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HUJICAST | The Robert H. Smith
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HUJICAST

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Hujicast with Dror Feuer

A selection of Hujicasts featuring the Robert H Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food, and Environment.

To see all Hujicasts, click on the logo.

 

 

How We Exterminated the Honey Bee

The world has been experiencing a significant and sustained decline in the number and variety of insects for decades, with some experts calling it the sixth mass extinction. The loss of insects, including the beloved and essential honey bee, can have devastating ecological and economic consequences. In this episode of HUJICAST, we explore the disappearance of the honey bee with the help of Professor Sharon Shafir, a leading bee expert from Hebrew University's Bee Research Center.

The Fungi That Kill Us

More than 1.6 million people die a year from fungal infections - about three times more than from malaria. Every year there are more fungal diseases in the world,   becoming more deadly, and we still know little about them and how to fight them. Fungi are a separate kingdom in nature, neither animals nor plants. Some of their properties make it very difficult to fight them or develop drugs to treat the infections they cause. Death from fungal infections is, according to many researchers, a "silent epidemic".

The Spiritual Grandson of Aaron Aaronson

A little less than eight hundred million tons of wheat are harvested in the world annually, but soon it won't be enough to feed us all. The combination of population explosion and the climate crisis poses a fundamental challenge to science: how to feed everyone? One important avenue is to adapt crops to changing climate with the help of genetic intervention to improve crops, both in quantity and quality.

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The Bacteria Wars

Although bacteria are single-celled creatures without a brain, they have a fifth of the genes that we humans have, and when it comes to wars for food and territory, they are as creative, diverse and violent as we are.

The guest in the current episode of HUJICAST, Dr. Assaf Levy, is the head of the Levy Laboratory in the Department of Plant Diseases and Microbiology. His research deals with bacteria wars - between themselves and between  other microorganisms. The lab combines methods from the fields of microbiology, bioinformatics, molecular biology and plant sciences.

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Pedestrian Seeds Get the Right of Way

Most plants in the world spread their seeds by the wind and by bee pollination. But there are also quite a few seeds that are pedestrians. Seeds that stay on the ground and have to fend for themselves completely and start wandering to find a suitable place to germinate, and of course manage to do all this without being eaten - and they do it in a fascinating variety of ways.

How do they migrate? Does a seed have legs? How far does sperm travel? We talked about all these things, and more, with Prof. Rebecca Elbaum, the guest in this episode of HUJICAST.