Link: Finding the lost rice of the American South
The New York Times has a fascinating story about a lost strain of rice that once was widely grown by slaves and freedmen in the South: “Finding a Lost Strain...
The New York Times has a fascinating story about a lost strain of rice that once was widely grown by slaves and freedmen in the South: “Finding a Lost Strain...
I just love this article about hybridization and the origins of different varieties of citrus fruits: “Genomics of the origin and evolution of Citrus”.
Annalee Newitz has written an article about Natalie Mueller’s search for the ancient food crops of North America: “Hunting for the ancient lost farms of Nort...
On the subject of long-running experiments in biology, Atlas Obscura has a story about a 137-year-old experiment in the germination of common weeds: “The wor...
Notable paper: Rangan H, Bell KL, Baum DA, Fowler R, McConvell P, et al. (2015) New Genetic and Linguistic Analyses Show Ancient Human Influence on Baobab Ev...
Karen Hardy and colleagues (2013) have a brief paper in a recent issue of Antiquity putting into context their recent finding about possible medicinal plant ...
An increasing number of authors of scientific papers are writing good blog summaries of their work. The really great part is that the authors tend to give ba...
An interesting essay in the New York Times today by Jo Robinson: “Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food”. The theme is that plant domestication selected for...
Dental plaque is a biofilm made up of bacteria adhering to the enamel surface of the teeth. Plaque is soft but over many days can gradually calcify. The hard...
Re: MSA sorghum use and starches adhering to tools non-obvious for seed processing:
Julio Mercader reports in a short Science paper that the MSA stone artifacts from Ngalue cave, Mozambique, preserve thousands of grains of sorghum starch, al...
In Science this week, Nira Alperson-Afil and colleagues report on recent excavations at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel. I saw some of this research presented a...
One of my favorite art bloggers, Katherine Tyrell, has an illustrated review of a Kew Gardens exhibition, titled “The Art of Plant Evolution”.
On occasion, I point out interesting findings from archaeological chemistry and microscopic study of site formation processes. Last month, I pointed to the a...
I don’t read Spanish well, but I’m going to go ahead and link a news article in a Spanish journal about Neandertal diet and cooking at the Spanish site of El...
On the subject of weeds and biological invasions, touched on in this week’s “Practical Evolution” essay, the NY Times ran a long piece last week about the re...
This is the first in a series of essays titled, "Practical Evolution." Here are links to the whole series and the series introduction. I've decided to break ...