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POPSMan Made Life Whoa. The implications from this will be enormous. If this project succeeds expect a concerted campaign of denial and attack from the religious conservatives.
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POPSThe coming famine "In light of all these hurdles, as I see it, the challenge is to double world food output by 2050 using less land, far less water and fewer nutrients – all in the teeth of increasing rates of drought. And we need to do it sustainably." "I believe we are quite capable of solving these issues through good science and good policy. In the first instance, we need to massively increase global public investment in agricultural research and development. Then we need to make sure the fruits of that research reach farmers everywhere. I also think that commercial wild harvests, such as fishing and forestry, should be phased out in favour of sustainable farming that dovetails with the local environment."
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POPSA life revealed: "The Afghan girl", seventeen years later
More: In the mid-1990s, during a lull in the fighting, Sharbat Gula went home to her village in the foothills of mountains veiled by snow. To live in this earthen-colored village at the end of a thread of path means to scratch out an existence, nothing more. There are terraces planted with corn, wheat, and rice, some walnut trees, a stream that spills down the mountain (except in times of drought), but no school, clinic, roads, or running water. Here is the bare outline of her day. She rises before sunrise and prays. She fetches water from the stream. She cooks, cleans, does laundry. She cares for her children; they are the center of her life. Robina is 13. Zahida is three. Alia, the baby, is one. A fourth daughter died in infancy. Sharbat has never known a happy day, her brother says, except perhaps the day of her marriage… "I want my daughters to have skills," she said. "I wanted to finish school but could not. I was sorry when I had to leave."
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POPS"Boudicca's gold hoard unearthed" continues: This is the first major Icenian gold coin hoard found but the tribe had a tradition of making votive offerings of other gold objects. At one of their major religious centres, Snettisham in northern Norfolk, the tribe buried at least 30kg of gold and silver jewellery. also within a rectilinear enclosure.
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POPSThe Birth Control of Yesteryear
Unlike many other medicines of its time, silphium was not thought of as a mere folk remedy; Scholars and doctors of the day openly praised the plant's effectiveness as a contraceptive. Ancient Rome's foremost gynecologist– a physician named Soranus– wrote that women should drink the silphium juice with water once a month since "it not only prevents conception but also destroys anything existing." Alternatively, a tuft of wool could be soaked in the juice and inserted into the vagina as a pessary. During laserwort's heyday, Rome's birth rate decreased considerably despite increasing life expectancy, plentiful food, and relatively few wars or epidemics, and some historians cite this as evidence of the herb's effectiveness. Unfortunately, modern science will probably never determine whether the fennel's extract was really an effective form of parenthood prevention, nor will it measure laserwort's merit as a medicine. By the end of the first century AD, following a fifty year decline in s
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POPSHunger, water scarcity displaces thousands of Afghans Faced by violence in the past two years, the bloodiest since the Taliban's ouster in 2001, and frustration from many Afghans about perceived lack of development, the government has been seeking ways to import flour or wheat to curb rising food prices
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POPSThe Age Of Megafires "You know, there are a lot of people who don't believe in climate change," Pelley remarks. "You won't find them on the fire line in the American West anymore," Tom Boatner says. "'Cause we've had climate change beat into us over the last ten or fifteen years. We know what we’re seeing, and we're dealing with a period of climate, in terms of temperature and humidity and drought that's different than anything people have seen in our lifetimes." They need some of our angry, know it all, bring on Armageddon clippers to set them straight.
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POPSIran Buys Wheat From US For 1st time in 27 years. Capitalist Americans at work I guess. However, I hope they are charging an arm & a leg OR we are using some better bargaining chips. As Americans, we've bent over backwards to do our best to see that the *average* population does not suffer because of the policies of it's government; however....when does the benefactor say "stop biting the hand that feeds you"?
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POPS2009 World Food Prize awarded to Ethiopian Scientist
Born in 1950, Gebisa Ejeta grew up in a one-room thatched hut with a mud floor, in a rural village in west-central Ethiopia. Walking 20 kilometers every Sunday night to attend school during the week Ejeta’s high academic standing earned him financial assistance and entrance to the secondary-level Jimma Agricultural and Technical School, which had been established by Oklahoma State University under the U.S. government’s Point Four Program. After graduating with distinction, Ejeta entered Alemaya College (also established by OSU and supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development) in eastern Ethiopia. He received his bachelor’s degree in plant science in 1973. In 1973, his college mentor introduced Ejeta to a renowned sorghum researcher, Dr. John Axtell of Purdue University, who invited him to assist in collecting sorghum species from around the country Ejeta entered Purdue in 1974, earning his Ph.D. in plant breeding and genetics. Alot more good reading at t
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POPSNext major drought in Africa will slay millions Study: over the last 3,000 years, severe drought every 30 to 65 years; no reason to assume it won't happen again soon. With increase in population, death tolls of the next could be in the millions, unless the world prepares.
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