Consumption of animals helped hominins to grow bigger brains. But in a world rich with food, how necessary is meat?
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Tag Archives: Nature (journal)
Agriculture / Animal Feeding / Colombia / Environment / Forages / ILRIComms / Latin America / LIVESTOCKFISH / Project
Making grass greener: CIAT breeds tropical pasture that suppresses greenhouse gas emissions
Guillermo Sotelo of CIAT’s entomology team, working with brachiaria grass in a greenhouse at the institution’s headquarters in Colombia (picture credit: CIAT/Neil Palmer). ‘. . . On 13 September, researchers announced that they have bred a tropical pasture grass that can significantly suppress greenhouse-gas emissions. The team, from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) … Continue reading
Agriculture / Article / Dairying / Europe / ILRIComms / Nutrition / Pastoralism
Europe’s ‘milk revolution’: First Neolithic cheese-making, then a genetic mutation allowing lactose persistence
Oscypek, a ‘must taste’ when visiting Polish mountains, is the most famous cheese in Poland today; it is made from salted sheep milk, smoked and formed in traditional wooden forms (photo credit: Tom Karas/PolishFoodInfo.com). In 2011, Mélanie Roffet-Salque, a geochemist at the University of Bristol, UK, found signatures of abundant milk fats — evidence that early farmers, … Continue reading
Agriculture / Article / Asia / Biotechnology / Environment / Genetics / ILRI / India / North America / Seeds / USA
‘Nature’ takes a hard look at the ‘messy middle ground’ — the ‘difficult adolescence’ — of GM crops
Cover of a special issue of ‘Nature’ on GMOs, 2 May 2013. The leading British science journal Nature has published a special issue on GM crops: Promise and reality (2 May 2013). This hub of updated science-based information on GM crops includes feature news stories, commentaries, a podcast and more. ‘Foreign genes were successfully introduced into … Continue reading
Empower women to tend farms, families, high-level science careers — Nature and NYT
Fisherwoman, by B Prabha, 1960 (via Blake Gopnik’s Daily Pic in the Daily Beast). Whether female scientists will want to celebrate International Women’s Day on 8 March may depend on how far they look back in time. Things have changed, and if you talk in terms of decades, there are considerable victories to cheer about. … Continue reading
A4NH / Agri-Health / Animal Diseases / East Africa / Emerging Diseases / Epidemiology / Ethiopia / ILRI / India / Nigeria / Report / South Asia / USA / West Africa / Zoonotic Diseases
Human-animal diseases are emerging in the North, have biggest costs in the South–New ILRI study
Zoonotic emerging infectious disease events (non-wild hosts). Published In report to DFID by Delia Grace et al.: Mapping of Poverty and Likely Zoonoses Hotspots, ILRI, 2012 (map credit: ILRI/Delia Grace). Natasha Gilbert reports today in Nature on the ‘Cost of human-animal disease greatest for world’s poor’, noting that ‘the United States and western Europe are … Continue reading
Article / Cattle / Dairying / North Africa
Got Milk? Dairy found essential to prehistoric development in Africa–new research
Petroglyphs and pictographs in the Jebel Acacus, Libyan Sahara (photo on Flickr by Carsten ten Brink / 10b travelling). This month’s publication of a scientific article on new evidence of livestock herding in prehistoric Africa is stirring interest. ScienceDaily, for example, reports the following: Chemical analysis of pottery reveals first dairying in Saharan Africa nearly 7,000 years … Continue reading
Agriculture / Article / Drylands / DRYLANDSCRP / Environment / Farming Systems / Food Security / Geodata / ILRI / NRM / Research / WLE
A BIG conversation starts on ways to increase food supplies while protecting environments and eradicating hunger
An animated 3-minute video clip by the University of Minnesota’s Institute for the Environment. Justin Gillis has published an interesting piece this week in the Green Blog of the New York Times on a big study just published in Nature by Jon Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. … Continue reading
‘One more reason to build the richer, resilient societies that can weather risk’–Time Magazine
Artists from around the world have painted canvases illustrating the human impact of climate change in their countries. Sixteen of these canvases were exhibited at UN climate negotiations in Poznan, Poland, in December 2008 (artist: Ashley Cecil; image on Flickr by Piotr Fajfer / Oxfam International). Bryan Walsh delves into a rich discussion of the possible … Continue reading
Climate Change / Drought / East Africa / Eritrea / Ethiopia / Food Security / Geodata / Kenya / Pastoralism / Somalia / Vulnerability
We had effective famine early warning systems in place in the Horn: So what went wrong?
Village scene in Gash-Barka, a region of Eritrea considered a breadbasket and with some 3.5 million head of livestock (photo on Flickr by Charles Fred). Scientist Chris Funk, who is part of a Climate Hazard Group at the University of California at Santa Barbara and also works with the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), … Continue reading
ILRI Clippings 