Environment

The $105 billion organic food industry is not terribly worried about yields. Their customers are primarily wealthy and concerned more about the perception of benefit than they are cost. But to the real evangelists, who insist that the organic process can feed the world, yield differences are a substantial hurdle to overcome. The low hanging fruit in food has already been picked, as it were, wealthy people educated by advertising are already buying organic food, and the rest of the marketplace thinks about price. So yields are a killer. A new review of studies by environmentalists finds…

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) found in flame retardant cloth, paint, adhesives and electrical transformers, have been banned since 1979, but if you live on top of a waste disposal site or you have a 40 year old couch, you could still be exposed to them. A new study suggests that if you were a pregnant woman, you could have suffered endocrine disruption, in this case in thyroid production, and it could have harmed the baby. Endocrine disruptors are natural or man-made chemicals that interfere with endocrine glands and their hormones, There is no evidence that normal exposure to…

Honeybees pollinate a third of Australia's food crops. Losing them due to varroa might would cost the economy billions of dollars. David McClenaghan, Author provided By Gary Fitt, CSIRO A nationwide outbreak of foot and mouth disease; an invasion of a devastating wheat disease; our honeybees completely wiped out. These are just three possible disastrous scenarios facing Australia; they’re considered in the Australia’s Biosecurity Future report published today by CSIRO and its partners. Intensifying and expanding agriculture, biodiversity loss, and more people and goods moving around the world…

Take a spot that only gets 6 to 8 inches of rain per year, with erosion causing such blinding dust that there is zero visibility, and build a wheat farm. Wait, why would you do that? Washington State University researchers do it in the Horse Heaven Hills of south-central Washington to understand summer fallow management practices that can mean efficient water and soil conservation and help farmers everywhere. Farmers in the Horse Heaven Hills practice a winter wheat-summer fallow rotation where only one crop is grown every other year on a given piece of land. Average yields can be as low as…

Last week, in Part I of this two part series, "Bee Deaths Mystery Solved? Neonicotinoids (Neonics) May Actually Help Bee Health”, we explored the claims by Harvard School of Public Health researcher Chensheng Lu, heralded by anti-pesticide and anti-GMO advocacy groups, for his research that purportedly proves that the class of chemicals known as neonicotinoids are killing bees and endangering humans. And we saw how many journalists, our of ignorance or for ideological reason,s promote dicey science. In Part II, we examine the specific claim that neonics are responsible for Colony Collapse…

Vegetable juice ice-melt?  Ice-free pavement? "Smart snowplows"?   Cold-climate researchers at Washington State University are clearing the road with 'green' alternatives to salt. Do they work? It depends on whether or not you are getting paid to work on them. Washington state has become rather famous for disastrous experiments using sand and rubber-tipped plows all because of environmental claims that salt would be bad for Puget Sound. What body of water is already salt water? Puget Sound. What is actually bad for inland waterways? Silt, which is primarily sand. Xianming Shi,…

Reports that honey bees are dying in unusually high numbers has concerned many scientists, farmers and beekeepers, and  gripped the public. There have been thousands of stories ricocheting across the web, citing one study or another as the definitive explanation for a mystery that most mainstream experts say is complex and not easily reducible to the kind of simplistic narrative that appeals to advocacy groups. This is part one of a two-part series that will examine this phenomenon: how complex science is reduced to ideology, how scientists and journalists often facilitate that--and its…

In the 1960s, there was talk of a dystopian future where the masses starved because the ghost of Malthus came home to roost and the world could no longer feed its people. Instead, Norm Borlaug and science ushered in a "Green Revolution" and countries that embrace science, like America, have reduced environmental strain while producing more food than ever dreamed possible. One other interesting effect the boost in agriculture has had: changing the amplitude of atmospheric carbon dioxide by about 15 percent during the last five decades.  A new atmospheric model called VEGAS estimates…

Scientists have found that seed dormancy, a property that prevents germination when conditions are not right, was present in the first seeds 360 million years ago. Seed dormancy is a phenomenon that has intrigued naturalists for decades, since it conditions the dynamics of natural vegetation and agricultural cycles. There are several types of dormancy, and some of them are modulated by environmental conditions in more subtle ways than others. In an article published in the New Phytologist journal, the scientists studied the evolution of dormancy in seeds using more than 14.000 species. …

Scientists have found that transplanting a microbe that occurs naturally in eastern cottonwood trees boosts the ability of willow and lawn grass to withstand the effects of the industrial pollutant phenanthrene. Because the plants can then take up 25 to 40 percent more of the pollutant than untreated plants they could be useful in phytoremediation, the process of using plants to remove toxins from contaminated sites, without all the environmentalist political lobbying drama of using genetically modified plants to do the same thing.  The microbe from the cottonwood was encouraged to…