Credit: Jacob van Hulsdonck (1582–1647), Commons.wikimedia.org Most of us are familiar with the pesky little flies that hover around fruit bowls and food scraps or get tipsy floating in a glass of beer or wine. What is less commonly known is that these little bugs are NOT fruit flies: they’re vinegar flies (Drosophila melanogaster), otherwise known as ferment flies. READ MORE… Published by The Guardian ..read more

Credit: World Vegetable Centre Natalie Parletta heads to Taiwan to visit the World Vegetable Center, a global organisation working to rescue vegetable diversity by neatly combining old and new techniques and technologies. When Sognigbé N’Danikou was a small boy, his grandmother cooked meals with yantoto, a wild green that grew on his mother’s farm in Ouèssè, a small village in Benin, West Africa, about 250 kilometres north of the capital Porto-Novo. “At that time, I fell in love with this indigenous vegetable,” he tells me, a warm smile transforming his serious demeanour. READ MORE… Published ..read more

They are one of the easier legumes to digest and fetch a higher crop price than Australian wheat, yet mung beans are not mainstream in the western world. But, while the vigna radiata has been nourishing populations across India and Asia for millennia, in recent decades enterprising scientists have started investigating the legume’s potential to improve food security and farmers’ incomes. READ MORE… Published by The Guardian ..read more

Prof Cassandra Szoeke. Photo credit: Jackson Gallagher/The Guardian For far too long, says Prof Cassandra Szoeke, discussions about women’s health have focused on what she calls “bikini health”, that is, relating only to areas of the body covered by a two-piece. But when the principal investigator of the longest ongoing study of women’s health in Australia gives presentations on this topic, she talks about brains and hearts. READ MORE… Published by The Guardian ..read more

Credit: Arterra Picture Library/Alamy (via The Guardian) Around one in 10 Australians – 2.7 million people – suffer from asthma, a chronic condition involving inflammation and narrowing of the airways. This can cause breathing difficulties, wheezing, chest tightness and coughing. Understandably, fear of triggering symptoms often leads to exercise avoidance. READ MORE… Published by The Guardian Australia ..read more

Australians love the great outdoors. Maybe that’s why our houses tend to be built like elaborate tents. If you’re not braced for camping, these frigid, poorly insulated homes can feel miserably cold during the chilly winter months. How can you get warm quickly, safely and efficiently, without being immobilised under several doonas or swathed in cumbersome layers of clothes? READ MORE… Published by The Guardian Australia ..read more

Using a series of Wild West style computer games, Australian researchers report in the journal Nature Human Behaviour that they have developed a way to accurately assess how impulsive people are – an important attribute for mental health. READ MORE… Published by Cosmos ..read more

Leo Skliros is happiest when he’s among his trees picking mangoes with a pole – especially in July. He also loves fishing. For many, the fruits of these activities could be quite a gamble. But for Skliros, not only is the fishing good in his area; he has his mangoes worked out as well. READ MORE… Published by The Guardian ..read more

A native Fijian bee from Nadi, Fiji. Credit: James Dorey Australian researchers have used DNA analysis to discover a refreshingly positive legacy of human colonisation on species abundance. While land clearing and environmental modification has led many species to extinction, it prompted native bees in tropical Fiji to dramatically increase their spread on the main island of Viti Levu, according to a study published in Molecular Evolution. READ MORE… Published by Cosmos ..read more

Credit: Tsunehiko Kohashi To communicate a message powerfully, well-timed pauses can be as important as the words, if not more so. In this, humans are not much different from other animals, it seems – even fish. Researchers studying African electric fish called mormyrids (Brienomyrus brachyistius) have revealed an underlying neurological mechanism for the phenomenon, as reported in the journal Current Biology. READ MORE… Published by Cosmos ..read more