Blogs / Discoblog

Hoping to fight off “colony collapse disorder,” the mysterious affliction that has devastated honeybee colonies, some British scientists want to get bees to start washing their feet—but with the intention of getting them dirty, not clean.

A team of University of Warwick researchers led by Dave Chandler believes that parasitic Varroa mites might be behind the honeybee’s decline; the mites can feed on young or old bees, and their presence usually spells doom for the entire colony. Varroas develop resistance to chemical pesticides, too, so the scientists turned to a more natural threat—fungi.

(more…)

Hydroponic farming is coming to the U.K.—70 soccer fields worth of it.

Outside of Birchington in far southeastern England, workers are finishing the first of what will be seven giant greenhouses for growing tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. Thanet Earth, as the complex is cleverly called, will cover around 220 acres of Kent County by its 2010 completion, according to the Daily Mail. In the greenhouses, plants will hang from a 26-foot-high ceiling. A drip will supply them with water, and also the nutrients they need and would normally take from soil, like potassium, magnesium, phosphate, and nitrogen. Greenhouse operators will deploy bees to pollinate the plants, and wasps to keep pests like aphids from wrecking their rows and rows of produce.

(more…)

Advocates of “organic” or “natural” foods get up in arms about some of the practices at big commercial hog farms—especially putting antibiotics into the livestock feed to make the animals grow faster. The idea simply makes some people uncomfortable, but more importantly, the overuse of antibiotics in animals, just like in hospitals, can worsen the problem of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. According to a study out of Ohio State University, however, pigs that went without antibiotics were more likely to carry human pathogens like salmonella and trichinella.

The team of scientists led by Wondwossen Gebreyes studied around 600 pigs. About half lived in indoor commercial hog farms and received antibiotics; the other half lived the old-fashioned way, outdoors and antibiotic-free. The non-treated swine showed more salmonella infections, 54 percent compared to 39 percent of the treated pigs, and more infections of toxoplasma and trichinella.

(more…)

In a remote region in southern Texas, a horde of eight-legged creatures feasts on a flock of helpless prey. These tiny parasites are called fever ticks, and they’re threatening to invade the U.S. and decimate our cattle population. But not if the Tick Riders can stop them.

(more…)

The climate blog Celsias offers some intriguing insight into geoengineering. Recently spotlighted on DISCOVER’s website, geoengineering involves drastic, planet-scale alterations to the climate so Earth remains habitable for humans, despite our impressive negligence. The geoengineering schemes highlighted in the DISCOVER slideshow include blocking the sun with trillions of space-based shields and shading ourselves with stratospheric sulfur injections—but these are not the only innovative ways to help our climate.

(more…)