Sustainable food doesn’t mean saying no to technology
The First Sustainable Food Chain Summit last week gave a clear message that to provide food sustainably for the future we need to use technology to bridge the gap between available resources and the amount of food we need to produce. As well as recommending the use of technology, to increase shelf life and reduce…
Sunnyside up…
Friday 16 July 2010. AS I listened to Radio 4 Woman’s Hour on the way to work, I found myself increasingly incensed & talking to the airwaves. In the studio was a male travel medicine expert, a woman who loved the suntanned look, and another woman who was determined to be “pale & interesting”. The…
Can science feed the world?
This was the question posed by Nature’s Special last week. In other words, how can we feed the Earth's growing population in such a way that no-one goes hungry and nature is left with some land and water of its own? Their answer can be broadly summed up by what Britain’s Royal Society call “sustainable…
Attack of the Buttock-Biting Spider and Other Myths
“The trouble with the world is not that people know so little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.” This observation from Mark Twain is one of many illuminating quotes in an examination by Richard Vetter of the power of myth in science and medicine, and the limited power of hard science in…
Travel advice: Watch out for the mozzies!
The Hand Picked blog is not perhaps a place where you'd normally expect to find pictures of celebrities. And fear not, we're not going down the route of showbiz gossip. But sometimes celebrity news and serious topics overlap. And the power of celebrity has been harnessed this week to highlight the malaria risk when travelling…
Cutting The Salt
Salt reduction is a hot topic at the moment in the US and the UK as officials react to research that suggests decreasing salt intake could decrease levels of stroke in the population. Consumers can do a lot to reduce the salt they consume, but as most of salt consumption comes from eating processed food,…
Health Literacy in action
This blog is contributed by Dr. Arthur Culbert, a member of the Global Health advisory board, and Executive Director of the non-profit organisation Health Literacy Missouri (HLM), USA. On May 27, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released the National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy. The long-awaited action plan is aimed…
Entomotherapy: Revolting Recipes or Marvellous Medicine?
During our daily job of searching through journals for articles to add to CAB Abstracts database we came across an article all about entomotherapy (use of insects for medicinal purposes) in tribal communities in Arunachal Pradesh, India. So I’d like to add entomotherapy to the long list of benefits of insects in my blog on…
Nanotechnology, Miracle or Menace?
This debut blog is contributed by our editorial intern Elizabeth Milway, an Oxford University graduate with a background in biochemstry & bionanotechnology. Recently wherever I turn nanotechnology keeps cropping up! At first I thought – maybe it’s one of those things where once you’ve noticed something you can’t stop noticing it, but then I did…
Biodiversity, Development and Poverty Alleviation
As Vera pointed out in her blog yesterday, this Saturday (22 May) is the International Day for Biodiversity. The theme for this year is ‘Biodiversity, Development and Poverty Alleviation: Recognizing the Role of Biodiversity for Human Well-Being’. Poverty alleviation is something we feel strongly about here at CABI where our mission is to “improve people’s…