Butterfly Ship Presents a Winter Spectacular

I am very excited with this event.  It brings me back to my roots when at Jungle Vibes Toys we did arts and crafts for kids on the riverside deck.  I will be personally staffing a booth making paper kaleidoscopes, yarn craft and leaf prints. All the paints and supplies are provided.  Kids can make art cards and gifts for the holidays.  So sweet....and I don't have to tell you how sweet and talented are the crew of Butterfly Ship

Can Better Photosynthesis Help Feed the World?

The science here is funded by Gates so OK I guess and it will ultimate involve Genetic engineering. I am not of the persuasion to think GMO baaaaad! I just think it's science. Commercializing it and releasing it on the world helter skelter has turned out bad of course. Herein lies my caution. Gate is all about increasing yield in crops in a system that has already proven to be unsustainable because of depletion of soils 

As human population growth fuels the need for increased crop yields, researchers look to engineer plants that perform photosynthesis more efficiently

If you go to the link for the article that crop they are standing amid appears to be tobacco.  Hum, there's money in it but I am not sure the planet need increased yields of that particular vegetable. 

Of course, plant researchers have been thinking about using improved photosynthesis to increase crop yields for decades, but recent leaps in computer modelling and genetic engineering techniques have started to bring that goal within reach. In 2011, and again in 2015, a group of scientists came together to publish an article that called for research into the improvement of photosynthesis as a means for meeting the increased yield demands of coming decades, as well as laying out potential strategies. One of the strategies the group highlighted was the possibility of engineering plants to use near infrared light.

While this tech could be used to allow inter cropping food crops under canopies which certainly has promise if it can be done safely, its primary use will be in field crops to get the immediate short term gain in yield while continuing other destructive practises.  

Re-engineering shade loving plants to efficiently photosynthesize under canopies of trees in deep layers could turn the forests into carbon sucking monsters which of course would accelerate drawdown and thus be of good use, this may not be the ultimate planet we want. I can imagine a kind of sci-fi out of control jungle and I kind of like the one we have so how do we contain the genetics so that it can be normalized in the future. Also who will live in these new carbon sucking forests? It is not a niche that has yet been adapted to so you would expect die offs and unwitting population explosions to happen. Hum, I think it should stay as science until understood better.

https://undark.org/article/can-better-photosynthesis-help-feed/

This undark site is really cool on their about us it explains the name --

EDITORIAL MISSION

The name Undark arises from a murky, century-old mingling of science and commerce — one that resulted in a radium-based industrial and consumer product, called Undark, that was both awe-inspiring and, as scientists would only later prove, toxic and deadly. We appropriate the name as a signal to readers that our magazine will explore science not just as a “gee-whiz” phenomenon, but as a frequently wondrous, sometimes contentious, and occasionally troubling byproduct of human culture.

As such, the intersection of science and society — the place where science is articulated in our politics and our economics; or where it is made potent and real in our everyday lives — is a fundamental part of our mission at Undark. As journalists, we recognize that science can often be politically, economically and ethically fraught, even as it captures the imagination and showcases the astonishing scope of human endeavor. Undark will therefore aim to explore science in both light and shadow, and to bring that exploration to a broad, international audience.

Undark is not interested in “science communication” or related euphemisms, but in true journalistic coverage of the sciences.

FUNDING

Undark is a non-profit, editorially independent digital magazine exploring the intersection of science and society. It is published with generous funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, through its Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts.