#sccience

[typhlonectes]

[jooner4142]

please participate in my poll :)

Survey on sexual identity and attraction in correlation with transsexuality

Hello, welcome to the survey! For this survey, please assume that "transgender woman" means a person who transitioned from male to female,

[canadianabroadvery]

How scientists saved rare seeds from Syria's war — and are now helping to feed the world

Conflict forced scientists to abandon a gene bank, but not before duplicating their last remnants of essential crops in the Svalbard vault on a remote Arctic island.

“ ... This could well make these researchers the stewards of humanity’s future food supply, ensuring the resiliency of dietary staples like barley, wheat and chickpeas, as well as forage crops like clover and alfalfa that are eaten by livestock.

Some 11,000 years ago, the Fertile Crescent birthed humanity’s modern food supply, right where ICARDA has operated for the past 40 years. In a great band of productive soil stretching from modern-day Egypt to the Persian Gulf, people planted roots — figuratively and literally — giving up the hunter-gatherer modus operandi for the settled life of agriculture. They planted wheat and barley in controlled environments, using irrigation and tilling the soil.

With the resulting bounty of food, human populations swelled, requiring still more food. Today, the nearly eight billion people of Earth are dependent on these staple crops, the genetic descendants of those wild varieties, now bred to be even more productive.

These have become our monocrops, vast fields of species like wheat that are great at producing a lot of food, but not great at warding off pests and diseases. That's a problem of genetic diversity — or lack thereof. When our ancestors began selecting the particular wheat plants that produced the most food, they created one-track genetic lines that favoured supercharged production.

Wild wheat dotted across a landscape, on the other hand, is more genetically diverse — that is, different groups of plants are gifted with different traits. Some of them might have the lucky genes that allow them to resist a specific insect or a disease, and survive to pass those genes along. So when a pest or pestilence invades, at least some part of the wheat supply may survive.

But when modern farmers all use the same variety of wheat, the homogeneous crop is more vulnerable to disaster. If the wheat hasn’t been selected to resist whichever specific threat arises, farmers can lose entire harvests....”

“ ... Now gene banks the world over share a common repository, a sort of fail-safe against a catastrophe like Syria’s civil war. Last year, Westengen went to Morocco and stood in that field of wheat grown from seed that had journeyed thousands of miles from home and (nearly) back, all crops that could help humanity weather the chaos of climate change.

“It was quite emotional, actually,” he says, “to be there and see these seeds that had been sitting in boxes in Svalbard, were now growing out there in the field.”

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/12/04/features/scientists-saved-rare-seeds-syria-war-feed-world

[wigglebox]

i just read 10 articles on ted cruz excuse me while i drown myself in science 

[erickaforman]

Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less."

Read the rest of the article, written by Naomi Klein. Perhaps we should start thinking about saving our children and theirs after that.

[dietarysalad]

Kind of realises I should be doing homework. Finally got my brother out of my room. Should probably do homework. Bye, peoplez. With a 'z'. 'Coz I'm duh koolz.

[spiritualturtle]