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Agriculture Research and News
Blackspot seabream is a prized fish on many Spanish tables but it grows slowly at sea, is heavily overfished and is incredibly diffcult to farm. No European company had successfully bred it until one Galician company teamed up with a a local partner and Norwegian nutritionists to develop a method as a EUREKA project.
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 | An HHMI scientist has moved a step closer to turning sexually-reproducing plants into asexual reproducers, a finding that could have profound implications for agriculture. ...> Full Article |
Nitrogen fertilization is essential for profitable corn production. It also is a major cost of production and can contribute to degradation of the environment. Is it possible to "teach" corn to fix its own nitrogen, thus eliminating the need for nitrogen fertilizer applications? University of Illinois agricultural engineer Kaustubh Bhalerao believes it may be, through research in an emerging area of engineering called synthetic biology.
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Agricultural Research Service scientist Scott Yates is studying how oxytetracycline, an antibiotic that is administered to animals, breaks down in cattle manure.
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Lots of leaves growing in easy reach of a cow's tongue means less time and less land needed to raise beef cattle.
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 | Five new potato breeding lines being tested by Agricultural Research Service scientists and collaborators could open the door to new varieties of the crop that resist powdery scab and black dot diseases. ...> Full Article |
 | To monitor forests' response to change requires massive data sets. The Smithsonian's Center for Tropical Forest Science and Earthwatch train volunteers to measure trees -- giving them a new perspective on life and resulting in new insights into biodiversity and climate change. ...> Full Article |
 | Escalating use of nitrogen fertilizer is increasing algal blooms and global warming, but a discovery by Stanford researchers could begin to reverse that. They have revealed a key step in how symbiotic bacteria living in legumes turn nitrogen into plant food, which could be used to improve the process in some plants, reducing the need for chemical fertilizers. ...> Full Article |
What are the top research questions facing agriculture? Earlier this year, the American Society of Agronomy sought out the opinions of its members and leadership to develop a Grand Challenge statement, key questions and expected outcomes.
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 | A total of 697.3 million board feet of softwood logs was exported from Washington and Oregon in 2009, according to data released by the US Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station. During the same period, the two states exported a total of 344.2 million board feet of softwood lumber. ...> Full Article |
Combined mechanisms of transport have important applications -- transport of nutrients across cell membranes in plants and animals, the aeration of agricultural soils, performance of chemical reactors, the design of membranes for desalting brackish water, and the design of clay membranes for retaining dangerous chemicals. In a recent article in Vadose Zone Journal, scientists show that the developers of popular models of diffusion have made invalid assumptions.
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 | A two-year field study in Mississippi evaluated the effect of nitrogen, growth stage (bud formation and flowering), and harvest time (first in mid-July, second beginning of October) on peppermint yields, oil content and composition. ...> Full Article |
 | It's a paradox that's puzzled scientists for a half-century.
Models clearly show that the coexistence of competing species depends on those species responding differently to the availability of resources. Then why do studies comparing competing tree species draw a blank? ...> Full Article |
Molecules from seaweed extracts and natural clays help adsorbing the harmful toxins which are found in animal feed. The resulting new product has a huge potential market worldwide as a completely natural alternative to the formerly-used antibiotics, which are now prohibited from this use in the European Union.
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 | Root systems are the basis of the second Green Revolution, and the focus on beans and corn that thrive in poor growing conditions will help some of the world's poorest farmers, according to a Penn State plant scientist. ...> Full Article |
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