© Robert Glenn Ketchum
Seed Bank Concerns
The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture met in June 09 in Tunis with the hopes of encouraging reluctant countries to contribute seeds from their seed banks to a “doomsday vault” in Norway. Five of the 120 country signatories are not allowing “free and timely” access to their seeds (India, Iran, Turkey, China and Ethiopia) as prescribed by the treaty due to seemingly past inequities, i.e. the rich counties get the benefit of the seeds with the poor countries that provide the seeds getting nothing in return. This is particularly disturbing for Ethiopia whose barley landrace saved North America’s crop from a barley yellow dwarf virus epidemic twenty years ago. And today Ethiopia’s traditional wheat varieties may hold the key to battling Ug99, an especially serious fungus, which is destroying wheat crops worldwide. Another issue for the famine ravaged country is support for its traditional farmers whose skill and experience are crucial in selecting which seeds to breed. In the closing days the treaty’s governing body agreed to a biodiversity fund to support such farmers, which many hope is a crucial turning point. For more information, go to Science magazine, volume 324, 12 June 2009 or log onto www.sciencemag.org. — June 2009Long-Term Effects of CO2 Emissions
The scientific community has long agreed that even if all CO2 emissions were to halt today, the world would continue to see sea-level rise for some time to come. The question has always been how long this time period would be. In the 12 June 2009 issue of Science, researchers Eby et al. “... use a complex, coupled climate-carbon cycle model to investigate how long it will take for half of the total emissions to be removed from the atmosphere, what the maximum global average sea surface temperature increase will be, and how long it will take for 80 percent of that sea surface thermal anomaly to decay.” Their results suggest thousands of years or more. Go to www.sciencemag.org for more complete information. — June 2009Economic Development Impacts in the Amazon
An investigation by Rodrigues et al. on the economic development impacts within the Brazilian Amazon published in the 12 June 2009 issue of Science show that “... pre-and post-frontier levels of development are similarly low, indicating a pattern of boom and bust.” In other words, no economic net gain exists for 300 municipalities across the country’s poorest region as a result of Amazonian deforestation for cattle-raising and agriculture. For more information on this investigation, log onto www.sciencemag.org. — June 2009High Info Transfer Rates and Neuro Impacts
Most people know that higher band widths are required for high data communication information transfer rates. However, what wasn’t known is how this increased rate of information transfer affected the recipient. In the 12 June 2009 issue of Science, Ethofer et al. show that recipients are processing more information as well, including emotional overtones, which register in the brain. The researchers conclude that “... pseudowords spoken with five distinct emotional melodies (anger, sadness, relief, joy, or neutrality) do evoke recognizable neural responses within the auditory cortex ... suggesting a possible affective organization within the auditory cortex.” For more detailed information on this research, go to www.sciencemag.org. — June 2009
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