NASA scientists get global fix on food, wood & fiber use
... percentage of NPP humans consume. Calculations of domesticated animal consumption were made based on plant-life required to support them. Marc Imhoff and Lahouari Bounoua, researchers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues, found humans annually require 20 percent of N...The first domesticated donkey was born in Africa
...lts of their investigation into the origins of the domesticated donkey. The authors have discovered by using genetic analysis that the domesticated donkey originated in northeastern Africa approximately 5,000 years ago, quite probably due to the de...A changing landscape may have dire implications for birds
...accompanies an increase in housing density" as the domesticated animals that accompany humans, cats and dogs in particular, exact a heavy toll on native forest bird species. What's more, human activities, such as the growing use of all-terrain vehicles and the replacement of native vegetation with exotic and orna...Oldest evidence for processing of wild cereals: starch grains from barley, wheat, on grinding stone
...date for the processing of close wild relatives of domesticated wheat and barley, a key step in cultural development, to 23,000 years before the present era. "Ten thousand years before people were cultivating cereals, they were processing wild barley: starch grain analysis establishes a clear link between an int......bly in Ethiopia, some time after the crop had been domesticated by native Ethiopians," says Ralph Panstruga. Today's agriculturally used cultivars of Barley are genetically closely related: there are not more than three basic kinds in contrast to the almost unlimited natural diversity of wild type barley. These ...Environmental decontamination, greenhouse gases, and the genome of a methane-loving bacterium
...fills, natural gas and oil processing (about 60%), domesticated livestock (cattle account for about 75% of livestock contributions), and rice fields (up to 29% of total emissions). Luckily, there are microbes, called methanotrophs, that consume methane. They've been found in soils, landfills, sediments, hotsp...'Most recent common ancestor' of all living humans surprisingly recent
...lanted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu." The results can also work backwards, into the future. According to Chang, "Within two t...