouse gas from cow farts and decomposing manure.
Could the yeast hacks and subsequent processing that Real Vegan Cheese proposes really work? Responding to our questions via blog post Dr. Ricky the pseudonymous writer behind Science Based Cuisine stated that the campaign makes some scientifically dubious promises
and vegan and whether you call yeast animals or plants. But synthetic biologist and writer Christina Agapakis a postdoctoral research fellow at University of California Los angeles thinks Real Vegan Cheese could work.
It can sometimes be tricky to express proteins at high yield in yeast she wrote in email
*In addition to Bt corn Bt cotton is popular. Yet resistance to Bt crops has been occurring with pest species throughout the world.
Seed company Dow Agrosciences told Reuters that Dow representatives taught Brazilian farmers these strategies. The companies'instructions were confusing a lawyer representing the farmers told Reuters
several woodrat populations in the U s. Southwest specifically eat a type of highly toxic creosote bush.
or help raise cattle in places where noxious weeds often hurt rancher's productivity. You could presumably give the cattle microbes from others that have become accustomed to eating these plants
what type of vegetation exists over an area. The study was done in part because deforestation isn't well-documented by local governments
Instead the FBI alleges Debeinong staff tried to steal the seeds and seedlings of the parent plants that companies crossbreed to create the seeds they sell to farmers.
Parent plants are much more valuable than the GMO seeds farmers buy. A farmer who plants a crossbred GMO corn crop could keep the resulting seeds
and replant them if she wanted. I mean technically she could because the seeds aren't sterile as is alleged often
but she would likely face legal repercussions.)However a crop grown from crossbred seeds will contain a mix of corn types most them inferior in quality.
Parent plants on the other hand breed true generation after generation carrying the traits companies engineered into them.
The sequences of parent plants'genes represent some of the companies'most important intellectual property.
and reinserted them in the leaf tissue. It's a lot more accurate than traditional methods
which involve breeders hand-pollinating blossoms in hopes of producing fruit with the desired trait.
so that farmers can spray entire fields more liberally yet kill only weeds. Glyphosate use has skyrocketed in the U s
since the seeds became commercially available in 1996. Corn cotton and soy hich together occupy about 40 percent of U s. cropland re the three crops with the highest GMO fraction by area each more than 90 percent in 2013.
The GMO fraction by area of corn cotton and soy in the top states that grow those crops.
Data from the U s. Department of agriculture. Graphic by Rebecca Lantner. Very few genetically modified crops end up on plates
and yeasts are also critical to the production of some foods including many wines and cheeses.
Refined sugarwinecertain wine yeasts have been modified to make wine production easier and prevent the production of harmful fermentation byproducts.
One example is yeast strain ML01 in the U s . which prevents the production of histamines that can trigger headaches.
Scientists at the University of California Berkeley are already working with it to create virus-resistant cassava.
Gene editing may also provide fodder for fresh controversy. Current GMO methods leave a trace behind
Buzz buzz you're looking for flowers. Good for you. Now as you might imagine there are competing bees afoot--naturally you're not the only species looking for pollen and nectar.
Let's say you've found a nice cluster of flowers a good source of food.
or flower they tend to defend it heavily against other bees. So by making their flower-claim clear the species signals that they have found it
and are willing to defend it. This allows the other species to steer clear and avoid putting up all the energy that would be required for stealing away said flower.
On the other hand food sources with fewer pheromones were visited readily by competing bees. Until now it was thought that eavesdroppers select against conspicuous signals for example by more easily finding
and bamboo stalks may not seem very durable compared to bars of steel. But a new series of experiments finds making metals mimic those materials could improve metals'endurance and strength.
while the brain spinal cord and nerve trunks together account for 2700. And what lurks in the hearts of men?
Earlier he'd been photographing a brightly-colored fungus beetle for project called Meet Your Neighbors that's dedicated to reconnecting people with the wildlife on their own doorsteps
Magee escorts me out past spiky cacti and Seuss-like succulents. Ten years ago I don t think anyone would have thought ever you d find desert landscaping around a large hotel-casino development he says.
S. Thermophilus L. Bulgaricus L. Acidophilus Bifidus and L. Casei Chicory root Fiber Black cherries Water Cherry Juice Concentrate Evaporated Cane Juice Pectin
Natural Flavors Locust bean Gum Monkfruit Extract Stevia Leaf Extract. You will notice items like pasteurized nonfat milk a variety of nonfat milk that comes not from the pasteurization process but from the Pasteur Cows of the Lower Himalayan Range.
There is also evaporated cane juice a substance so rare it must be bartered for from one of the eight living practitioners of the cane juice evaporation process an ancient family trade lost to the sands of time.
which can destroy palm tree date palm sugarcane and banana tree populations. A potential method for detecting the beetles involves the use of acoustic monitoring devices to determine which trees are infested.
when they get into tree trunks. For a long time we've been using sounds to detect these hidden insects particularly to detect large species said Mankin.
which may include the controlled introduction of biological predators like a fungus that's known to attack the beetle.
The sweltering mosquito-assaulted set of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a minor marvel of engineering a three-story habitat with interlacing tree trunks recessed rooms
when the Mayo Clinic injected human stem cells into fetal pigs creating swine with human blood
Karel Capek s 1920 play R. U. R. ends with a pair of factory-built lovers seemingly destined to become the new world-populating Adam and eve.
The picture shows a sunny meadow littered with buttercups across which a lovely little stream rushes to find its home in a deep blue lake.
And when the sun comes out it is pleasant to lie on your belly in the meadow to refresh your memory of grass and of the tiny flowers that bloom in microscopia.
#What Does It Take to Make Meat From Stem Cells? Made with some breadcrumbs egg and 20000 lab-grown cow muscle cells the world's first lab-grown burger made its debut last year.
If it does making beef from stem cells could be an environmentally friendly alternative to you know killing animals for food.
Like the techniques that made last year's burger bioengineer Johannes Tramper's proposed method starts with a small number of stem cells taken from an animal.
While many scientists have calculated the environmental footprint of beef no one has done that for stem cell burgers.
so that they might flower and produce. To me personally the oceans mean safety mystery and wonder.
The men in the rockets are rather like human sacrifices taking a part of all of us with them.
just as yeast-generated carbon dioxide does. The result is something known as salt-rising bread. A century ago a scientist went so far as to bake bread leavened with Clostridium perfringens drawn from an infected wound in
but seem to lie in the nineteenth-century American frontier where it was likely difficult to obtain fresh yeast or keep a bread starter cool and regularly fed.
This step kills all of our familiar friendly yeasts and lactic acid bacteria and in fact most microbes of any kind.
The survivors are those bacteria that happen to be present as dormant and tough spores
but spores survive and are stimulated to grow --and grow fast--when the food temperature drops from piping hot to warm.
whether bakery loaves of salt-rising bread contained any of the bacillus. Indeed they did but in the form of spores rather than live cells.
or dwarf cultivars that can be packed tightly together. It would make the most sense to plant fast-cycle salad crops first says Jean Hunter a professor at Cornell who studies food-processing and waste-management systems for long-term living away
At fault was a fungus that continues its march around the planet. In recent years it has spread across Asia and Australia devastating plants there that bear the signature yellow supermarket fruit.
Scientists at the conference assumed that the fungus was limited to a single plot. The new report suggested the entire plantation was infested expanding 125 diseased acres to more than 3500.
I described a fungus commonly known as Panama Disease but scientifically termed Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubensis Tropical Race 4 (or Foc-TR4).
It infects the roots of banana plants moves upward through the xylem and clogs the flow of sap causing leaves to wilt and the plant to rot.
The Big Mike cultivar soon began succumbing to a variant of Fusarium now known as Race 1. By 1960 the breed was functionally extinct.
Researchers are now analyzing the strain of fungus found in Mozambique to see if it shares genetic markers with samples gathered elsewhere.
Whatever the origin it is certain that the new plantation was equipped poorly to handle the fungus.
#'Chameleon'Vine Looks like Whatever Tree It Climbschameleons aren t the only species that excel at mimicry as biology professor Ernesto Gianoli discovered in Chile s temperate rainforests.
The woody vine Boquila trifoliolata Boquila for short is a climbing plant and has the abilities to mimic the leaves of its supporting trees as detailed by Gianoli and his student Fernando Carrasco-Urra in their paper.
Gianoli first came across the Boquila vine when he abandoned his usual rigorous schedule of fieldwork that day
he saw two different stems ne much thinner hose leaves were the exact same and realized
while the thinner stem was actually a Boquila vine in disguise its leaves were the same as its neighbor National geographic reported.
Further research shed light on just how good a mimic the vines are. They can match the nearest leaves in terms of size shape color
And a single strand of Boquila vine can copy several different leaves as it climbs from plant to plant.
How does the vine mimic their host trees without any contact? Carrasco-Urra and Gianoli have several hypotheses.
The vine might be sensing airborne chemicals released by the trees to help it choose what disguise to adopt.
Or the vine might be borrowing and using genes from its host trees hich would explain why it mimics the nearest leaf
even if the leaf is not from the tree the vine is climbing on. Gianoli s team is investigating the mysterious Boquila further.
National geographic a
#Pig Heart Transplants For Humans Are On The Wayshe's got the heart of a pig nd that's a good thing.
There was also a Centers for Disease Control report that concluded the number of calls to poison centers involving e-cigarette liquids containing nicotine rose from one per month in September 2010 to 215 per month in February 2014.
C-Lock of South dakota sells feeding stations containing supplements such as basil that reduce the methane cows produce Financial times reports.
#Missiles And Rockets Might Soon Smell Like Pine Treesin an effort to launch things skyward in a more sustainable way researchers have coaxed bacteria to produce a highly combustible compound called pinene.
Conifers naturally excrete the stuff in their resin lending the plants part of their distinctive scent.
So pretty soon a rocket or missile flying overhead might spew exhaust that smells like pine trees.
A breakthrough in rocket-compatible biofuel came in 2011. That's when the Navy discovered chemicals that link together or dimerize two molecules of pinene into a fuel with properties similar to JP-10.
With the brewing of pinene complete they used the Navy-discovered chemicals to dimerize pinene molecules into rocket-ready fuel.*
For now the team is trying both methods in hopes of making a drop in biofuel that's cheaper and more sustainable option for launching rockets or missiles without changing engines or existing infrastructure.*
when native cottonwoods and willows drop their seeds Scienceinsider reports. Ecologists hope those seeds will take root in the newly-wetted sand
and drive out invasive salt cedars that have taken over. Scientists themselves will proliferate in the area after the planned mini-flood.
As a Phd ecologist myself it's hard to see how 60%fewer elk could affect vegetation as much as before.
reserve warm. 5) Next make the flash pickled shiitake mushrooms. Sautã Â the mushrooms in a shallow pan with vegetable oil and season to taste.
and strawberry followed by the pickled shiitake and carrot mixture. Pour a small amount of the pineapple broth into the dish and finish with the scallion mint chive and 1 pinch lime zest.
Season with Maldon salt and an additional grind of white peppe
#8 Steps To Sustainable Meat And Milkglobally deforestation driven by clearing land for cattle alone accounts for close to one-fifth of global greenhouse gas pollution.
When the moose population expands unchecked by predation fewer fir seedlings can grow large enough to escape into the canopy above the reach of moose
I will pick out all your orchid letters and return them in hopes of your making use of them...
no one else has perceived that my chief interest in my orchid book has been that it was a'flank movement'on the enemy.
and the orchids and species. But I must enquire. By the way one of my chief enemies (the sole one who has annoyed me) namely Owen
I should like to hear what you think about what I say in the last chapter of the orchid book on the meaning and cause of the endless diversity of means for the same general purpose.
In another project it is trying to develop a spray that would restore the ability of its Roundup herbicide to kill weeds that have grown impervious to it.
and insects are suited perfectly for environments where you have dynamic obstructions he trees are moving the branches are moving.
He's also a director of research at the University of California Davis Seed Biotechnology Center. Van Deynze studies hot peppers in part because he enjoys eating them.
and serves as nice ornamental foliage. We have known for quite a long time about capsaicins. We know why we can taste them
Capsaicin synthase (CS) is only found in the fruit not the seeds. So if you ike the author here hought that peppers held the spice in their seeds you would be wrong.
The real hottest part of a pepper is in the white tissue that holds the seeds (known as the placenta.
CS biosynthesizes the capsaisin and the Capsicum genus is the only one that evolved to biosynthesize capsaicinoids.
The study suggests that the pungency from peppers was evolved through new genes by unequal duplication of existing genes.
Zhang who worked at a cacao research center in Peru for a decade decided to use the seed coat of the cacao bean to extract the DNA needed to make a positive identification of the plant's origins.
DON'T KILL THE FUR FUNGI!!!New research you see has found that chemicals excreted by microbes in sloth fur had potent activity against a host of human pathogens
The study found that chemicals isolated from fungi in three-toed sloths were deadly for parasites that cause malaria and Chagas disease (Plasmodium falciparum and Trypanosoma cruzi respectively.
It also comes as no shock that fungi create chemicals of interest to drug developers as fungi have spawned drugs from penicillin to Lovastatin.
The researchers were surprised however by the scope of the fur-fungi's antimicrobial properities. Very few chemicals have been found to have activity against Chagas disease for example
Several of the chemicals isolated from the fungi also showed strong activity against human breast cancer cells. a
the smell of certain flowers and ripe fruits. Perfume soap Aquilaria wood durian and bearcats have a tpã smell.
petrol smoke bat droppings bat caves some species of millipedes wild ginger roots and wild mango wood all have this smell. plã Âaeâ this means a bloody smell that attracts tigers.
Cigarette addicts with few iron-willed exceptions aren't about to give up the weed it declared.
The satellite images revealed the mangroves'expansion into terrain formerly inhabited by salt marsh plants. While the study only looked at the Atlantic Coast the same trend is taking place on Florida's Gulf Coast Cavanaugh
which is visible through a more pronounced red coloration of the wood beneath the bark.
Some branches show almost no red coloration others a spotty pattern and again other a full red coloration.
The branches with the highest red coloration produce 160%more ethanol. On the whole the ethanol yield per gram of wood is 20%higher.
The branches with the highest red coloration give us hope that we will be able to achieve our goal in the future.
Palms belonging to the Genus phoenix including the economically-important date palm Phoenix dactylifera i e. the main fruit crop in North africa and the Middle east are amongst the groups of flowering plants characterized by difficulties in species discrimination based on their look.
Moreover given their high interfertility they can easily hybridize whereas they come into contact generating even more confusion for palm scientists.
By screening over 130 palm individuals from 13 out of the 14 species of the Genus phoenix they found enough variation in the composition of the DNA to be able to identify correctly eight species out of 13 and more than 82%of the individuals.
which large numbers of Elm rootstocks and seeds were imported from several different countries. The study was published in the open access journal Zookeys.
M. ulmi the synonym of M. mali was described first in Italy on the Elm tree species Ulmus Chenmoui.
which resistant Elm rootstocks were sent at the end of the breeding program. The first description of M. mali was in Japan
The trial field'Mierenbos'in Wageningen used for growing the resistant Elm cultivars is infested completely with M. mali with all the trees showing severe galling symptoms.
and are therefore more like bushes. While the architecture of these compact bushy plants allows mechanical harvesters to reap the crop the early end of growth means that each plant produces fewer fruits than their home garden cousins.
Teasing out the hidden subtleties of a type of hybrid vigor involving just one gene has provided the scientists with means to tweak the length of time that bushy tomato varieties can produce flowers.
and flower production. The mutation dramatically increases tomato yields in bush tomatoes and Lippman and his team led by postdoctoral researcher Ke Jiang set out to understand the mechanism behind this remarkable result.
They found that bushy plants with a mutation in one of the two copies of the florigen gene producing half as much florigen as plants without the mutation do postpone the moment
when they stop producing flowers. This in turn leads to many more fruits overall. This is because Lippman explains bushy tomato varieties are highly sensitive to the amount or dosage of the florigen hormone
which alters plant architecture--that is how many flowers can form before growth ends. These discoveries lead to an exciting prediction:
Lippman's team also studied florigen mutants in another plant the crucifer weed known as Arabidopsis that is a cousin of crops like broccoli and cauliflower.
#Slippery bark protects trees from pine beetle attacktrees with smoother bark are better at repelling attacks by mountain pine beetles
The tiny beetles which are about the size of a grain of rice bore into the pine bark.
Doctoral student Scott Ferrenberg who led the study said he first began to suspect that bark texture might affect the survival of trees
They noticed that surface resin a residue of fighting off a beetle invasion was common only on patches of rough bark.
We found trees that had both textures on the same stem and when the tree was attacked it was on the rough surfaces Ferrenberg said.
To determine which was the case the researchers tested how well the beetles could hold onto different bark textures.
They placed each of 22 beetles on a rough patch of bark and on a smooth patch.
Twenty-one of the 22 beetles were able to cling to the rough bark until the test ended after five minutes.
But all of the beetles fell from the smooth bark in less than a minute. The results--especially combined with the findings of a second study also recently published by the research team--provide information that may be useful to land managers who are trying to keep public parks and other relatively small forested areas healthy.
The team discovered that trees that had survived beetle attacks had more resin ducts than trees that were killed.
The number of resin ducts differed between trees of the same age and in general younger trees had more resin ducts than older trees.
The number of resin ducts--which is related to the trees'ability to pitch out the beetles--is counted easily by taking a small core of the tree.
There are very practical applications Ferrenberg said. These two traits are very easy to see on the tree.
Because young trees tend to have smoother bark as well as more resin ducts the research also suggests that land managers should consider cutting down some older trees
In a study to appear in the December 22 issue of the journal Nature the team constructed an evolutionary tree of more than 32000 species of flowering plants--the largest time-scaled evolutionary tree to date.
and leaf and stem data for thousands of species the researchers were able to reconstruct how plants evolved to cope with cold as they spread across the globe.
The results suggest that many plants acquired characteristics that helped them thrive in colder climates--such as dying back to the roots in winter--long before they first encountered freezing.
Fossil evidence and reconstructions of past climatic conditions suggest that early flowering plants lived in warm tropical environments explained co-author Jeremy Beaulieu at the National Institute for Mathematical & Biological Synthesis (NIMBIOS) at the University
Plants that live in the tundra such as Arctic cinquefoil and three-toothed saxifrage can withstand winter temperatures below minus 15 degrees Celsius.
Unlike animals most plants can't move to escape the cold or generate heat to keep them warm.
If enough of these air bubbles come together as water thaws they can block the flow of water from the roots to the leaves and kill the plant.
and re-sprout from their roots or start growing as new plants from seeds when conditions are right.
To compile the plant trait data for their study the researchers spent hundreds of hours scouring
When they mapped their collected leaf and stem data onto their evolutionary tree for flowering plants they found that many plants were equipped well for icy climates even before cold conditions hit.
Plants that die back to the ground in winter for example acquired the ability to die and come back when conditions improve long before they first experienced freezing.
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