(Not-so-)Happy World Food Day!
Today is World Food Day. Or World Food Week. Or World Food Month, depending on which country you’re living in. This year the event, which has been taking place since 1980, centres on the theme of ‘The Right To Food’ and is held each year on the anniversary of the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s foundation…
Finding that needle: searching tips
I’ve spent the last few months constructing ready made searches for Nutrition and Food Sciences on CAB Direct. Here are some general handy tips for choosing the words for searches that I have gathered on the way. This isn’t the CAB Direct helpfile, you’ll find that on CAB Direct.
Gardening in Microgravity
Long-term space missions would need plants for recycling carbon dioxide and oxygen and producing food. However, growing plants in space is a tricky business – some of the basic signs of over- or under-watering (wilting and flopping) are simply not present in microgravity, and water does not spread through the soil as it would on…
Carbon offsets – whats the deal?
At the UNWTO Conference on Climate Change and Tourism I attended in Davos, Switzerland last week, participants were requested to offset the carbon dioxide emissions of their travel and accommodation. Not an unreasonable request given the subject matter of the conference, and the fact that the conference itself was free to attend. But as reported…
Not mush-room for fungi in school
The British Mycological Society runs an excellent website called Fungi4Schools. Not a school lunches initiative as you might expect, it’s a resource for teachers who are looking for ways to introduce information about fungi in all their many forms to students of all ages. A quick investigation of the UK National Curriculum, and I’ll admit…
Pine beetles continue marching east
If this press release is anything to go by, hard times in Canadian forestry are about to get harder. The Mountain Pine Beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) has been chomping its way through the lodgepole pines of British Columbia since a shortage of cold winters has allowed it to spread unchecked. The beetles spread the deadly "blue-stain"…
Sympathy for the devil
Scientists working on trying to control the facial tumour disease which threaten to wipe out the Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) have increased their understanding the disease. The Tasmanian devil is the largest carnivorous marsupial remaining and is now found only on the island of Tasmania, having been exterminated from the Australian mainland. The disease that…
World tourism leaders tackle climate change
Earlier this week, some 600 representatives from over 100 countries, representing all sectors of the tourism industry (public and private sector, NGOs and governments) met in the idyllic Swiss resort of Davos to debate the global challenge of climate change as it affects and is affected by tourism, at the 2nd International Conference on Climate…
The Blandford Fly is not confined to Blandford (and other interesting facts about blackflies)
Although the weather has become quite autumnal in the last week or so, the mosquitoes which have been flying around my house in the evenings in unusually high numbers in recent weeks (fortunately without biting me much) have not yet disappeared, and have reminded me of an interesting article1 that I came across earlier in…
BSE: Twenty years old
Twenty years ago, a paper appeared in the Veterinary Record recording a new disease in dairy cattle. The syndrome had been seen in cattle in England for a couple of years but with the publication of the paper by Wells and others, the disease was described and named, and the new term bovine spongiform encephalopathy…