Agriculture

Agriculture

Nanoscale nutrients can protect plants from fungal diseases

Applied to the shoots, nutrients served in tiny metallic packages are absorbed more efficiently, strengthening plants’ defenses against fungal attack.

Plants

Modified genes can distort wild cotton’s interactions with insects

In a Yucatan nature park, engineered genes influence nectar production, affecting ants’ and maybe pollinators’ attraction to the wild cotton plants.

Agriculture

How does a crop’s environment shape a food’s smell and taste?

Scientific explorations of terroir — the soil, climate and orientation in which crops grow — hint at influences on flavors and aromas.

Tech

Bubble-blowing drones may one day aid artificial pollination

Drones are too clumsy to rub pollen on flowers and not damage them. But blowing pollen-laden bubbles may help the machines be better pollinators.

Animals

Insects’ extreme farming methods offer us lessons to learn and oddities to avoid

Insects invented agriculture long before humans did. Can we learn anything from them?

Life

Engineered honeybee gut bacteria trick attackers into self-destructing

Tailored microbes defend bees with a gene-silencing process called RNA interference that takes on viruses or mites.

Ecosystems

Can forensics help keep endangered rosewood off the black market?

Timber traffickers are plundering the world’s forests, but conservationists have a new set of tools to fight deforestation.

Earth

Too much groundwater pumping is draining many of the world’s rivers

Too much groundwater use could push over half of pumped watersheds past an ecological tipping point by 2050, compromising aquatic ecosystems worldwide.

Agriculture

Birds fed a common pesticide lost weight rapidly and had migration delays

Scientists have previously implicated neonicotinoid pesticides in declining bee populations. Now a study suggests that songbirds are affected, too.

Animals

U.S. honeybees had the worst winter die-off in more than a decade

Colonies suffered from parasitic, disease-spreading Varroa mites. Floods and fire didn’t help.

Agriculture

The U.S. is still using many pesticides that are banned in other countries

In 2016, the United States used millions of kilograms of pesticides that are banned or being phased out in the European Union, Brazil and China.

Agriculture

Can Silicon Valley entrepreneurs make crickets the next chicken?

Entrepreneurs are bringing automation and data analysis to insect agriculture to build a profitable business that helps feed the planet.