There is an ongoing food crisis that is becoming more severe every year, even if many don’t openly see it in more developed parts of the world. Global actions have improved overall food security for many impoverished and subsistence farming regions, but the larger looming crisis has not been diminished. With limited agricultural space on […]
With the world continuing on its course toward severe climate instability in the future, the desire to reduce the use of fossil fuels and lower humanity’s production of greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide has become an issue of ever greater importance as the years go on. But there are a number of highly beneficial chemicals […]
Plants and their interactions with their environment are always in the middle of a physiological quandary. When it comes to their roots, they need to be permeable so they can absorb water and other nutrients from the surrounding soil, but also impermeable to anything that could be harmful to take up, such as toxic heavy […]
A lot of the time when speaking of pathogens, the conversation stays on just the pathogenic organism itself and the host it exploits. But there are many other interactions that are possible and that complicate the scenario, especially those that involve an intermediate vector needed to spread the pathogen to the eventual host. It has […]
When attempting to produce new traits and properties in plants, it’s commonplace to try and expose them to stressful conditions alongside mutagenic agents in the hopes that this will help induce the formation of resistance genes. This process sometimes is successful, but it involves a large amount of trial and error, as most experiments involving […]
From the start of things, science has always relied on the organisms that can be made to be a representation of more complex systems. They were a model for either humans themselves or to show in their own simplicity how life builds up to larger formations of cells and processes. That has long been the […]
The health of plants is paramount for farmers, gardeners, and scientists alike. They not only provide the food we need to survive, but their overall well-being is a marker for the strength of the environmental conditions around them. And there are many things, much like with us humans, that can be a cause for alarm. […]
The process of beer-making is complicated. The brewing process has an array of steps that need to be followed fairly precisely or you risk ruining the flavor of your concoction. A general description of the process is that brewer’s yeast, usually specially cultivated strains of the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is used along with sugars […]
As we have seen so often in recent years when it comes to human pathogens, eradicating a disease from a major population, country, or continent does not mean those results will be permanent forever. Any sort of laxity in preventative treatment and strict efforts against global spread can result in the re-emergence of a deadly […]
The Green Revolution, that near-mythical time nowadays where the imaginations of technology became real and millions of lives were saved from starvation, was, sad to say, never a full solution to the problem. It was a stop-gap. An incredibly successful one that managed to push back the looming issue for decades, but still only temporary […]
