Scientists are developing a salt-resistant variety of rice, a move prompted, in part, by last year’s Japan tsunami, which flooded some 20,000 hectares of rice paddies. The rice varieties Japanese farmers were growing in those paddies couldn’t survive in salt-contaminated soil. The new method hones in on the precise changes in a gene responsible for…
The man behind the popular 2008 documentary Food, Inc. is out with a new project aimed at getting the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to label genetically engineered or modified (GE or GMO) food products. Filmmaker Robert Kenner’s “Labels Matter” piece is part of his FixFood project, a social media platform to empower Americans…
We don’t want to ask the question: Is civilization good for you (or me)? Instead we want to ask: Is civilization good—in the long term—for planets and their capacity to support life (or at least technologically adept civilizations)? In other words, we want to frame the question of sustainability in an astrobiological setting.
The tidy picture of seemingly inevitable social “progress” following the appearance of domesticated plants is challenged by a study of human remains from the Krieger site in southwestern Ontario published in the journal American Antiquity.