These days, grocery stores contain aisle after aisle of products encased in plastic packaging. This practice preserves food and might help prevent food waste, but does the environmental cost justify it? The cover story of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, looks into the matter.
An eight-year study of soybeans grown outdoors in a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere like that expected by 2050 has yielded a new and worrisome finding: Higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations will boost plant growth under ideal growing conditions, but drought – expected to worsen as the climate warms and rainfall patterns change – will outweigh those benefits and cause yield losses much sooner than anticipated.
The well-known documentary "Plastic Planet" by Werner Boote starkly illustrates the dangers of plastic and synthetics for human beings and also shows how ubiquitous plastic is. Motivated by this multiple award-winning film, a family of five from Styria completely avoided plastics in their home environment for several months.
A farming technique practised for centuries by villagers in West Africa, which converts nutrient-poor rainforest soil into fertile farmland, could be the answer to mitigating climate change and revolutionising farming across Africa.
Research reported in the Applied Physics Express demonstrates that ‘non-thermal air plasma irradiation’ dramatically improves the harvest of the salad crop Arabidopsis thaliana.
A recent study from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the University of Southampton reveals that inland freshwaters with a wide range of fish species contain higher-yielding and less variable fisheries.
Improved agricultural water management could halve the global food gap by 2050 and buffer some of the harmful climate change effects on crop yields. For the first time, scientists investigated systematically the worldwide potential to produce more food with the same amount of water by optimizing rain use and irrigation. They found the potential has previously been underestimated. Investing in crop water management could substantially reduce hunger while at the same time making up for population growth. However, putting the findings into practice would require specific local solutions, which remains a challenge.
The creation of a new kind of rice which gives off nearly zero greenhouse gas emissions during its growth has earned kudos for a team of scientists from three continents, including the lead investigator at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Fluctuations in extreme weather events, such as heavy rains and droughts, are affecting ecosystems in unexpected ways -- creating "winners and losers" among plant species that humans depend upon for food.
Rice serves as the staple food for more than half of the world's population, but it's also the one of the largest manmade sources of atmospheric methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Now, with the addition of a single gene, rice can be cultivated to emit virtually no methane from its paddies during growth. It also packs much more of the plant's desired properties, such as starch for a richer food source and biomass for energy production, according to a study in Nature.
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