1+ day, 7+ hour ago   (80+ words) Bacterial wilt, caused by the soil-borne pathogen Ralstonia solanacearum, is one of the most destructive plant diseases in the world, striking tomatoes, potatoes, bananas and hundreds of other crops. Once the bacterium establishes itself in a field, it is notoriously…...

1+ day, 7+ hour ago   (598+ words) Maize is one of the hungriest crops on the planet, demanding enormous quantities of nitrogen fertilizer to fill its kernels each season. Yet much of that nitrogen never reaches the grain. It leaks into rivers as nitrate, escapes into the…...

1+ day, 9+ hour ago   (74+ words) Sub-Saharan Africa is running out of time and topsoil. A sweeping new meta-analysis synthesizing 317 peer-reviewed studies published between 2010 and 2025 has delivered the most comprehensive quantitative verdict yet on whether biologically derived inputs and engineered materials can rescue the region’s collapsing…...

1+ day, 9+ hour ago   (587+ words) A team of researchers in China has sequenced the first complete mitochondrial genome of the jumping plant louse Bactericera gobica and, by combining it with nearly every other Triozidae mitogenome available, assembled the most comprehensive genetic dataset ever compiled for…...

1+ day, 9+ hour ago   (718+ words) Slaughterhouses are among the most difficult facilities to keep environmentally clean. Every carcass processed leaves behind a wastewater stream loaded with blood proteins, fats, oils and grease, suspended solids, and an enormous chemical oxygen demand that can overwhelm conventional treatment…...

1+ day, 9+ hour ago   (679+ words) A team of researchers in Peru has built a system that can fly a drone over a Hass avocado orchard and, in real time, tell a farmer not only where every visible fruit is hanging but also how ripe each…...

1+ day, 10+ hour ago   (75+ words) Every year, humanity swallows roughly 35,000 metric tons of aspirin, and much of it does not simply vanish after doing its job. A sweeping new review published in Advances in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry argues that one of the world’s oldest…...

1+ day, 10+ hour ago   (669+ words) Cadmium is one of the most stubborn contaminants in the world’s farmland, and in China it has become a quiet but persistent threat to the food supply. The toxic heavy metal, which enters soils through mining, smelting, industrial emissions, and…...

1+ day, 10+ hour ago   (74+ words) Rice feeds more than half of humanity, yet its two great subspecies have taken strikingly different evolutionary paths when it comes to fighting one of its most destructive diseases. A recent commentary published in Stress Biology by Yachun Su, Shoujian…...

1+ day, 10+ hour ago   (55+ words) In the world of traditional Chinese medicine, few raw materials are as quietly ubiquitous as Cicadae Periostracum, the papery slough that cicadas abandon when they molt from nymph to adult. For centuries, this discarded exoskeleton has been prescribed for sore…...