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Science Discovers
How Plants Vary
Response to
Heat Stress
Scientists have solved a 79-year-
old mystery by discovering how
plants vary their response to heat
stress depending on the time of day.
This understanding could help with
breeding commercial crops to produce
higher yields in hotter climates as predicted
under climate change. Heat stress is a major
issue in agriculture and can significantly
reduce crop yield. Even small increases in
temperature can affect plant growth and
development. Understanding how plants respond
to heat stress is crucial for developing crops that can
withstand rising average temperatures and more frequent heat
waves under climate change. As a result, many people have
been working for years to try to understand how plants sense
temperature, and then how they use this information to activate
chemical pathways to protect themselves by, amongst other
things, manufacturing protective heat shock proteins (HSP).
But the signalling involved in telling the plant when to activate
genes to manufacture heat shock proteins remained a mystery.
Researchers at Cambridge University found light-induced
chloroplast signalling triggers the heat stress response and that
plants respond better to heat stress in the daylight.
—sciencedaily.com
Kimbal Musk Predicts Millennial Workers
Fleeing Desk Jobs for Farms
Kimbal Musk (brother of Elon) runs a chain of local food-focused
restaurants called The Kitchen, as well as Big Green, a national
non-profit that builds educational gardens in public schools. He
expects a growing number of young Americans to join him in the
local farming movement. When asked to name a big food trend
through 2018, Musk said he sees millennials flocking to careers in
agriculture rather than office jobs. “For the past 20 years, I think
technology has been a wonderful benefit for us in so many ways,
but it’s not a very connected life. But we see urban farmers sell
direct-to-consumer and be a part of their community,” he told
Business Insider. For only the second time in the last century, the
number of farmers age 25-34 is increasing, according to the US
Department of Agriculture. In some states, including California,
Nebraska, and South Dakota, the number of new farmers has
grown by 20 per cent or more since 2007.
—uk.businessinsider.com
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