The year was 1969. Final plans for travel to the moon were being fine-tuned. On the checklist had been how to keep food safe for the astronauts during a spaceflight. Foodborne illnesses in the United States, and indeed worldwide, in the 1960s were not a rarity. So in the years leading up to lift-off, NASA worked with the Pillsbury Company and the United States Army Laboratories to ensure that the astronauts, orbiting in space,

Did you know that vehicles with steering wheels on the left are often cheaper to make than right hand-drive cars? They are mass-produced in much larger batches. But many drivers and governments were just unwilling to change to this dominant design. We humans are not so adept at change. Instead of embracing novel ways of thinking, we’d rather stick to the old ones. We cling onto what is safe, what is familiar or what we are already good at. We see this in the workplace, in our personal lives and in society as a whole. The world still can’t agree on using the metric system!

It is with great delight and pride that I offer my congratulations to all my colleagues at the World Food Programme for winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
It is a much deserved recognition of the untiring efforts of generations of humanitarian workers worldwide to defeat hunger.
It also turns the eyes of the international community towards the millions of people who suffer from or face the threat of food insecurity.

New research from the University of Kent's School of Economics sheds light on a long-standing obstacle to improving agricultural productivity in developing countries—the reluctance of small-scale farmers to adopt modern technologies because of the risks associated with them. The researchers conducted a series of psychological experiments with aquafarmers in 30 villages in four regions in southern Ghana to measure their aversion to risk and willingness to take gambles

Dr. Elizabeth Kellogg and her team at Donald Danforth Plant Science Center (Danforth Center) has generated the genome sequences of nearly 600 green millet plants and released a very high-quality reference Setaria viridis genome sequence. Their analysis also led to the identification of a gene related to seed dispersal in wild populations for the first time.

Transgenic hybrid corn seeds developed by Cuba's Centro de Ingeniería Genética y Biotecnología (CIGB) were recorded to have performed well during its harvest in central Cuba. Based on the amount that was harvested, it is possible for the country to reduce imports of corn for animal feed in the future. The transgenic corn that was harvested by the Juan Darias de Yaguajay Cooperative from the province of Sancti Spiritus amounted between 4.6 and 6 tons per hectare

FAO Director-General QU Dongyu today met the Regional Coordinator of the Parliamentary Front against Hunger (PFH) in Latin America and the Caribbean, Jairo Flores, who is also a Deputy of the Congress in Guatemala, to discuss ways of strengthening the collaboration between FAO and Parliaments in the region to fight poverty, hunger and malnutrition. The Deputy Coordinator of PFH for the Caribbean, Hamlet Sánchez Melo, Deputy of the National Congress in the Dominican Republic, also attended the meeting.

Potato prices in India started rising in December 2019 due to the delay in harvesting the early rabi crop (Figure 1). Although they fell a bit in February and March with the arrival of the new harvest, they have remained higher than average prices during the same period in previous years due to less area planted, lower yields and transportation issues.

A speedy transcription activator-like effector nuclease (TALEN) preparation protocol was developed based on widely used Golden Gate TALEN and TAL Effector Kit 2.0. This new protocol can be used to prepare any custom 18-bp binding TALENs in about 12 hours, which is faster than CRISPR. The results of the study are published in ACS Publications.

Scientists from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the University of the State of Paraná in Brazil have discovered that widespread fungal disease in plants can be controlled with a commercially available chemical that has been primarily used in medicine until now. In a comprehensive experiment, the team uncovered a new metabolic pathway that can be disrupted by acetohydroxamic acid, a substance used to treat harmful bacteria in the human stomach, which also inhibits urea breakdown.