I see over on BBC news that BASF, the “chemical” company, wants to plant a trial of potatoes engineered to resist late blight. Leave aside the question of whether, as BASF says, engineering is “the only way” to get resistance genes (found in wild potatoes) into domesticated varieties. Leave aside,...
Brave new world. I’ve read all about how easy it is to foist podcasts on an unsuspecting audience, but never had the need, until now. And even now I am pretty sure that I do not fully understand the business of making the podcast available to subscribers. But I’m told that Feedburner will do the nee...
A paper in the most recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examines in detail how one weed, Amaranthus tuberculatus (waterhemp) developed resistance to a class of herbicides called protoporphyrinogen oxidase inhibitors. PPO is the last, vital enzyme step in the pathway that l...
Start: 95.4 Last week: 90.3 This week: 89.2
Saturday 19 August: Crashed -- if you can call 100 grams below a Big Round Number crashing -- through another barrier this morning, somewhat to my surprise as I had not done anything drastic. Still and all, I’m not complaining. There’s another barrier...
Amy Smith’s Tedtalk was really stimulating, especially the wrap up -- if we were in Zambia, 300 of you would be farmers ... and 100 of you would have AIDS. But there’s something a little disturbing about her thesis.
Rewind. Amy Smith, a professor of engineering at MIT, invents stuff to help poor...
