Agriculture & Food

A plant's roots do their work in the dark, and almost everything known about how a plant notices being eaten was learned from the parts that do not. Bite a leaf, and the undamaged leaves hear about…

Researchers at Nanjing University report that China's long shift in diet began by improving health and easing pressure on the environment together, then split into a trade-off: health gains continued…

Chemists at the University of Almería have published a laboratory method for separating microplastic particles as small as 0.05 millimeter from agricultural soil and used it to measure the soils…

Environmental DNA taken from water samples and interviews with local fishers have both placed Mytella strigata, a brackish-water mussel native to Central and South America, in the estuaries of Kerala…

Spray a field of peppers and most of the green peach aphids under the leaves die. A few do not. They carry a small change in the protein the chemical was built to jam, so the dose passes over them.…

A study published Sept. 16 in Nature Climate Change puts the cost of heat that slows workers down at roughly $41 for every ton of carbon dioxide emitted in 2025, a loss the authors say has been…

Irrigation on US farmland keeps far more greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere than it puts in, a study published Sept. 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates, because the…

Researchers have built a combined genetic map of cultivated peanut and used it to read the DNA of 2,320 accessions, meaning distinct samples held in a seed bank. The work was published on September…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared a multistate Cyclospora outbreak, traced to iceberg lettuce, over on Sept. 11, 2026, and put the final count at 12,883 illnesses in 21…

A coral is not a tree, but it keeps the same kind of books. The slow-growing stony corals of the northern Gulf of Mexico add a layer of limestone every year, one on top of the last, for centuries.…

Replacing beef and lamb with poultry across 181 countries would cut the world's food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 37% over the rest of this century and still leave the 1.5 °C climate target…

Melon seeds are a problem on an archaeologist's table. They turn up at Chinese sites, small and flat and stubbornly anonymous: melons, cucumbers and their wild relatives all belong to the genus…