Crops

Photo: Scott Olson (Getty Images)Another week, another coffee-is-good-for-you study that’s caught people’s attention. New researchfound a link between regular coffee consumption and a reduced risk of death. While the findings are the latest to suggest that coffee is perfectly fine to drink, they’re not necessarily strong proof that your daily cup of joe is life-saving.The study was conducted by researchers at Southern Medical University in China and was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. It looked at data from…

Jordan McDonald / Emerging Tech Brew: FarmWise, which builds a weeding robot that uses cameras, sensors, and AI to identify and cut down weeds without harming the crops, raises a $45M Series B — FarmWise sells its AI-powered weeding robots as a service to major commercial farms. — Weeds, the enemy of gardeners and farmers everywhere … Jordan McDonald / Emerging Tech Brew: FarmWise, which builds a weeding robot that uses cameras, sensors, and AI to identify and cut down…

Birds regularly eat large quantities of crops, and often become accustomed to stationary devices designed to scare them away. That's why scientists are now looking at using autonomous drones to do the job.In a study recently conducted by a team from Washington State University, cameras were installed around small plots of land, accompanied by customized multicopter drones. The live output of the cameras was continuously analyzed by a machine vision algorithm, which had been trained to recognize the wing-flapping movement…

The iron and steel industry produces about 4 billion tons of carbon emissions each year, accounting for around 10% of all energy-related climate pollution, according to a 2020 report by the International Energy Agency. Those figures have risen sharply this century, driven by rapid economic growth in China and elsewhere. The hefty emissions and increasingly strict climate policies in some areas, including Canada and the European Union, have started to compel some companies to explore cleaner ways of producing these…

A major consideration is the kind of crop you’d grow to feed a wide-scale BECCS system. That would probably be switchgrass or Miscanthus, another kind of grass, neither of which need as much water or added nutrients as a crop like corn. “They’re quite efficient,” says David Lawrence, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and coauthor of the new paper. They’re also perennial crops, so you don’t need to plant and till the ground all the time. “But in the context of the study, we found that…

Farmers are in a race against the clock to get their crops in the ground this week, with planting of corn, soybeans and wheat well behind their usual pace.Wet and cool temperatures in key parts of the Midwest have delayed farmers’ planting plans, leaving them days to get crops in the ground before they start to lose out on a bigger harvest. If they don’t, some grain traders say that already high prices for agricultural commodities could rise even more, with supplies thinning as farmers world-wide grapple with tough…

Researchers used two imaging and crystallography techniques to uncover the structure of a key plant defense protein called NPR1, which resembles “a gliding bird.” Credit: Xinnian Dong/HHMI/Duke UniversityBiologist Xinnian Dong says her “best Christmas gift ever” arrived in the form of a phone call. The call was from her longtime friend and collaborator at Duke University, Pei Zhou, who rang with long-awaited news: they had finally solved the structure of the key plant defense protein NPR1.Dong, a Howard Hughes Medical…