Agriculture
- Agriculture
Dealing with change, climate and otherwise
Wine, DNA, our understanding of the universe: It's all changing, whether we are ready for it or not.
- Agriculture
Sweet potato weevils have favorite colors
When it comes to eradicating the sweet potato weevil, the devil is in the colorful details.
- Agriculture
Probiotics may protect piglets from E. coli infection
Beneficial bacteria could replace antibiotics in pig feed.
- Agriculture
Fertilizer has staying power
Nitrogen-based fertilizer may remain in the soil for eight decades, complicating efforts to reduce pollution from runoff into rivers.
- Earth
Nanosized pollutants pose crop risks
Nanoparticles in exhaust and common consumer products can end up in soil and harm the growth and health of crops.
-
- Humans
Yet another study links insecticide to bee losses
Since 2006, honeybee populations across North America have been hammered by catastrophic losses. Although this pandemic has a name — colony collapse disorder, or CCD — its cause has remained open to speculation. New experiments now strengthen the case for pesticide poisoning as a likely contributor.
- Humans
Growth-promoting antibiotics: On the way out?
Sixty-two years later — to the day — after Science News ran its first story on the growth-promoting effects of antibiotics, a federal judge ordered the Food and Drug Administration to resume efforts to outlaw such nonmedical use of antibiotics.
- Humans
Bt: The lesson not learned
The more things change, the more they stay the same, as a Dec. 29 Associated Press report on genetically engineered corn notes. Like déjà vu, this news story on emerging resistance to Bt toxin — a fabulously effective and popular insecticide to protect corn — brings to mind articles I encountered over the weekend while flipping through historic issues of Science News. More than a half-century ago, our magazine chronicled, real time, the emergence of resistance to DDT, the golden child of pest controllers worldwide. Now much the same thing is happening again with Bt, its contemporary agricultural counterpart. Will we never learn?
- Animals
Lost to history: The “churk”
More than a half-century ago, researchers at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center outside Washington, D.C., engaged in some creative barnyard breeding. Their goal was the development of fatherless turkeys — virgin hens that would reproduce via parthenogenesis. Along the way, and ostensibly quite by accident, an interim stage of this work resulted in a rooster-fathered hybrid that the scientists termed a churk.
- Life
Microbes may sky jump to new hosts
The role of microbes in cloud formation and precipitation may not be an accident of chemistry so much as an evolutionary adaptation by certain bacteria and other nonsentient beings, a scientist posited at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.
- Humans
Because some foods carry organophosphate residues
Three new papers link prenatal exposures to organophosphate (OP) pesticides with diminished IQs in children. Fruits and veggies are one continuing source of exposure to these bug killers. As to what we’re supposed to do with that knowledge — well, the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization, offers some guidance.
