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Cooperative crops
'Unselfish' genes that make plants cooperate could boost crop yields
A simple breeding experiment can identify genetic variants that make plants grow well without impeding their neighbours, improving overall yields
by Kismat Shrees
New Scientist | 29 November 2022
Whose wounds? Chimps, insects and togetherness
Watch this mama chimp treat her son’s open wound by applying insect “poultice”
Observed behavior could be evidence of "prosocial" human-like empathy in primates.
by Jennifer Ouellette
ars technica | Feb 8, 2022
Weeds are Herbs
Botanic Arts of Foraging, Classifying, and Cooking
In this issue we are delighted to present a brief yet meaningful exchange between o Lin, one member of the boundary-crossing artist/activist duo Weed Dow, and our cover team member En-Chieh Chao, an anthropologist and STSer based in NSYSU, Southern Taiwan.
by Zo Lin and En-Chieh Chao
East Asian Science, Technology and Society Journal, volume 15, issue 3
Plants, bones and memories of noise
Jessica is a British botanist in Colombia who wakes one night to a heavy thumping noise that is loud enough to set off car alarms. When it becomes apparent that no one else heard it, it sends her on a downwards spiral into anxiety.
A surreal and immersive journey into the human mind: Review of the film Memoria (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
New Scientist | 5 January 2022
Battling a plant disease pandemic
When we hear 'pandemic' we immediately think of COVID-19. But there's a deadly plant disease pandemic tearing through Australia that arrived long before COVID-19.
Branch Out (Podcast by The Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney)
How to be a good Holobiont?
Holobiont in biology refers to “an organism plus its persistent communities of symbionts” (Gilbert 2017: M73) and was used for decades by scientists focusing on plants.
How to be a good Holobiont? Relating during the COVID-19 pandemic by Sabine Biedermann | EASST Review 39(1) 2020
Staph Retreat
In the war on devilish microbes, our weapons are starting to fail us. The antibiotics we once wielded like miraculous flaming swords seem more like lukewarm butter knives.
RadioLab | November 3, 2015
Can you really grow enough fruit and veg to be self-sufficient?
Gardens, unfortunately, will not replace supply-chains for the time being, but they can raise issues only if you cultivate them.
by James Wong | New Scientist, 18 April 2020
Resisting everything
The most damaging weed in the UK is evolving resistance to the powerful herbicide glyphosate - and many more superweeds are evolving worldwi
Cancer avatars?
Flies, fish and mice are being developed into “cancer avatars” that carry the unique traits of a person’s cancer and help doctors choose whi
Ministers are expected to meet with climate protestors next week, but what do they want? Rupert Read, of Extinction Rebellion, explains the group’s demands
The science behind Extinction Rebellion’s three climate change demands by Adam Vaughan | New Scientist, 25 April 2019
Ministers are expected to meet with climate protestors next week, but what do they want? Rupert Read, of Extinction Rebellion, explains the group’s demands
Gaia rebooted: New version of idea explains how Earth evolved for life by Bob Holmes | New Scientist, 20 March 2019
Gaia rebooted: New version of idea explains how Earth evolved for life by Bob Holmes | New Scientist, 20 March 2019
The controversial Gaia hypothesis sees Earth as a superorganism adapted to be perfect for life. A weird type of evolution may finally show how that actually happens.
But there might be another way, says Lenton. What if Gaia works like Ashby’s Homeostat? In other words, he suggests, Earth and the early life on it might have interacted haphazardly at first. Unstable configurations – those, say, with little or no cycling of key elements such as nitrogen – would have failed quickly, requiring life to reboot nearly from scratch. Eventually, though, the system must have stumbled on a stable configuration, with better cycling and tighter regulatory mechanisms. It should be no surprise, then, that the planet of today has strong regulatory systems.
This process, called “selection by persistence”, evades the requirements for competition and reproduction that make natural selection so problematic as a mechanism for explaining the evolution of Earth. “I think of it like a search algorithm,” says Lenton. “[Earth] can undergo repeated trials over time until it falls into a stable configuration. And once it does, that tends to persist.”
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If Lenton is right, this would have triggered a period of planetary instability followed by the gradual emergence of a new, increasingly stable Earth system as the biosphere accumulated fresh metabolic pathways to regulate its novel regime.
What doctors don't know about the drugs they prescribe. TED Talk, September 2012
What doctors don't know about the drugs they prescribe by Ben Goldacre | TED Talk, September 2012
When a new drug gets tested, the results of the trials should be published for the rest of the medical world -- except much of the time, negative or inconclusive findings go unreported, leaving doctors and researchers in the dark. In this impassioned talk, Ben Goldacre explains why these unreported instances of negative data are especially misleading and dangerous.
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"Can Ticks Make You Allergic to Red Meat?" by Peter Andrey Smith The New Yorker | March 6, 2014
Can Ticks Make You Allergic to Red Meat? by Peter Andrey Smith | The New Yorker, March 6, 2014
Adult lone-star ticks can carry the pathogens that cause several diseases: Rocky Mountain spotted fever; Southern tick-assocated rash illness, which manifests in Lyme-like symptoms; and ehrlichiosis, a cluster of related bacterial illnesses. (Michael Specter wrote about tick-borne disease in the magazine last year.) But Platts-Mills, who is the only allergist in the Royal Society, embarked on the hike because he believed that the ticks could cause another ailment: an allergy to red meat.
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An army of ants is besieging the world’s chocolate supply, by Ed Yong | Aeon Essays, 30 July, 2013
An army of ants is besieging the world’s chocolate supply by Ed Yong | Aeon Essays, 30 July, 2013
Ants have been farming for millions of years longer than humans. These particular ants herd mealybugs — small, sap-sucking insects that look like woodlice dipped in flour. The ants shepherd and protect the mealybugs so they can ‘milk’ the sugary nutritious fluids in their waste. The bugs used to drink primarily from local rainforest trees, but when humans started clearing the forest to make way for cocoa, the ants adapted, by driving their livestock into the fresh cocoa pastures.
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This strategy shift entangled the cocoa trees in a web of pests and pestilence. When mealybugs drink from trees, they inject them with a pathogen called cacao swollen shoot virus (CSSV). In local rainforest trees, the effects of CSSV are mild, but cocoa — a newcomer to these forests — hasn’t had a chance to evolve countermeasures. As a result, the virus pummels the trees, swelling their shoots and roots well beyond their usual size while draining the colour from their leaves. Before long, often only a few years, the trees die.
"Smarty Plants," Episode on Radiolab | Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Smarty Plants | Episode on Radiolab, Tuesday, February 13, 2018
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Do you really need a brain to sense the world around you? To remember? Or even learn? Well, it depends on who you ask. Jad and Robert, they are split on this one. Today, Robert drags Jad along on a parade for the surprising feats of brainless plants. Along with a home-inspection duo, a science writer, and some enterprising scientists at Princeton University, we dig into the work of evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano, who turns our brain-centered worldview on its head through a series of clever experiments that show plants doing things we never would’ve imagined.
Environmental Humanities and Sustainable Modernity in Asia (and Beyond) by Prasenjit Duara | November 7, 2017
Environmental Humanities and Sustainable Modernity in Asia (and Beyond) by Prasenjit Duara | SSRC, November 7, 2017
Prasenjit Duara makes a strong case for the relevance of the humanities in understanding the human dimensions of environmental and climate change. Multiple aspects of the environmental crisis of the Anthropocene, not least questions of environmental justice in efforts to adapt to and mitigate climate change, can be engaged through humanistic inquiry. With a focus on Asia, Duara argues that questions of identity, representation, religion, ethics, knowledge systems, and more—central concerns of the humanities—are deeply embedded in imagining how to respond to present environmental challenges.
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