Over the next 50 years, human society and plant science will face the greatest conservation challenge in history: supporting a peak population of perhaps 8 billion mostly-affluent humans—and their pets—without taking the rest of the planet’s land away from nature. Then, with their spare land, the farmers are expected to free the world from its [...]
Forbes.com
Cathy Bussewitz
July 20, 2007
Excerpt…
TOKYO – As U.S. baseball strikeout champion, Nolan Ryan used to hurl a lot of cowhide. In Japan on Friday, he pitched a different bovine product: U.S. beef.
The retired Hall of Famer – and now Texas cattle rancher and beef promoter – visited Tokyo to assure Japanese consumers and regulators that U.S. [...]
Those of you who regularly read my work know that I believe in conventional milk. It is perfectly safe, perfectly nutritious, and perfectly refreshing. So what is with this push from some groups to make raw milk sales in supermarkets legal? For those of you who don’t know what raw milk is, [...]
A team of water experts says the pattern of droughts and floods in South Africa shows our global warming was triggered by the variability of the sun’s irradiance rather than by human-emitted CO2. They say variations in South African rainfall patterns are keyed to periodic reversals of the sun’s magnetic field—and to the constantly changing [...]
MSNBC
By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek
July 30, 2007 Issue
Excerpt…
It’s a trifecta much bigger and rarer than an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony. Only five people in history have ever won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal: Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel … and Norman [...]
The Congress is trying urgently to write a new farm bill—but it can’t think of an excuse for passing it. The cold reality, of course, is simply that half of the U.S. Senate is elected in states where the farm vote is significant, and neither party wants to lose an election because of a few [...]
Another scientist has added his voice to the Global Warming debate. Canadian climatologist Tim Patterson says the sun drives the earth’s climate changes—and Earth’s current global warming is a direct result of a long, moderate 1,500-year cycle in the sun’s irradiance.
Patterson says he learned of the 1,500-year climate cycle while studying cycles in [...]
Fort Wayne News Sentinel
Jennifer L. Boen
Only 3 vCJD cases in the U.S. were confirmed; all had links to U.K. beef.
Excerpt…
The news that since January four northeast Indiana residents are suspected to have died from a progressive, fatal neurodegenerative disease often mistaken for “mad-cow disease†should not overly concern residents, public health officials say.
The cluster of [...]
The journal Science editorialized on May 23rd that the world is becoming too dependent on Roundup-Ready biotech crops. It claimed agriculture had become as dependent on glyphosate for weed control as human medicine had become on antibiotics. The journal predicted: “There is going to be an epidemic of glyphosate-resistant weeds.â€
In the very same issue, [...]
