The Turbo-Charged Plants That Could Boost Farm Output
“Prof Long and his team have used powerful computers to build a digital twin of the photosynthesis process. It can tweak that process in millions of ways. From those millions of options the software can identify those that will make the biggest improvements.
“We then engineered these into crops, and if that results in an improvement in the glasshouse, then we take it to our experimental farm and test it in a real-world environment,” says Prof Long.
That’s already had promising results. Changes to the mechanism of photosynthesis in soybean plants have resulted in yield improvements of more than 20% in controlled environments, with field trials now underway.”
Florida’s Coral Reef Supports Fishing, Tourism, and Beaches
“Scientists like Enochs are working overtime to engineer more climate-resistant corals. They are creating booster shots to keep them alive, deploying in vitro fertilization to make larvae grow faster, and importing coral species from around the Caribbean to breed with those in Florida.”
Fern Protein Discovery Could Usher in Potent New Insecticides
“The pretty ferns that adorn windowsills and gardens have some surprising powers. Biologists have long known that this ancient group of plants wards off hungry insects better than other flora, and now they’re homing in on why. They’ve discovered fern proteins that kill and deter pests, including, most recently, one that shows promise against bugs resistant to widely used natural pesticides.”
US Corn Farmers Defy Summer Heat to Grow Record Crop
“So much for the summer of drought and extreme heat in the US that triggered early fears about crop damage. On Thursday, the Department of Agriculture made it official: This year’s corn harvest was the biggest ever.
The most widely grown US crop will total 15.234 billion bushels, the USDA said in its latest set of monthly estimates, surpassing the previous peak of 15.148 billion set in 2016.”
Thanksgiving Will Be 13 Percent More Abundant This Year
Gale Pooley —
Professor Jeremy Horpedahl has provided updated numbers on the percentage changes in four products essential to enjoying our Thanksgiving holiday. Remember, it’s not how expensive things are but how affordable they are that counts. To measure affordability, we must compare prices to wages. This is what time prices do for us. A time price is simply the nominal money price divided by nominal hourly income. Since last year, the nominal money prices of our four essential items have decreased from 0.8 percent to 13 percent, while nominal hourly income has increased by 4.4 percent. That means that personal abundance has increased by between 5.2 percent and 20 percent.
Dividing the percentage change in the nominal money prices by the percentage change in nominal wages reveals the percentage change in the time price. Personal abundance is how much more you now enjoy for the same amount of time relative to last year. We get 13 percent more Thanksgiving this year for the same amount of time it took last year.
