Dutch plant ecologists have investigated how the potato cyst nematode can be controlled using Solanum sisymbriifolium, a member of the potato family. The plant produces a hatching agent which causes the nematode’’s eggs to hatch. However, the nematodes which eat the plant can no longer reproduce.

Potato cyst nematodes attack the roots of potato plants. After harvest the nematodes remain in the soil in the form of cysts. These are the dead bodies of female nematodes that are filled with egg

“Bellwether” of what’s to come farther south, say Queen’s researchers

Dramatic clues to North American climate change have been discovered by a team of Queen’s University scientists in the bottom of 50 Arctic lakes.

Using innovative techniques that enable them to collect historic evidence from fossilized algae in lake bottom sediment, the researchers have found signs of marked environmental changes in a variety of lakes of different depths and composition, within a 750-km r

The newly discovered disease, Sudden Oak Death (SOD), is quickly gaining a reputation, and it’s not a good one. SOD is tenacious and lethal, using as many as 26 different plants as hosts and spreading in ways scientists don’t completely understand. Now, recent research suggests that SOD is capable of using an even greater number of host plants than previously thought. While this is not necessarily good news, it does help shed light on why SOD has been so quick to spread.

“SOD is d

Scientists from the University of Minnesota demonstrated yields of corn and soybeans were only minimally reduced when organic production practices were utilized as compared with conventional production practices. After factoring in production costs, net returns between the two production strategies were equivalent.

More than 80% of corn and soybeans produced in the United States is grown in the Midwest, the vast majority with conventional production practices in a corn-soybean rotation requ

Logging, illegal hunting, and Ebola caused nearly 60 percent decline since 1983

Scientists say chimps and gorillas now ’critically endangered’

Scientists from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, Princeton University and other organizations have reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature that a dramatic decline of gorillas and chimpanzees is taking place in western equatorial Africa, the last stronghold for great apes on the continent. Ravaged

An increasing amount of genetic engineering in agriculture closely resembles the conventional crop breeding that has been done for thousands of years, and unnecessarily stringent regulation of this type of gene research is choking off its usefulness, one expert says in a new policy forum in Science.

Government regulations that lump all types of genetic engineering together, instead of making reasonable distinctions between differing technologies, is stifling research, favors the efforts of

Our post-ice-age climate is not nearly as stable as is commonly believed. New evidence for this is reported by geoscientists of the DFG Research Center Ocean Margins in the upcoming issue of the journal Science. Investigating marine sediments from the northern Red Sea, they discovered that this currently very dry region was influenced by a long wet period between 9,000 and 6,500 years ago. It was characterized by a monsoon-like system during that time. The possibility that this Mediterranean monsoon

Scientists at Horticulture Research International have been studying natural mutations in vegetables in the hope of identifying the genes responsible for limiting uptake of caesium. The results of their quest, to be presented at the annual SEB conference suggest ‘safe’ crops could one day be grown on radioactive soil.

Four million people in Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine currently live in areas where 137Cs deposition densities to soils exceeded 37 kBq m-2 following the Chernobyl accident in

The exotic island of Madagascar, situated off the southeast coast of Africa, was a dangerous place to live 65 million to 70 million years ago. Crocodiles swarmed in the rivers, and a 30-foot-long, meat-eating dinosaur named Majungatholus atopus stalked the plains. Like most carnivorous dinosaurs, Majungatholus had teeth perfectly suited for ripping into flesh. But what was on the menu? Until now, this question has remained a mystery. In a report published in the April 3 issue of the Journal

Scientists using NASA satellite data have found the most intense global pollution from fires occurred during droughts caused by El Niño. The most intense fires took place in 1997-1998 in association with the strongest El Niño event of the 20th century.

Bryan Duncan, Randall Martin, Amanda Staudt, Rosemarie Yevich and Jennifer Logan, from Harvard University, used data observed by NASA’s Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) satellite to quantify the amount of smoke pollution from biomass b

The expensive, energy-intensive process of turning wood into paper costs the pulp and paper industries more than $6 billion a year. Much of that expense involves separating wood’s cellulose from lignin, the glue that binds a tree’s fibers, by using an alkali solution and high temperatures and pressures. Although the lignin so removed is reused as fuel, wood with less lignin and more cellulose would save the industry millions of dollars a year in processing and chemical costs. Research at North Caroli

Significantly improved peanut yields have been achieved by researchers at the Hebrew University Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences in Rehovot.

Through the use of the plant hormone ethylene, the researchers have succeeded in regulating the flowering of the peanut plant, with a resulting four-fold increase in the yield of large peanut pods at harvest time.

The research was carried out by Eliezer Zamski, the Jack Futterman Professor of Agricultural Botan

Just as vegetables are essential to balancing the human diet, the inclusion of vegetation may be equally essential to balancing Earth’s climate models.

Scientists at MIT who were trying to create accurate models of climate change in the southern portion of the Sahara desert found that including a realistic component of vegetation growth and decay was absolutely essential. Without including the vegetation as a variable (rather than a fixed parameter), the models were not able to show the regi

On Monday 31 March ecologists will meet with molecular biologists at the University of Southampton for the most novel and broad-ranging scientific session of its kind. They will present findings in Session C5/P3 which show that the biochemical pathways which influence a plant’s response to stimuli such as attack, disease or other stresses are not mutually exclusive as previously thought. For example, up until recently the two separate signalling pathways in plants which respond independently to disea

In a recent study published in Ecology, John Lill and Robert Marquis (University of Missouri – St. Louis) investigated the role shelter-building caterpillars play in herbivorous insect communities living on white oaks. Previous studies have shown how caterpillars create and modify habitats through the construction of leaf shelters, increasing biodiversity around the leaves. In their study, Lill and Marquis wanted to see what effect shelter-building caterpillars had on the entire community living on o

The world’s biggest fungus, discovered in Oregon’s Blue Mountains in 2001, is challenging traditional notions of what constitutes an individual. The underground fungus–estimated to be between 2000 and 8500 years old–is also deepening our understanding of the ecosystem, with possible implications for the management of Canadian forests, according to a paper by the discoverers (B.A. Ferguson, T.A. Dreisbach, C.G. Parks, G.M. Filip, and C.L. Schmitt) published March 17 on the Web site of the