seeds

The ancestor of your stir-fry might be growing closer than you think. Wild field mustard, or Brassica rapa, is an unassuming plant that reaches a couple of feet tall and produces clusters of small, yellow flowers perched atop spindly green stalks. It is the nearest wild relative to such produce aisle hits as turnips, napa cabbage, and bok choy. Outside of farm fields, feral forms of the plant are found worldwide thanks to human introductions, and these free-growing B. rapa varieties are edible, too. The plant has likely…

Science in meter and verse Credit: J. Berger/BRG/Global Crop Diversity TrustAdvertisement Hoarded at the heart of an Arctic mountain, within an archipelago of snow: an ark of seeds. Cocooned against soil, nuclear bodies hunker and wait for some future hungerscape. A gathering of crops, varied faces folded into foil, shuttered from the earth. Lentil, dark and round and pebble-smooth. Barley's slender husk of an eye. Each wrinkled chickpea the embryonic head of a bird. Sister…

When you spawn into a Minecraft world, it uses a seed number to generate … well, everything. This seed is the core code that builds the world and decides your spawn point in it. The cool part is that if you find a world you really like, you can copy, save, and share the seed. The result is a growing collection of very useful or interesting seeds that are perfect for players who want something new — but not entirely random — to explore. Down below are some of our favorites! Note: These seeds are designed to work with…

Because seeds may contain yield-reducing fungi, bacteria or viruses, they're often chemically treated before they're sold to farmers. A new mobile system, however, substitutes microbe-killing electrons for harsh and eco-unfriendly chemicals.The problem with existing chemical treatments lies in the fact that the fungicides and antibacterial compounds deposited onto the seeds may be harmful both to farmers, and to the environment in which the seeds are planted.As far back as the 1980s, scientists began looking into using…

When the Artemis program returns humans to the Moon in (hopefully) a few years' time, there are considerable logistics that need to be addressed for keeping such fragile beings alive in such a hostile environment.  Not least is the issue of food. Space agencies involved in the International Space Station are very experienced, by now, in providing pre-packed provisions, but there are advantages to having access to fresh food, including to both physical and mental health.If lunar soil were to prove an amenable medium for…