News by Subject Agriculture

To develop locally relevant strategies that improve food security, nutrition, and conservation, researchers employed a gendered ecosystem services approach in Zambia.

n October 2014, the suspicion arose that the parasite worm Polydora websteri had found its way to the Wadden Sea. Researchers from the German Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), confirm in a publication in Marine Biodiversity, that they have found the shell-borer in oysters near Sylt and Texel and that it has arrived in European waters.

Seafood is the most highly traded food commodity globally, with tropical zone marine fisheries contributing more than 50% of the global fish catch, an average of $USD 96 billion annually. Available scientific evidence consistently shows that tropical marine habitats, fish stocks and fisheries are most vulnerable to oceanic changes associated with climate change. However, telecoupling, or linkages between distant human-natural systems, could generate cascades of climate change impacts from the tropics that propagate to other 'extra-' tropical natural systems and human communities globally.

A novel connection between primordial organisms and complex life has been discovered, as new evidence sheds light on the evolutionary origins of the cell division process that is fundamental to complex life on Earth.

Its neck was three times as long as its torso, but had only 13 extremely elongated vertebrae: Tanystropheus, a bizarre giraffe-necked reptile which lived 242 million years ago, is a paleontological absurdity. A new study led by the University of Zurich has now shown that the creature lived in water and was surprisingly adaptable.

University of Minnesota researchers report the release of the first commercially available intermediate wheatgrass cultivar.

By CT scanning crushed fossilized skulls and digitally reassembling them, and by examining the fossils' growth rings, scientists were able to describe a new species of prehistoric sea creature. Tanystropheus hydroides, named after mythology's hydra, was a twenty-foot-long animal with a ten-foot-long neck.

Nearly 10 years after the Tohoku-oki earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power, radiation levels have fallen to safe levels in all but the waters closest to the shuttered power plant. An article published August 8 in the journal Science looks at the many radioactive elements contained in the tanks and suggests that more needs to be done to understand the potential risks of releasing wastewater from the tanks into the ocean.

To raise awareness of the importance of seabirds to people and the ecosystems we depend on, a Science & Society article appearing August 6 in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution looks at something that most of us find off-putting: their poop. The researchers say that the poop, known as guano and which serves as a source of fertilizer and a key contribution to marine ecosystems, could be worth more than $470 million annually.

Instead of relying solely on pigments, the metallic blue fruits of Viburnum tinus use structural color to reflect blue light, a mechanism rarely seen in plants. Researchers reporting August 6 in the journal Current Biology show that the fruits use lipid nanostructures in their cell walls, a previously unknown mechanism of structural color, to get their striking blue--which may also double as a signal to birds that the fruits are full of nutritious fats.