N-Drip’s precise agriculture system drip-irrigates fields that were formerly flooded, addressing the world water shortage while improving outcomes.
https://www.israel21c.org/new-gravity-watering-system-saves-resources-and-raises-yields/
Doubts crop up as bid to lower price of produce targets farms for reform
Plan, which would up imports and pay farmers directly rather than via tariffs, ‘risks destroying entire sector,’ warns academic as data suggests retail markups may be to blame.
Hebrew University Prof. Ayal Kimhi, vice president of the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research, said that while direct payments work, the suggested figure is “so inadequate that you risk destroying the entire farming sector.”
The number, he told The Times of Israel, was taken from the European Union, where there are large tracts of pasture land, and in no way reflects the tens of thousands of shekels poured into intensive vegetable and fruit farming. “If prices go down as a result of lowering the tariffs, people will simply abandon their farms,” he warned.
Kimhi noted that fruit and vegetable prices in Israel are still cheaper on average than in other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — 5% cheaper in the OECD’s most recent analysis, carried out in 2017.
In Europe, the process of moving to direct payments to farmers took two decades. “Lowering import tariffs is right but you need to do it slowly, carefully, and to stop each time and review the result. Five years is too fast,” said Kimhi.
Plant-based meat substitute producer, SavorEat, has announced that it is opening up a subsidiary to tackle another protein in the plant-based battle for our meals. EGG’N’UP will have a crack at developing food products based on natural egg substitutes, designed to replace eggs without impeding on their original taste or nutritional values. ..
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3906977,00.html
PNAS Journal Club: In the 1930s, scientists discovered a heavier form of water. So-called “heavy water” (D2O) weighs more because the nucleus of each of its two hydrogen atoms contains not just a proton but a neutron as well. Known as deuterium, heavy hydrogen causes subtle differences in heavy water—from small increases in boiling and freezing points to a roughly 10% increase in density.
Now, an international team of researchers has confirmed another difference long rumored to be true: Heavy water tastes sweet. “It’s a very gentle sweetness,” says study author Masha Niv, a taste scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “It’s not like Sweet’n Low.”
Heavy water won’t work as a sweetener. Indeed, in large quantities, it’s lethal. But the work, recently reported in Communications Biology, could inspire a deeper understanding of how the sweet taste receptor works.
Heavy water’s flavor has rarely been formally tested as part of an experiment. Harold Urey, who discovered deuterium, tasted heavy water in 1935 and reported with a colleague in Science that it was no different than regular water. And a more recent study relied on human sensory studies alone to investigate. But anecdotally, some chemists have reported that heavy water tastes sweet—including Niv’s coauthors, chemists Pavel Jungwirth and Phil Mason of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. So they and collaborators decided to put that sweetness to the test.
The Plant Sensing Laboratory (PSL) was established in 2018 and its main focus is at early stress detection and identification, and yield prediction based on sensing plant trait assessment. We are using spectral sensors (i.e., multi- and hyper- spectral cameras and spectro radiometrs) mounted on ground, airborne and spaceborne platforms to acquire spectral data.
We might refer to someone’s personality as “mousy,” but in truth, mice have a range of personalities nearly as great as our own. ...A quantitative understanding of the traits that make each animal an individual might help answer some of the open questions in science concerning the connections between genes and behavior. The findings of this research were published in Nature Neuroscience. Dr. Oren Forkosh, then a postdoctoral fellow who led the research in Prof. Chen’s group in Germany, explains that understanding how genetics contribute to behavior has remained an open question. Personality, scientists hypothesized, might be the “glue” that binds the two together: both genes and epigenetics (which determines how the genes are expressed) contribute to personality formation; in turn, one’s personality will determine, to a great extent, how one behaves in any given situation.
Personality is, by definition, something that is individual for each animal and something that remains fairly stable for an animal over its lifetime. Human subjects are generally given personality scores based on multiple-choice questionnaires, but for mice, the researchers needed to start with their behavior and work backward. The mice were color-coded for identification, placed in small groups in regular lab environments – with food, shelter, toys, etc. – and allowed to interact and explore freely. These mice were videoed over several days, and their behavior analyzed in depth. All together, the scientists identified 60 separate behaviors, including approaching others, chasing or fleeing, sharing food or keeping others away from food, exploring or hiding. ...
The secret to better equine wound healing might have been with us all along, thanks to bees.
"When field practitioners applied MGH to horses’ wounds prior to suturing, the defects were more likely to have complete wound healing within two weeks, before suture removal, than horses that didn’t receive MGH, said Gal Kelmer, DVM, MS, Dipl. ACVS, ECVS, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Koret School of Veterinary Medicine, in Beit Dagan, Israel.
Further, he said, these horses had fewer signs of infection, and their veterinarians were generally more satisfied with the wound healing process than those whose patients hadn’t received the honey.
Kelmer, who uses MGH in clinical settings regularly, said he wasn’t surprised by the results. “I use MGH inside repaired lacerations and inside elective surgeries, just prior to skin closure, in most of the surgeries I’ve performed in the past couple of years,” he said. “I’m extremely satisfied with the outcome.”
Microscopic droplets on the surface of leaves give refuge to bacteria that otherwise may not survive during the dry daytime, according to a new study published today in eLife. Understanding this bacterial survival strategy for dry conditions may enable scientists to develop practices that support healthy plant microbiomes in agricultural and natural settings.
The surface of an average plant leaf is teeming with about 10 million microbes – a population comparable to that of large cities – that contribute to the health and day-to-day functioning of the plant. Scientists have long wondered how bacteria are able to survive as daytime temperatures and sunlight dry off leaf surfaces.
“While leaves may appear to be completely dry during the day, there is evidence that they are frequently covered by thin liquid films or micrometre-sized droplets that are invisible to the naked eye,” says co-lead author Maor Grinberg, a PhD student at Hebrew University’s Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food, and Environment in Rehovot, Israel. “It wasn’t clear until now whether this microscopic wetness was enough to protect bacteria from drying out.”...
A special issue of Agri Magazine in collaboration with The Robert H Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment
Decoding the genetic basis of floret fertility in wheat - A high grain yield is undoubtedly a desirable trait in cereal crops. Floret fertility is a key factor which determines the number of grains per inflorescence of cereals such as bread wheat or barley. Nonetheless, until recently little was known about its genetic basis. Whilst investigating floret fertility, a group of researchers have now discovered the locus Grain Number Increase 1 (GNI1), an important contributor to floret fertility. A writeup from Science Daily of an international collaboration, including researchers from the Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, to decode the genetic basis of floret fertility in wheat.
Unleashing floret fertility in wheat through the mutation of a homeobox gene
I24 News Story about the first academic course in Israel in wine-making - the next step in growing the local wine industry
in French:
En Français
Jerusalem Post covers Food Tech Nation Conference at the Faculty - The future of healthy eating drew crowds Thursday at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture in Rehovot. About 300 people came to an event celebrating the institution’s 75th anniversary and giving students the opportunity to showcase their work. It featured some of the latest developments in Israeli food technology ranging from 3D printed meals to protein powder made from fly larva.
Nanotech pioneer Prof. Oded Shoseyov has already founded 11 companies based on his inventions. Now he’s on his next: a 4D printing platform to create customized meals.
