Drought tolerant cowpea can improve crop yield in arid West Africa

The cowpea or black-eyed pea, as it is more commonly known, is a New Year's tradition for good luck. But disease and particularly aphids, which can wreck a crop within a few a days, are especially bad luck for the cowpea, ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- The parasitic flowering plant Striga, or "witchweed," attacks the roots of host plants, draining needed water and nutrients and leaving them unable to grow and produce any grains. Witchweed ...

Cowpea, a protein-rich legume crop, is immensely important in many parts of the world, particularly drought-prone regions of Africa and Asia, where it plays a central role in the diet and economy of hundreds ...

Twenty-one boxes filled with 7,000 unique seed samples from more than 36 African nations were shipped to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a facility being built on a remote island in the Arctic Circle as a repository of last ...

A study by scientists from the Nairobi-headquartered international research centre icipe, in collaboration with the French Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) has established that bees have the potential to ...

University of Alberta research has yielded a way to double the output of rice crops in some of the world's poorest, most distressed areas.

(Phys.org) —A new analysis shows that the nation's land and water resources could likely support the growth of enough algae to produce up to 25 billion gallons of algae-based fuel a year in the United States, ...

(Phys.org) —It's been said metaphorically that too much focus on the trees can cause one to lose sight of the forest. In a similar check of perspective, a group of biologists, led by a University of California, ...

An international team of scientists reveals that a unique strain of potato blight they call HERB-1 triggered the Irish potato famine of the mid-19th century.

Scientists at the University of California, Davis have engineered a strain of photosynthetic cyanobacteria to grow without the need for light. They report their findings today at the 113th General Meeting of the American ...

Researchers at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and City University of New York have invented a proprietary new formulation called Visikol that effectively clears organisms to be viewed under microscopes. Visikol ...

Archaeologists have made a discovery in southern subtropical China which could revolutionise thinking about how ancient humans lived in the region.