Send a rat?

Charitable giving to developing countries has shown a new trend in recent years with ‘send a cow’, and ‘send a goat’- schemes supporting the supply of said livestock to farmers in Africa. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard the latest is- ‘send a rat’. A rat? However for reducing food insecurity farming-rats and…
Read Further

Chikungunya virus – hard to pronounce but becoming easier to catch.

Hundreds of tourists from South and South East Asia have been going home to the US, and Europe with Chikungunya virus. Quiescent for many years this mosquito-borne virus has reemerged in the last 2 years in India, South East Asia and Indian Ocean Islands. In the island of Réunion, the main industry, tourism has been…
Read Further

Musical Interlude

Discerning common carp find music, Morzart’s “Eine Kleine Nacht Musik”, to be precise, stress relieving or inducing depending on how it is played to them. The authors of this study discuss the possible use of music as a growth promoter or an enrichment tool to improve fish welfare in intensive fish farming. This fascinating application…
Read Further

What do trees wear when it gets cold? Fir coats!

What’s going on here then? Is it the arrival of a sentient machine from another planet, interfacing with the local plant-life for purposes unknown? I’m afraid not, contact with ET will have to wait. What we have here is a new technique, pioneered by the USDA Forest Service, for measuring the below-ground sequestration of carbon…
Read Further

Climate Change Catastrophy for Californian Crops?

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory say that increasing temperatures in California will damage yields of almonds, walnuts, oranges, avacados and table grapes. These crops are long-lived and are only planted once every 25-40 years. This could expose them to a projected temperature change of two to four degrees celsius over the next 45 years.…
Read Further

Heavy Metal

The case of the alleged poisoning of former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko is certainly gathering its share of UK media attention. Mr Litvinenko’s doctors are now reporting that the heavy metal thallium may not be the cause of his condition as was initially suspected. Still, if this news item has piqued your interest in the…
Read Further

Farming to Protect the Free?

"This tiger fur is OK, it’s farmed", is this a phrase that we will soon be hearing? The Liberty Institute, a free-market think tank based in New Delhi, India, has suggested that farming tigers could prevent wild tigers being hunted to extinction. The Institute estimates that approximately 4000 tigers are already being reared in farms…
Read Further

About Hand picked… and carefully sorted

hand picked… and carefully sortedis the the place where the content specialists who put together  CAB Abstracts, (and many other wonderful research tools from CABI) try to highlight just some of the vast amount of research information that goes into the products that we make. We are doing this because, to quote Bruce Sterling:  …
Read Further

Orangutans and Oil Palms

As some of you may know, this week is Orangutan Awareness Week in the UK. The fate of these rare primates is intertwined with the global demand for palm oil and the logging industry in Indonesia. With CAB Abstracts‘ wide coverage of topics in forestry and tropical agriculture, it’s the perfect place for our subscribers…
Read Further

Inconvenient Truths Down On the Farm

The recent UK Stern Review on the economic costs of climate change and Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth have focused attention on the serious consequences that may result. A new review by Jurg Fuhrer published in CAB Reviews highlights the implications for agriculture, pointing out that it is “among the sectors most directly exposed…
Read Further