Agriculture

Earth

Mixing trees and crops can help both farmers and the climate

Agriculture is a major driver of climate change and biodiversity loss. But integrating trees into farming practices can boost food production, store carbon and save species.

Plants

How Romanesco cauliflower forms its spiraling fractals

By tweaking just three genes in a common lab plant, scientists have discovered the mechanism responsible for one of nature’s most impressive fractals.

Agriculture

A tweaked yeast can make ethanol from cornstalks and a harvest’s other leftovers

By genetically modifying baker’s yeast, scientists figured out how to get almost as much ethanol from cornstalks as kernels.

Animals

Focusing on Asian giant hornets distorts the view of invasive species

2021’s first “murder hornet” is yet another arrival. This is the not-so-new normal.

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.