It's not a single pesticide or virus stressing honey bees, and affecting their health, but exposure to a complex web of multiple interacting stressors encountered while at work pollinating crops, found new research. Scientists have been unable to explain increasing colony mortality, even after decades of research examining the role of specific pesticides, parasitic mites, viruses or genetics. This led the research team to wonder if previous studies were missing something by focusing on one stressor at a time ..read more

The growing need for antibiotic-free products has challenged producers to decrease or completely stop using antimicrobials as feed supplements in the diet of broiler chickens to improve feed efficiency, growth rate and intestinal health. A research team conducted a study of natural feed additives that are promising alternatives to substitute for antimicrobial growth promoters ..read more

Using a pair of sensors made from carbon nanotubes, researchers discovered signals that help plants respond to stresses such as heat, light, or attack from insects or bacteria. Farmers could use these sensors to monitor threats to their crops, allowing them to intervene before the crops are lost ..read more

To make weeding easier, scientists suggest bioengineering crops to be colorful or to have differently shaped leaves so that they can be more easily distinguished from their wild and weedy counterparts. This could involve altering the crops' genomes so that they express pigments that are already produced by many plants, for example, anthocyanins, which make blueberries blue, or carotenoids, which make carrots orange. Then, they say, weeding robots could be trained to remove only the weeds using machine learning ..read more

Scientists have summarized microbial food production strategies ..read more

Researchers have created a method that extracts over 80 percent of the available protein in grain leftovers from brewing beer, commonly known as brewers' spent grain ..read more

Vitamin B1 is an essential micronutrient for human beings. Its deficiency is the cause of numerous diseases of the nervous and cardiovascular systems. Researchers have achieved a significant advance in the fight against vitamin B1 deficiency, frequently associated with a rice-based diet. By specifically targeting the nourishing tissues of the rice grain, the scientists have succeeded in considerably increasing its vitamin B1 content, without compromising agronomic yield. These results could help solve a major public health problem in regions where rice is the staple food ..read more

Are we missing the forest for the trees? More than timber grows in forests -- including products worth many tens of billions of dollars. Because these goods go unrecorded in official trade statistics, their economic value escapes our attention. As a result, clear opportunities to combat poverty are being missed, according to an economist ..read more

A study has found that market forces have provided good food price stability over the past half century, despite extreme weather conditions ..read more

A ..read more