Nearly every animal and plant species requires travelling some distance for nutrition reproduction and genetic diversity but few conservation or climate mitigation strategies take the connections between conserved lands into account.
whose research focuses on the U s. dairy industry and federal policy related to dairy other agriculture and food.
The result was a new margin insurance program plus a heretofore-unexpected plan to increase USDA donations to food assistance programs
and redefines financial stress according to returns over feed costs instead of just the price of milk.
Both of these changes are in reaction to the severe dairy farm stress that was revealed by the Great Recession and the explosion in feed prices over the last few years.
The Margin Protection Program for Dairy Producers (MPP) is a voluntary program that pays participating farmers an indemnity when a national benchmark for milk income over feed costs falls below an insured level.
These products would be targeted for use in domestic low-income family food assistance programs such as but not limited to The Emergency Food Assistance program.
This program provides a new authority to the Secretary of agriculture but it is consistent with existing efforts to procure
and provide dairy products for a variety of food assistance programs. A new paper by Novakovic and others titled:
#Nitrogen management studied in greenhouse pepper productionas consumer demand for year-round fresh produce increases vegetable
Nitrogen the most important and widely used agricultural nutrient is also a major environmental contaminant. In many regions increased levels of nitrate found in groundwater have been attributed to the high rates of nitrogen fertilizer applied to surrounding crops.
Pepper production is becoming commercially important in various regions of the world including Israel Spain southern Europe
They selected two pepper cultivars with different growth habits for the study and drip-irrigated the greenhouse plants with solutions containing four different nitrogen concentrations.
when peppers were irrigated with N at 56.2 mgâ L-1 Yasuor said. Higher concentrations of nitrogen loaded more nitrogen into the environment
The experiments also showed that nitrogen treatments had no significant negative effect on pepper fruit physical
or chemical quality including sugar content and acidity. Additionally reduced nitrogen application did not affect nutritional quality components of the pepper fruit such as beta-carotene
and lycopene content nor did it reduce total antioxidant activity. Our results demonstrate how the environmental impact of intensive agriculture can be minimized without harming fruit yield
#Gathering wild food in the city: Rethinking the role of foraging in urban ecosystem planning,
Edibles including berries fruits nuts greens and young shoots were by far the most frequently mentioned type of product in each study site.
In 2012 the city approved the establishment of an experimental food forest in a neighborhood park
when the parkâ##s commissioners welcomed thousands of school children every Nutting Day a local holiday at the time to the park to harvest chestnuts walnuts and hazelnuts (Gabriel 2011).
The results confirm that neither weight loss nor reduced food intake are required in order for the procedure to raise the number of beta cells as the pigs had identical body weight and ate exactly the same amount of food.
and the intestines so that food bypasses the stomach and parts of the small intestine and instead goes straight into the small intestine.
The reason why we have studied now pigs is that they are omnivores like us and their gastrointestinal physiology is similar to that of humans.
#Infants know plants provide food, but need to see theyre safe to eatinfants as young as six months old tend to expect that plants are food sources
but only after an adult shows them that the food is safe to eat according to new research published in Psychological science a journal of the Association for Psychological science.
The findings show that after watching an adult put part of a plant and part of a human-made object in her mouth infants at 6-and 18-months of age preferentially identify the plant as the food source.
Plants are often peripheral to modern life but they were central to fundamental problems of determining
what is food and what is fatal across evolutionary time says psychological scientist and study author Annie Wertz of Yale university.
Humans relied on gathered plant resources for food but many plants are toxic and potentially deadly.
The infants watched an experimenter take one fruit off each object--the plant and the artifact--and place it in her mouth as if eating it.
The experiments further showed that the eating action was crucial to this plant-based bias:
Younger infants who have little to no experience with solid food also showed evidence of a plant-based bias:
when they were performed with fruits from the artifact suggesting that this violated their expectations for edibility.
and selectively identify plants as food sources says Wertz. More broadly this suggests that humans unlike some other nonhuman primates don't simply consider anything that goes into the mouth to be food.
Instead they also take the type of object into consideration. Wertz notes that this social learning mechanism works in concert with other mechanisms including sensitive periods for learning about food and aversions to certain tastes such as bitterness
which can signal something is poisonous. Human food learning is complex and we're only just starting to scratch the surface of these important questions she says.
On a practical level Wertz believes that parents of young children may be able to put these findings to use:
Knowing that infants may be biased to learn that fruits plucked from leafy green plants are edible suggests strategies for getting young children interested in eating novel fruits and vegetables such as taking them to a'pick-your-own'fruits and vegetables farm.
#Deaths attributed directly to climate change cast pall over penguinsclimate change is killing penguin chicks from the world's largest colony of Magellanic penguins not just indirectly--by depriving them of food as has been documented repeatedly for these
And during extreme heat chicks without waterproofing can't take a dip in cooling waters as adults can.
Rainfall and the number of storms per breeding season have increased already at The argentine study site said Ginger Rebstock UW research scientist
Once chicks die parents do not lay additional eggs that season. The findings are based on weather information collected at the regional airport and by researchers in the field as well as from penguin counts.
and the need to protect food security but at lower cost. The study demonstrates the potential these breeds offer in providing novel genetic traits that may help sheep farming in the future.
They enable low input farming and food production on land unsuitable for other forms of agriculture.
and promote their farming for future national food security. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of York.
Glossophaga soricina a nectar bat feeding on the flowers of a banana plant. Nectar feeding bats comprised one of three evolutionary optima for mechanical advantage among New world Leaf-nosed bats.
Photo credit: Dr. Beth Clare Queen Mary University. The key finding is that in a highly diverse group--New world Leaf-nosed bats--selection for mechanical advantage has shaped three distinct optimal skull shapes that correspond to feeding niches Dr. Dá
These bats of which there are almost 200 species eat a variety of foods including insects frogs lizards fruit nectar and even blood.
Their skulls mirror the variety of their diets--bats with long and narrow snouts eat nectar;
snouts of species that eat other foods are intermediate in shape. The team's approach to identifying natural selection for mechanical function combined both evolutionary and engineering analyses.
and engineering (dark blue) models for the base model of the omnivorous bat Carollia perspicillata (B) and the morphed models for the nectar-feeding Glossophaga soricina (A)
and the specialized fig-eating Short-faced bat Centurio senex (C). They then analyzed the models to determine structural strength and mechanical advantage--the efficiency and hardness of the bats'bite.
Nectar feeders have very low mechanical advantage--a trade-off for having long narrow snouts that fit into the flowers in
which they find nectar. Morphological diversity among New world Leaf nosed bats with different diets. Nectar:
A) Platalina genovensium B) Glossophaga soricina; generalists: C) Carollia perspicillata D) Vampyrum spectrum; fig-eating frugivores:
E) Artibeus jamaicensis F) Chiroderma villosum; and short-faced bats: G) Phyllops falcatus H) Centurio senex.
Crania are shown not to scale. This means that even though these bats have been diverging for millions of years we can still find the signatures of natural selection in their current diversity says Dr. Dá
and wing development plays a crucial role in the evolution of bees'ability to carry pollen.
They also tested samples of local foods for the presence of C. perfringens and the toxin gene.
Of the 37 food samples 13.5%were positive for bacteria and 2. 7%were positive for the epsilon toxin gene.
#Contradictory nutrition news creates consumer confusionexposure to conflicting news about the health benefits of certain foods vitamins
and supplements often results in confusion and backlash against nutrition recommendations finds a recent study in the Journal of Health Communication:
not only the contradictory information but also widely accepted nutritional advice such as eating plenty of fruits and vegetables and exercising regularly said Rebekah Nagler Ph d. assistant professor in University of Minnesota's School of Journalism and Mass Communication
red wine or other alcohol; fish; coffee; and vitamins or other supplements. More than 71 percent of people surveyed said that they heard moderate or high levels of contradictory information about nutrition.
Those with the greatest exposure to contradictory information expressed the most confusion about nutrition. Greater confusion was associated indirectly with backlash against nutritional advice in general as indicated by agreement with statements such as Dietary recommendations should be taken with a grain of salt
or Scientists really don't know what foods are good for you. This was true even when controlling for age education or level of general mistrust.
Confusion and backlash were associated also slightly with less intention to exercise or eat fruits and vegetables.
Many people get health information from the news media which may not make it clear that research is constantly evolving.
The study notes that people who are confused about nutrition in the first place may blame the media for their confusion he pointed out.
Journalists should try to avoid relying on information based on findings from a single nutrition or health study
#Fertilizer nutrient imbalance to limit food production in Africaunderuse of phosphorus-based fertilizers in Africa currently contributes to a growing yield gap--the difference between how much crops could produce in ideal circumstances compared to actual yields.
and phosphorus applications has the potential to further limit food production for a growing population in Africa says Marijn van der Velde a researcher now at the Joint Research Centre of the European commission who led the study while working at IIASA.
While this might work in the short term in the longer term it has a negative effect on crop growth as soil nutrients become more imbalanced.
As farmers use fertilizers for their crops nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus build up in the soil providing a reserve of nutrients that plants need to grow.
But fertilizer use remains very low in Africa and to increase crop production it is recognized widely that farmers must increase their fertilizer use.
and phosphorus inputs must happen in a way that provides crops with the balanced nutrient input they need.
The team fed their treated diet containing various types and concentrations of chemicals to the laboratory-raised bee larvae.
Chronic exposure to pesticides during the early life stage of honeybees may contribute to their inadequate nutrition
The National Honey Board the U s. Department of agriculture-National Institute of Food and Agriculture-Agriculture and Food Research Initiative-Coordinated Agricultural Projects and the Foundational Award programs funded this research.
With the fragile state of the world's economy and concern over food shortages there is a need to protect arable crops from disease.
and flowers as well as human-made materials such as a sheet of tissue paper lying in a dish of water.
and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the deliberate molasses-slow animals in northeast Costa rica.
A sloth on the ground is such an easy meal for them. So this risky behavior must confer some sort of advantage.
When the sloth squats to do its business some female pyralid moths will emerge from the sloth fur to lay their eggs in the sloth's dung.
and render themselves nearly flightless damaging their wings to burrow into the wet matted fur to mate
Judging from their diet--which is all leaves from the tree they live in--they shouldn't be able to maintain even the slow lifestyle that makes them
Having this highly-digestible high-fat algae could be an important input that makes the difference
http://treesearch. fs. fed. us/pubs/45250story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by USDA Forest Service-Pacific Southwest Research Station.
If you notice eating watermelon cantaloupe or avocado make you cough and itch it may be a symptom of ragweed allergy.
On Tuesday January 28 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will hold a public meeting of the Allergenic Products Advisory Committee.
Buffalo is known as Black Gold due to its contribution to economy which is being reared as milk meat hide and bone sources all over the world.
In particular it could provide more than 5%of the world's milk supply and 20%to 30%of the farm power in Southeast asia.
Considering the importance of buffalo and realizing the need of genomic research for its improvement Lal Teer Livestock took a great effort for The Whole Genome Sequencing of Water buffalo in collaboration with BGI since March 2012.
Researchers compared buffalo genome with other mammals'such as cattle horse panda pig and dog for discovering more genetic characteristics of water buffalo and providing guidance for its breeding and industrial transformation.
BGI is continuing to make more progress for facing the challenges on food shortage and safety as well contribute to the development
With the joined forces with BGI we are excited to successfully complete the task of sequencing water buffalo. stated Mr. Tafsir Mohammed Awal Director of Lal Teer This will now lay the foundation of ensuring nutrition and food security in Bangladesh and other developing countries.
There is evidence that humans in the Kelabit Highlands of Borneo burned fires to clear the land for planting food-bearing plants.
This indicates that the people who inhabited the land intentionally cleared it of forest vegetation and planted sources of food in its place.
They are accessing nutrients that no other plants can access. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by American Journal of Botany.
and cheese just as well as most people of European descent are today. Researchers at the University of Zurich's Centre for Evolutionary Medicine have discovered that the population of the medieval town of Dalheim had a similar genetic predisposition for milk digestion to present-day Germans and Austrians.
Milk is the staple food for infants and contains the sugar lactose. Most mammals lose the ability to digest lactose
and thus milk as they get older. The ability to digest the sugar is governed by the production of the enzyme lactase in the small intestine.
As children get older the lactase gene is disabled gradually which means that no lactase is formed
Dairy products have long been a central feature of European cuisine and cultural identity and nowadays 60--90 percent of the European population is lactase persistent
Undoubtedly a number of factors played a role in the prevalence in different regions such as different food
It was only when dairy products were promoted in national and international food campaigns in the mid-20th century that it became apparent that the majority of the global population is lactose-intolerant.
and limited evidence suggests that similar processes may be operating in humansâ#she added. â#oesuch a finding has potential implications for nutrition management of babies in neonatal intensive care units and selection of donor milks.
They set out to tackle this by examining almost 200 species of New world leaf-nosed bats that exploit many different food niches:
Insects frogs lizards fruit nectar and even blood. The bats'skulls of today reflect this dietary diversity.
Species with long narrow snouts eat nectar while short-faced bats have exceptionally short wide palates for eating hard fruits.
Species that eat other foods have shaped snouts somewhere in between. Dumont explains further We knew diet was associated with those things
but there was no evidence that natural selection acted to make those changes in the skull. The engineering model allowed us to identify the biomechanical functions that natural selection worked on.
One was the long narrow snout of nectar feeders the second was the extremely short and wide snout of short-faced bats
Nectar feeders have very low mechanical advantage which is a trade-off for having long narrow snouts that fit into the flowers in
which they find nectar. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
and minerals in the soil to get nutrients for growth. The Sheffield team found that
#Lingonberries halt effects of high-fat dietlingonberries almost completely prevented weight gain in mice fed a high-fat diet a study at Lund University in Sweden has found--whereas the'super berry'aã
Some of the mice were fed a low-fat diet while the majority of the animals were fed a diet high in fat.
The mice that had eaten lingonberries had not put on more weight than the mice that had eaten a low-fat diet
and levels of fat in the liver were also lower than those of the animals who received a high-fat diet without any berries.
and higher levels of fat in the liver said Karin Berger diabetes researcher at Lund University.
Up to 20%of our mice's diet was lingonberries. It isn't realistic for humans to eat such a high proportion.
and diabetes by supplementing a more normal diet with berries said Karin Berger. However the Lund researchers do not recommend people start eating large quantities of lingonberry jam.
Boiling the berries can affect their nutrient content and jam contains a lot of sugar. Frozen lingonberries on cereal or in a smoothie are considerably better.
If anyone wonders--yes we now eat lingonberries on a regular basis! said Lovisa Heyman. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Lund University.
because it is rich in plant nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous. Now researchers from Wageningen University and Southern Illinois University revealed the effects of guano on the native trees of the arid coasts of South america.
We think this is related to the positive effect of marine nutrients on non-nitrogen fixing trees explains Gilles Havik a former master student at Wageningen University
Nutrients are limiting in the desert so this input from the sea through the nitrogen-rich guano has a positive effect for trees that cannot fix nitrogen.
What we found very striking is that trees that do fix nitrogen from the air do not seem to benefit from nutrients coming from the sea
even though fixing nutrients from the air is expensive for a plant continues Havik. These findings highlight the important interactions between marine and terrestrial environments
#Humans can use smell to detect levels of dietary fatnew research from the Monell Center reveals humans can use the sense of smell to detect dietary fat in food.
As food smell almost always is detected before taste the findings identify one of the first sensory qualities that signals
whether a food contains fat. Innovative methods using odor to make low-fat foods more palatable could someday aid public health efforts to reduce dietary fat intake.
The human sense of smell is far better at guiding us through our everyday lives than we give it credit for said senior author Johan Lundstrã m Phd a cognitive neuroscientist at Monell.
and discriminate minute differences in the fat content of our food suggests that this ability must have had considerable evolutionary importance.
As the most calorically dense nutrient fat has been desired a energy source across much of human evolution.
As such it would have been advantageous to be able to detect sources of fat in food
The Monell researchers reasoned that fat detection via smell would have the advantage of identifying food sources from a distance.
whether it was possible to detect fat in a more realistic setting such as food. In the current study reported in the open access journal PLOS ONE the researchers asked
and differentiate the amount of fat in a commonly consumed food product milk. To do this they asked healthy subjects to smell milk containing an amount of fat that might be encountered in a typical milk product:
Fat molecules typically are not airborne meaning that they are unlikely to be sensed by sniffing food samples said lead author Sanne Boesveldt Phd a sensory neuroscientist.
and ultimately link this to satellite observations where we think changes in plant cycles due to climate change are being expressed on a global scale said Jack Mustard professor of geological sciences at Brown.
Mustard and Jianwu Tang at MBL are Yang's Ph d. advisers and authors on the paper.
and the researchers walked roughly 3200 kilometers (1988 miles) in the course of the study.
as a result of predation or the onset of farm operations before eggs hatched or young birds were ready to fly.
Salamanders often serve as vital links in forest food chains; their population size and recovery from major disturbances can help predict the health of forest ecosystems.
which could make them easier to protect and conserve. While studying the direct response of species to climatic shifts is important it's only one piece of a complicated puzzle.
Since breast milk contains all the nutrients required by young infants formula manufacturers aim to closely match their product's ingredients to those of breast milk.
Most of us grew up drinking milk. We were told it was the ultimate health drink.
It is packed full of nutrients like calcium and other minerals vitamins including Vitamin d protein fat and sugar in the form of lactose.
In the West people take milk drinking for granted because most people of European descent are able to produce the enzyme lactase in adulthood and so digest the milk sugar lactose.
However this is not the norm in much of the world and was not the norm for our Stone age ancestors.
In fact genetic data has shown that the ability of adults to produce the enzyme lactase has evolved only within the last ten thousand years under strong natural selection.
and cheese because fermentation converts much of the lactose into fats. But in famine conditions such as
when crops fail they are likely to have eaten all the fermented milk foods leaving only the more high-lactose products.
or Canje Pheasant and today exists only in parts of South america. Its relationship among birds is as unclear as its evolutionary history.
These herbivores predigest their food in this crop before further processing in the stomach and intestines.
Toxic viral cocktails appear to have a strong link with honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) a mysterious malady that abruptly wiped out entire hives across the United states
Israel Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) Acute Bee Paralysis Virus (ABPV) Chronic Paralysis Virus (CPV) Kashmir Bee Virus (KBV) Deformed Wing
However unlike honeybees the mite-associated TRSV was restricted to their gastric cecum indicating that the mites likely facilitate the horizontal spread of TRSV within the hive without becoming diseased themselves.
The fact that infected queens lay infected eggs convinced these scientists that TRSV could also be transmitted vertically from the queen mother to her offspring.
#Ingredients in chocolate, tea, berries could guard against diabeteseating high levels of flavonoids including anthocyanins
and other compounds (found in berries tea and chocolate) could offer protection from type 2 diabetes--according to research from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and King's college London.
Findings published today in the Journal of Nutrition reveal that high intakes of these dietary compounds are associated with lower insulin resistance and better blood glucose regulation.
A study of almost 2000 people also found that these food groups lower inflammation which
when chronic is associated with diabetes obesity cardiovascular disease and cancer. Prof Aedin Cassidy from UEA's Norwich Medical school led the research.
Our research looked at the benefits of eating certain subgroups of flavanoids. We focused on flavones
which are found in herbs and vegetables such as parsley thyme and celery and anthocyanins found in berries red grapes wine and other red or blue-coloured fruits and vegetables.
This is one of the first large-scale human studies to look at how these powerful bioactive compounds might reduce the risk of diabetes.
Laboratory studies have shown these types of foods might modulate blood glucose regulation--affecting the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Researchers studied almost 2000 healthy women volunteers from Twinsuk who had completed a food questionnaire designed to estimate total dietary flavonoid intake as well as intakes from six flavonoid subclasses.
what we are seeing is that people who eat foods rich in these two compounds--such as berries herbs red grapes wine-are less likely to develop the disease.
This is an exciting finding that shows that some components of foods that we consider unhealthy like chocolate
or wine may contain some beneficial substances. If we can start to identify and separate these substances we can potentially improve healthy eating.
There are many reasons including genetics why people prefer certain foods so we should be cautious until we test them properly in randomised trials and in people developing early diabetes.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of East Anglia. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
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