BASF Plant Science is relocating from its European headquarters to the US, a move prompted by the European public’s hostility to genetically modified (GM) crops, its president Peter Eckes said. The German company is also cancelling the development and commercialization of all projects destined solely for the European market and in future will concentrate on markets in America and Asia. Continue reading BASF moves GM crop research to US
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A Cold July in Baghdad
Researchers in Spain are tapping a new database in their search for historic climate patterns: medieval Arab history. Physicist Fernando Domínguez-Castro of the University of Extremadura in Badajoz, Spain, and his colleagues, including a historian of Arab culture, examined references to droughts, floods, and hail in ten Arab sources written between 816 C.E. and 1009 C.E.. One text told of nights during a Baghdad summer that were so cold that residents bundled up inside their homes rather than sleeping on roofs as was the custom, the team reported in Weather. Continue reading A Cold July in Baghdad
Signs of progress
WHERE the internet has yet to take firm root, people plump for the next-best thing. In many emerging markets this means text messaging. Customers have embraced the short message service (SMS) not just to communicate with each other, but also to get weather forecasts, bus schedules and traffic information, or to vote in television talent shows. Authorities use it for public announcements. Companies text targeted advertising. India even has a rudimentary SMS-based social network.
The reason texting isn’t even more popular in such places has to do with the fact that—despite indignant claims in some quarters that texting is killing literacy—texters must be able to read and write. Continue reading Signs of progress
Ocean exploration, from empire to empirical
Creatures in chloroform, musty maps, and navigation by brass instruments. That was ocean exploration 18th-century style. Nowadays it’s satellite links, mandatory life vests on deck, and flow cytometers measuring minute lifeforms from the murk below – a very different kettle of fish.
The España Explora. Malaspina 2010 exhibition juxtaposes two Spanish expeditions launched over 200 years apart: between 1789 and 1794, commander Alessandro Malaspina led Spain’s imperial survey of its global holdings. In 2010, the Spanish government launched the high-tech Malaspina expedition, an oceanographic venture far removed from anything the commander would be able to recognise.
Continue reading Ocean exploration, from empire to empirical