US promotes GMO education to consumers through ‘Feed Your Mind’ initiative
Reading Time: < 1 minuteTHE Feed Your Mind Initiative was cooperatively launched by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and US the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to help consumers better understand food derived from genetic engineering, commonly known as genetically modified organisms (GMOs). GMOs have been available since the early 1990s and are […]
Popular cash crops can indirectly impact on fight against malaria
Reading Time: 2 minutesRESEARCHERS at the University of Sydney and University of São Paulo, Brazil, estimate 20 percent of the malaria risk in deforestation hot spots is driven by the international trade of exports including: coffee, timber, soybean, cocoa, wood products, palm oil, tobacco, beef and cotton. “What does this mean for affluent consumers?” asks senior author Professor […]
Bacteria engineered to protect bees from pests and pathogens
Reading Time: 2 minutesSCIENTISTS from The University of Texas at Austin report in the journal Science that they have developed a new strategy to protect honey bees from a deadly trend known as colony collapse: genetically engineered strains of bacteria. An increasing number of honey bee colonies in the U.S. have seen the dwindling of their adult bees. […]
Newly-developed edible cotton seeds are packed with protein – not poison
Reading Time: < 1 minuteCOTTON is a widely-grown crop and its seeds are full of protein, so you might think they’d be a great source of food. Unfortunately, though, they’re toxic to humans. That said, such is not the case with a newly-developed variety of the plant. Ordinarily, cotton plants (including the seeds) contain a toxic organic compound known […]
Aqueous stream of palm oil processing yields hidden gem
Reading Time: 3 minutesBY JAYASYALINY JAYARAJ KUALA LUMPUR: What has traditionally been ignored in the palm oil milling stream, has turned out to become a blockbuster bioactive supplement – now rolling out from a manufacturing plant in Mexico. The supplement, Palm Fruit Bioactive Complex (PFBc) has now [ihc-hide-content ihc_mb_type=”show” ihc_mb_who=”2,3,5″ ihc_mb_template=”1″ ] “come to be” because Malaysian scientists […]
International consortium sequences canola
Reading Time: < 1 minuteAN INTERNATIONAL consortium of key academic and global seed company leaders from the USA, Canada, Europe, and Israel has successfully sequenced the canola genome. The consortium, led by Dr. Isobel Parkin, research scientist from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), and Dr. Andrew Sharpe, director of genomics and bioinformatics from the Global Institute for Food Security […]
Golden Rice moves towards full cultivation
Reading Time: < 1 minuteON BEHALF of the 151 Nobel Prize winners and 13,292 cosigners supporting GMOs, we were delighted to hear of the recent announcement of the approval by the Philippine Department of Agriculture to authorize the direct use of Golden Rice as Food and Feed or for Processing (FFP). This brings the cultivation of Golden Rice in […]
2019’s top science stories
Reading Time: 2 minutesSCIENCE in 2019. While it wasn’t quite what Blade Runner envisioned, some pretty amazing science happened this year. A picture worth more than 1000 words Think getting a decent Christmas photo with your family is the hard? Spare a thought for the team of 200 scientists who took monitored a network of eight linked telescopes […]
M’sian PhD students develop alternative plastic
Reading Time: 2 minutesA TEAM of Malaysian PhD students has won a global engineering challenge with a sustainable approach to packing dried food products. The engineers from the University of Southampton Malaysia, University of Malaya and Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP) have developed a prototype for dissolvable food blocks that would significantly reduce the amount of single-use plastic supermarket […]
A biotechnologist’s success story
Reading Time: 3 minutesBY JOEL WILLIAM RECALLING my interview question for my first job; “How do you explain Biotechnology to a 5-year-old kid?” My answer was simply; “Using any form of living organism to convert low value products into high value products.” The simple definition basically means that humans have been practising biotechnology from ancient times when our […]