Miami-raised poet and engineer Richard Blanco was selected to write a poem for today’s presidential inauguration.

It begins and ends with the sky.

Here’s what he read:

One Today
One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One [...]

Well, maybe not *directly*… but Science Daily explains how scientists are watching Arabidopsis thaliana, a fast-growing, globally found weed known as mouse-eared cress, to learn how plants can produce even in tough growing conditions:

Unlike crops, which for millennia have been selectively refined to express certain traits, Arabidopsis has not been cultivated and thus has not suffered the same loss [...]

SONG: “This Stupid War.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on “Pesticide exposure linked to brain changes: study”, AFP, via Yahoo!News, 30 Apr 2012, as used in the post “Stupid pesticide lowers your kids’ IQs.”.

ABSTRACT: This song was a response to Bill Corbett’s SongFu prompt, “Write an upbeat, danceable [...]

A new U.N. report (over at Scientific American) shows we’re actually wasting 300 million Hummer H2s’ weight of food every year:

What is more interesting is how the food is wasted around the world:

Food losses in industrialized countries are as high as in developing countries, but in developing countries more than 40% of the food [...]

PhysOrg hops on the in-vitro meat bandwagon with a study that concludes lab-grown meat will lower greenhouse gas emissions by 96 percent:

The analysis, carried out by scientists from Oxford University and the University of Amsterdam, also estimates that cultured meat would require 7-45% less energy to produce than the same volume of pork, sheep or beef. It would [...]

It must be strange to work in a facility like the ones Sky News just reported on – the places where genetically modified cows produce human breast milk:

The milk produced by the transgenic cows is identical to the human variety and has the same immune-boosting and antibacterial qualities as breast milk, scientists at China’s Agricultural University [...]

No, not like that. PhysOrg reveals the way lightning makes the mushrooms grow:

A four-year study carried out at Iwate University in northern Japan on ten species of mushroom (so far) has shown that for eight of the 10 mushroom species a bolt of lightning-strength electricity could double the crop yield. The best improvements were found in the popular [...]

Purdue University researchers have devised a menu for a mission to Mars (or further) – fresh strawberries grown in space:

Cary Mitchell, professor of horticulture, and Gioia Massa, a horticulture research scientist, tested several cultivars of strawberries and found one variety, named Seascape, which seems to meet the requirements for becoming a space crop.

“What we’re trying to do is [...]

Johns Hopkins University is unleashing a wave of… no, wait. It’s farms. Johns Hopkins is just warning about it. Farms, however, are unleashing a wave of antibiotic terror:

Kellogg Schwab, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Water and Health, refers to a typical pig farm manure lagoon that he sampled. “There were 10 million E. coli per liter [...]