Promoting renewable energy is not an easy job: “it gets dogged by some ironic bit of environmental unpleasantness. Wind turbines can be dangerous to birds and bats. Biofuels require so much land, fertilizer, and water that they may use more energy to produce than they provide. Hydropower dams screw up a whole lot of river habitat and stop fish…
Most Americans have never stepped foot on a farm or ranch or even talked to the people who grow and raise the food we eat. Farmland will take an intimate look at the lives of farmers and ranchers in their ‘20s, all of whom are now responsible for running their farming business. Through this film from award-winning director, James…
A bacteria may threaten the food security of a whole country. Orange juice prices are rocketing. The reason : the yellow dragon, a bacterian disease, attacks orange trees in Florida. More details on Wikipedia and The American Phytopathological Society Internet site
Concerning neonicotinoids, “few adverse impacts have been observed at doses to which pollinators might be exposed in the field – with the exception of those well-documented cases in several European countries and in Canada of bee mortality caused by acute exposure of bees to neonicotinoid dusts generated during planting of insecticide-coated maize seed”. That is an important conclusion of…
Some wonderful pictures of pests. And also macrophotographies of various insects : bees, wasps, flies… With short comments Some pest Some pests. Macrophotographies of various insects (bees, pollinators, …)
Researchers from ETH Zurich and the Julius Kühn Institute in Germany have created the first fire-blight-resistant apple. With the aid of so-called cis-genetic engineering, they transfered a resistance gene from a wild apple into the genome of a Gala apple. A single gene provides a sufficient protection. But more resistance genes are requested to make it doubly sure…
This video is a summary of a workshop in Ethiopia sponsored by the Integrated Pest Management Innovation Lab at Virginia Tech. Its aims was to share current knowledge about Tuta absoluta and its spread, as well as methods of controlling the pest.
A very interesting story about the fungus Metarhizium anisopliae which could be used more widely in Africa to kill devastating locusts : “Scientists fight locusts with green locust bio-pesticide” A cockroach infected by Metarhizium anisopliae (Wikipedia)