The history of cultivated plants in Finland stretches back some 3,500 years. Cultivated plants usually arrived in Finland from elsewhere with new settlers. Landraces were still widespread in the early part of the 20th century, but then improved varieties produced in plant breeding programmes began to gain ground in the 1920s. As a consequence, the landraces, which were well adapted to local conditions, are no longer grown to any large extent, and thus they no longer contribute to the diversity of ou

Using innovative Geographic information system (GIS) technology and land parcel identification systems (LPIS), the European Commission is playing a key role in preventing agricultural subsidy irregularities. Through better monitoring of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reforms, the Commission is ensuring that subsidies are distributed more efficiently, fairly and reliably. The Agriculture and Fisheries Council Meeting in Brussels today will underline that implementing fair CAP reforms is essential

Using innovative Geographic information system (GIS) technology and land parcel identification systems (LPIS), the European Commission is playing a key role in preventing agricultural subsidy irregularities. Through better monitoring of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reforms, the Commission is ensuring that subsidies are distributed more efficiently, fairly and reliably. The Agriculture and Fisheries Council Meeting in Brussels today will underline that implementing fair CAP reforms is essential.

Four papers that expand upon the record on the origins of agriculture will appear in a supplement, guest edited by O. Bar-Yosef, Director of the Stone Age Lab at the Peabody Museum of Harvard University, to the August/November 2004 issue of Current Anthropology. Taken as a set, they demonstrate the maturation of the study of agricultural origins through fine-grained regional analyses and new methodological techniques.

Peter Rowley-Conwy in “How the West Was Lost: A Reconsideration of Agricu

The exploration of near-Earth space will enter a new phase on 26 July when a spacecraft called Tan Ce 2 (Explorer 2) lifts off from Taiyuan spaceport, west of Beijing, on a Chinese Long March 2C rocket. The launch is currently scheduled to take place at 08:23 BST (07:23 GMT).

Tan Ce 2 is the second spacecraft to be built for the Double Star programme, a unique collaboration between Chinese and European scientists. Its predecessor, Tan Ce 1 (Explorer 1), was successfully launched on a sim

Collisions in the Asteroid Belt result in the asteroids being completely destroyed and shattered into countless pieces. Computer simulations predict that most of these fragments will eventually fall into the Sun. Some of them, however, will hit the Earth after millions of years as meteorites. It is possible that this could also occur much earlier. In certain positions in the Asteroid Belt, the orbiting time of an object around the sun is a multiple of the orbit of the giant planet Jupiter. The so-

The gradual subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate beneath the North American plate puts tremendous stress on the seafloor, creating cracks and fissures, hydrothermal vents, seafloor spreading, and literally hundreds of small earthquakes on a near-daily basis.
Now a North American team of scientists has documented for the first time a new phenomenon – the creation of a void in the seafloor that draws in – rather than expels – surrounding seawater. They report their discovery in the July 15 issue

Current conservation planning may be hindering not helping endangered wildlife – opportunistic land purchases may be best bet for highly threatened species

A new study published in the August issue of the journal Ecology Letters shows that elaborate modeling efforts used to guide land conservation result in plans that are rarely achievable in the real world–and may actually be counter-productive to achieving long term protection of plants and animals.

“Conservation agen

Some primatologists have argued that to understand human nature we must understand the behavior of apes. In the social interactions and organization of modern primates, the theory goes, we can see the evolutionary roots of our own social relationships. In the genomic era, as scientists become more adept at extracting biological meaning from an ever expanding repository of sequenced genomes, it is likely that our next of kin will again hold promising clues to our own identity.

Comparing pri

People say size doesn’t matter, and that may be true for tiny plankton, those free-floating ocean plants that make up the bottom of the marine food-chain. Little plankton may be able to change the weather, and longer term climate, in ways that serve them better.

It’s almost hard to believe, but new NASA-funded research confirms an old theory that plankton can indirectly create clouds that block some of the Sun’s harmful rays. The study was conducted by Dierdre Toole of the Woods Hole Oce

A team of researchers led by the University of Sheffield and supported by English Heritage have found eighty 13,000-year-old carvings in limestone rock of Church Hole Cave, at Creswell Crags in Nottinghamshire. The carvings are a unique find and form the most elaborate cave art ceiling in the world.

The carvings, which appear on the ceiling of the cave, represent animal figures, including deer, bears, birds and possibly dancing women.

Dr Paul Pettitt, of the Department of Archaeolog

If raindrops on roses are among your favorite things, University of Washington researchers have encountered some monster drops that could change your mind.

On two occasions, separated by four years and thousands of miles and in very different conditions, raindrops were measured at sizes similar to or greater than the largest ever recorded. The largest ones were at least 8 millimeters in diameter, about the same as the largest previously observed, and were possibly a centimeter – about four

This morning a team of forty scientists from seven UK universities will travel to the Azores to join hundreds more in the largest international atmospheric field campaign of its type ever attempted.

The exciting mission will track and investigate a mass of polluted air as it leaves the United States and travels across the Atlantic to the UK and mainland Europe. Scientists will measure chemical reactions within the air-mass as it travels, quantifying the resulting pollutants delivered to Eu

A scientist with the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station said the development of corn with improved protein quality would reduce the need for soybean additives when feeding corn to swine and poultry. Corn is deficient in two essential amino acids, lysine and tryptophan. Increasing the relative content of these two amino acids is the project of corn researcher Dr. Javier Betran.

The resulting nutritionally-improved corn, known as Quality Protein Maize, could have positive implications no

Deep in the Antarctic interior, buried under thousands of meters [more than two miles] of ice, lies Lake Vostok, the world’s largest subglacial lake. Scientists believe that the waters of Lake Vostok have not been disturbed for hundreds of thousands of years, and there are tantalizing clues that microbes may exist there that have been isolated for at least as long.

Now, the most comprehensive measurements of the lake–roughly the size of Lake Ontario in North America–indicate that it is

A powerful new instrument heading to space this Saturday is expected to send back long-sought answers about greenhouse gases, atmospheric cleansers and pollutants, and the destruction and recovery of the ozone layer. Only a cubic yard in size but laden with technical wizardry, the High-Resolution Dynamic Limb Sounder (HIRDLS) will measure a slew of atmospheric chemicals at a horizontal and vertical precision unprecedented in a multi-year space instrument.

Scientists at the National Center f