Is the Roundup Ready revolution coming to a close? In the early 1990s, agribusiness giant Monsanto introduced its line of genetically modified crops that could tolerate the pesticide Roundup, allowing farmers to spray it far and wide without worrying about damaging their product.

Now, reports are bubbling up about the increased resistance some weeds are showing to Roundup, which could be the source of great worry, as 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of corn currently grown in the United States are the Roundup Ready varieties.

[F]armers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said [The New York Times].

And for the environmentally-minded, here’s something else to consider:

That threatens to reverse one of the agricultural advances bolstered by the Roundup revolution: minimum-till farming. By combining Roundup and Roundup Ready crops, farmers did not have to plow under the weeds to control them. That reduced erosion, the runoff of chemicals into waterways and the use of fuel for tractors [The New York Times].

For an in-depth take, and a historical reminder of how weeds have always evolved to thwart our means of killing them, check out DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer’s post.

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Image: flickr / Peter Blanchard

There are few more dramatic examples of humanity’s careless treatment of the earth than the Aral Sea.

The Aral’s precipitous decline began in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union began using river water to irrigate the mega-farms it established on the arid steppe. As the river water flowing into the sea slowed to a trickle, the Aral began drying up.

Once a colossal geographic feature—at 26,000 square miles (67,300 square kilometers), it was the fourth largest inland water body on earth in terms of surface area—the Aral shrank to hold just one-tenth of its original volume, becoming a tragic shadow of itself [National Geographic]. Fisheries collapsed, people moved away, towns were abandoned, and the Aral became famous primarily for its ghostly landscapes, with rusting ships lying on sand dunes.

But now scientists report that the northern sector of the Aral is making a recovery, due to a concerted effort from the Kazakh government, the World Bank, and scientists. A dam completed in 2005 raised water levels and decreased salinity, and increased the North Aral’s span by 20 percent. Soon native plants, stifled for years by the saltwater, began to sprout, and migrating birds like pelicans, flamingos, and ducks again began to visit the Aral.  Nowadays, “It’s a paradise for birds,” says Russian Academy of Sciences zoologist Nick Aladin, who has been studying the Aral since the 1970s. “It’s a place for pleasure, and it’s an enormous victory” [National Geographic]. Freshwater fish have also returned, leading to hopes of a resuscitated fishing industry. And while the South Aral remains in dire straits, researchers say the tentative revival of the North Aral gives them hope.

Another sea, another headache. Over in the Middle East, several countries are weighing a proposal that could give new life to the dwindling Dead Sea–but that may cause environmental problems of its own.

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Call it the green Nobels: Tonight in the San Francisco Opera House, six people will each receive a $150,000 Goldman Environmental Prize for their efforts to protect sharks and elephants, to promote sustainable agriculture, and to fight for other green causes.

The awards go out by region. Here in North America, the winner was Michigan’s Lynn Henning, a self-described “redneck from Michigan” who investigated huge factory farms there. Henning, 52, began testing water herself to track discharges from the farms into local waters. She has been threatened and sued and had dead animals dumped on her porch. But her tireless detective work has contributed to the state closing one factory farm and fining others more than $400,000 for 1,077 violations since 2000 [Detroit Free Press]. As Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality suffered staff cuts, Henning’s determination kept regulators focused, former department head Steve Chester says.

South and Central America’s winner, Randall Arauz of Costa Rica, turned his attention to stopping the wasteful practice of shark finning. Arauz used a secretly recorded video to expose a ship illegally landing 30 tons of shark fins, which led to the death of an estimated 30,000 sharks. The video caused outrage in Costa Rica, which Arauz used to mobilize opposition [San Francisco Chronicle]. The Costa Rican government banned the practice, and its rules are now the model for those trying to work up international agreements against shark finning. (Worldwide restrictions were just shot down at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.)

The other winners:

In Europe, Malgorzata Gorska of Poland, who stopped a highway project that would have cut through a forest.

In Asia, Sereivathana Tuy of Cambodia, who taught farmers how to ward of wandering Asian elephants rather than kill them.

In Africa, Thuli Brilliance Makama of Swaziland. This environmental lawyer won a fight for local residents to have more say in environmental decisions by the government, especially those regarding the expansions of game parks that would force people off the land.

And for island nations, Cuban Humberto Rios Labrada, who pushed for more crop diversity and less pesticide use in Cuban agriculture.

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Image: NASA

This spring, many beekeepers across America opened their hives and found ruin within. At a time when they should have been buzzing with activity, the hives were half-empty, with most adult bees having flown off to die. A new federal survey indicates that 2010 has been the worst year so far for bee deaths. Another study suggests that pesticides might be to blame for the mass wipeout of adult honeybees.

This winter’s die-off was the continuation of a four-year trend. At any given point, beekeepers can expect to see 15 to 20 percent of their bees wiped out due to natural causes or harsh weather. But this alarming phenomenon, termed colony collapse disorder (CCD), has seen millions of bees perish in a mysterious epidemic, with some farmers losing 30 to 90 percent of their hives.

As for the cause of this epidemic, experts say their best guess is that many factors are combining to sicken bees, with the list of culprits including parasites, viruses, bacteria, poor nutrition, and pesticides. Now a new study published in the scientific journal PLoS ONE strengthens the case for pesticides’ culpability.

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After 12 years of refusing to let any new genetically modified food crops take root in the European Union, the EU has finally given the go-ahead to an engineered potato. However, the GM potatoes won’t end up in French pomme frites or German potato dumplings, as they’ve been approved only for industrial or animal feed purposes. Regulators say the high-starch spuds will likely be used by paper and textile companies.

The Amflora potato was created by the German chemical company BASF and will be cultivated this year on a commercial scale of 250 hectares in the Czech Republic, Sweden, and Germany. Before Amflora, only one other GMO had been approved for cultivation in the EU — Monsanto’s MON810 maize, in 1998 — in spite of repeated findings from the European Food Safety Authority that such products did not pose health risks [Financial Times]. And even though that GM maize variety was officially approved by the EU, a number of European countries have banned its cultivation.

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Atrazine, one of the world’s most widely used herbicides, is wreaking havoc on the sex lives of male frogs. In a new experiment, exposure to the chemical emasculated more than half of the male African claw frogs in the study, and made one in ten turn into females. The results, which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have raised concerns that the herbicide found in waterways is altering amphibians’ hormones, and could potentially have similar effects on other animals, including humans.

Biologist Tyrone Hayes studied 40 male control tadpoles along with 40 male tadpoles reared in water tainted with atrazine. The levels of the chemical matched the levels the frogs would encounter in their natural settings, and was also within the drinking water standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency. The results showed that 75 percent of male tadpoles reared in atrazine-contaminated water developed into frogs that had low testosterone levels, decreased breeding gland size, feminized laryngeal development, suppressed mating behavior, reduced sperm production and decreased fertility, while the control group showed features typically found in male frogs [AFP]. Most of these “chemically castrated” frogs were unable to reproduce.

The rest of the results were even more dramatic. Ten percent of tadpoles raised in the chemically tainted water developed into frogs with male genetics but female anatomy, and some of these were actually able to breed and produce eggs. The offspring, researchers found, were all male because both parents contributed male genes. Scientists worry that the sex-reversed males and the subsequent production of all-male offspring is skewing the sex ratio of wild frog populations, and may be contributing to the decline of frog populations worldwide.

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After much debate over balancing the need for independent scientific testing and the needs of poor Indian farmers, the Indian government has decided to put on hold the introduction of genetically modified eggplant in the country. The move hampers the expansion of seed makers including Monsanto Co. in the world’s second-most populous nation [BusinessWeek]. The government said there was no overriding food security argument for GM eggplant, and added that more safety studies needed to be done before the ban could be reconsidered.

There is little evidence that GMO eggplant would cause harm to people eating it, but the crop is consumed very often in India, and some scientists and regulators argued that they needed more proof that long-term consumption wouldn’t cause a problem. “It is my duty to adopt a cautious, precautionary principle-based approach and impose a moratorium on the release of Bt Brinjal till such time independent scientific studies establish, to the satisfaction of both the public and professionals, the safety of the product” [Daily News and Analysis], said the environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, who delivered the announcement.

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There’s nothing like the round number at the start of a new decade to get everyone prognosticating (yes, we know some of you are in the crowd that says the new decade doesn’t begin until 2011; OK, fine). To predict what the scientific scene will be like in 2020, the journal Nature brought in experts from 18 fields. Though the collection doesn’t encapsulate the “world of tomorrow” feel of, say, the old Omni magazine, it’s still packed with sunny (and scary) forecasts. Some show lingering uncertainty, some unbridled optimism, and some give warnings to the world to make a much-needed course correction. Here are five we thought were particularly telling.

1. In 2020, Google defines your reality (even more than it does already).

Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, tackles the question of where search will be a decade hence. Advanced, he says, but also troublesome: Most searches will be spoken rather than typed, and designers will be experimenting with search systems that read your brain waves. “Users will decide how much of their lives they want to share with search engines, and in what ways”—such is Norvig’s polite description of a world with even less digital privacy than today’s.

What search engines give you back will change, too. Particularly, he says, they will come up with a way to judge relevance and quality that doesn’t rely on popularity: “Thus, a site that claims that the Moon landings were a hoax and seems to have a coherent argument structure will be judged to be lower quality than a legitimate astronomy site, because the premises of the hoax argument are at odds with reality.”

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Keep an eye on all that leftover squash casserole and sweet potato souffle in the fridge. It would be a shame if it went bad, because Americans waste a staggering amount of food every year. Nearly 40 percent of the food supply is wasted in the United States alone, according to a new study, published in the journal PLoS ONE.

Researchers Kevin Hall and Carson Chow analyzed average body weight in the United States from 1974 to 2003 and figured out how much food people were eating during this period. Hall and Chow assumed that levels of physical activity haven’t changed; some researchers think that activity has decreased, but Hall and Chow say their assumption is conservative. Then they compared that amount with estimates of the food available for U.S. consumers, as reported by the U.S. government to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The difference between calories available and calories consumed, they say, is food wasted [ScienceNOW Daily News]. They dubbed the difference the “missing mass of American food,” and say it’s the equivalent to each person in the United States wasting 1,450 calories-worth of food per day.

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From an ancient Peruvian civilization comes this warning: Don’t chop down all your trees, or there will be hell to pay.

The Nazca people are famous for the enormous earthworks they carved into an arid plateau, in designs that range from simple geometrical forms to representations of animals like hummingbirds, lizards, and monkeys. They were previously known to have disappeared around A.D. 500, when massive floods powered by El Niño ravaged the valley where they made their home. Now, a new study that examined the pollen in buried layers of soil in order to trace the horticultural history of the land may have revealed why those floods were so devastating.

The Ica Valley, about 120 miles south of Lima, is barren today but was once a riverine oasis — a fertile landscape capable of supporting many people. The key to that fertility was a tree called the huarango [Los Angeles Times]. The huarango tree provided wood for building and fuel, and seed pods that can be ground up and used in flour or beer. Its branches caught the water in morning mists, and its roots stabilized the topsoil. Says lead researcher David Beresford-Jones: “These were very special forests…. It is the ecological keystone species in the desert zone enhancing soil fertility and moisture and underpinning the floodplain with one of the deepest root systems of any tree known” [BBC News].

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Lord Nicholas Stern, the British economist who produced an influential report on the potential costs of global warming, is strongly urging the British public to go vegetarian in order to slow the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. Said Stern: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better” [The Times]. Stern also suggested that climate change legislation that makes it more expensive to generate greenhouse gases could soon force meat producers to raise prices, which might lower consumption.

In a 2006 report, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concluded that worldwide livestock farming generates 18% of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions. By comparison, it said, all the world’s cars, trains, planes and boats accounted for a combined 13% of greenhouse gas emissions [BBC News]. The gases are produced by each step of livestock production. Take cows, for example. First forested land is cleared for cattle grazing or for agricultural operations that generate livestock feed, then there’s the methane emitted by burping cows and the nitrous oxide in their manure, and finally there are the energy costs associated with slaughtering the cows and transporting the meat.

Not everyone is calling for the drastic measure of eliminating meat entirely from our diets. Many experts agree that we could make a good start merely by dropping meat one day a week. This is what the citizens of the Belgian city of Ghent have been doing, voluntarily, all this year, without noticeable ill effects [The Times].

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Image: flickr / Cathy, Sam, Max and Mai

Scientists have used nanotechnology in some bizarre applications—nanotube speakers and glue are just two examples. Now carbon nanotubes may have a use as fertilizer, according to a new study. Plant biologist Mariya Khodakovskaya and nanotechnologist Alexandru Biris … planted tomato seeds in a growth medium that contained carbon nanotubes. They found that the seeds germinated sooner and seedlings grew faster than those in a non-treated medium [New Scientist]. After 12 days, 72 percent of the treated seeds had germinated compared with 30 percent of the untreated group. After four weeks, the nanotube-supplemented seeds were twice as tall and had twice the biomass. However, the root systems in both groups were roughly the same.

Similar findings have been reported previously, but until now nobody understood how nanotubes sped and enhanced plant growth. The new study, which recently appeared in the journal ACS Nano, proposes that nanotubes poke holes in the seeds, which allows water to seep in and speeds up germination. However, some researchers are skeptical that a complex process like germination can be enhanced simply by poking holes in the seed’s coating, and at least one researcher is suggesting that the nanotubes cause a hormonal imbalance in the plants.

Before nanotubes could become a commercial fertilizer, their effect on the environment would have to be studied, with close attention to how nanotubes move through the food chain. Some single-walled nanotubes are toxic to some insects; testing on mice has found multi-layer nanotubes (like the kind used in the study) have carcinogenic effects similar to those of asbestos [Popular Science].

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Image: flickr / wit

In an ambitious attempt to assess how humans are doing as stewards of planet earth, 28 leading scientists have drawn up a list of nine “planetary boundaries” that must not be crossed if we want to avoid drastically changing the global environment and imperiling our own existence. The only problem is, we’ve already crossed three of those thresholds.

The paper, published in Nature (and available for free), aims to define a “safe operating space” for human life on the planet. It’s a first-draft users’ manual for an era that scientists dub the “anthropocene,” in which nearly seven billion resource-hungry humans have come to dominate ecological change on Earth [Wired.com]. What follows is a list of the nine environmental factors, and how we’re doing on living within each limit.

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Norman E. Borlaug, a world-renowned American botanist, died this past Saturday at his home in Dallas from complications due to cancer. Borlaug, who was 95, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for starting the “Green Revolution” that dramatically increased food production in developing nations and saved countless people from starvation [Washington Post]. Borlaug pioneered high-yield agricultural techniques, using cross-bred crops and nitrogen fertilizers, which helped India, Mexico, and other nations combat hunger and become self-sufficient producers of grains.

“Civilization as it is known today could not have evolved, nor can it survive, without an adequate food supply,” said Borlaug during his Nobel Lecture in 1970. “Yet food is something that is taken for granted by most world leaders despite the fact that more than half of the population of the world is hungry. Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.”

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Meat may be tasty, but many people object to way that chickens, cows, and other animals are treated at so-called “factory farms,” which produce massive amounts of edible flesh. So could animals that have been genetically engineered to not feel pain (or at least not be bothered by the sensation) offer a solution to an ethical dilemma posed by these meat factories?

That’s what one philosopher asked in a paper published in the journal Neuroethics, concluding that we have an ethical duty to consider the option. “If we can’t do away with factory farming, we should at least take steps to minimise the amount of suffering that is caused” [New Scientist] by practices such as de-beaking chickens without anesthesia, says author Adam Shriver. But because pain serves as an important warning sign, these so-called “pain-free” animals would still be able to sense pain–they just wouldn’t be bothered by it. Researchers seek ways to eliminate the suffering caused by pain without tampering with the physical sensation [New Scientist].

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