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Category: food – Page 321

You might not give it more than a passing thought, but groundwater is a vital freshwater resource. In Australia alone, the reserves of groundwater help to earn the nation a steady A$34 billion a year from mining, food production and manufacturing.

But it’s also a vulnerable resource. Worldwide, about 1.7 billion people live in regions where groundwater is under stress, 60 percent of them in India and China.

US and Canadian researchers recently calculated the total amount of the world’s groundwater and estimated that it is equivalent to a lake 180 metres deep covering the entire Earth. This makes groundwater the largest active freshwater resource on the planet.

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Driven by a need for convenience, an IT specialist from Sweden just opened the country’s first unstaffed store, which uses an app for access and scanning technology to make purchases.

After dropping what turned out to be his last jar of baby food on the floor, Robert Ilijason, who was then home alone with his son, had no choice but to make a drive to find a supermarket that was open and buy a new one.

This was no easy task, as shops close early in many rural areas, leaving individuals with nowhere to go to get any last minute necessities late at night.

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Bad news if you use RoundUp.

Local councils across Australia that use the weed killer glyphosate on nature-strips and playgrounds are being warned that the chemical probably causes cancer.

An updated World Health Organisation (WHO) warning for the herbicide, often trade marked as Roundup, is also routinely used in household gardens and farms.

The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) recently upgraded its assessment of glyphosate from “possibly” to “probably carcinogenic to humans”, though the level of risk is the same as the IARC’s findings on red meat.

Continue reading “Round Up linked to cancer” | >

Annual list highlights the most important technology milestones.

Cambridge, MA – February 23, 2016: Today, MIT Technology Review publishes its annual 10 Breakthrough Technologies list (www.technologyreview.com/lists/technologies). The list identifies innovations from the past year that solve difficult problems or create powerful new ways of using technology. These are the breakthroughs that will matter for years to come.

Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher, states, “Each year, our editors search the globe to create this important list. From Beijing, China, where researchers are creating fungus-resistant wheat and boosting rice crop yields, to Seattle, where a spin-off company of the University of Washington is commercializing “passive Wi-Fi,” making data connections using 1/10,000th as much power as existing Wi-Fi, the 10 Breakthrough Technologies represent the advancements we feel have the greatest potential to impact our lives for years to come.”

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Around the world, the animals that pollinate our food crops — more than 20,000 species of bees, butterflies, bats and many others — are the subject of growing attention. An increasing number of pollinator species are thought to be in decline, threatened by a variety of mostly human pressures, and their struggles could pose significant risks for global food security and public health.

Until now, most assessments of pollinator health have been conducted on a regional basis, focusing on certain countries or parts of the world. But this week, a United Nations organization has released the first-ever global assessment of pollinators, highlighting their importance for worldwide food and nutrition, describing the threats they currently face and outlining strategies to protect them.

The report, which was released Friday by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), has been in the works since the summer of 2014. The research team consisted of more than 70 experts, who drew on the most up-to-date global pollinator science, as well as local and indigenous knowledge, to complete the assessment.

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