Hitting the Books: 'Miracle Rice' fed China's revolution but endangered its crop diversity

Feeding the planet's 8 billion people is challenge enough and our current industrialized commercial practices are causing such ecological damage that we may soon find ourselves hard-pressed to feed any more. For decades, scientists have sought out higher yields and faster growth at the expense of genetic diversity and disease — just look at what we've done to the humble banana. Now, finally, researchers are working to revitalize landrace and heirloom crop varieties, using their unique, and largely forgotten, genetic diversity to reimagine global agriculture. In his new book, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them, BBC food journalist Dan Saladino scours the planet in search of animals, vegetables and legumes most at-risk of extinction, documenting their origins and declines, as well as the efforts being made to preserve and restore them. In the excerpt below, Saladino takes a look at all-important rice, the cereal that serves as a staple crop for more than 3.5 billion people around the world.Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishingExcerpted from Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2021 by Dan Saladino. All rights reserved.Whereas the global Green Revolution was largely steered by American science and finance, China’s push for greater food production was more self-contained. Both efforts happened more or less in parallel. Mao’s... Continue reading at 'Engadget'

[ Engadget | 2022-02-05 16:30:43 UTC ]
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China at BEA 2015: The E-book Market in China

Digital reading technology has been widely embraced by the Chinese reading public. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly

[ Publishers Weekly | 2015-05-22 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Got Diversity? Six Hacks that Address Book Industry Diversity, 21st-Century Style

The lack of diversity in the book publishing industry is not new or surprising to veterans of the business. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly

[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-12-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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China’s Shanghai Children’s Book Fair Names 2024 Dates

The 11th Shanghai International Children's Book Fair has announced its dates and some of its plans for its 2024 iteration. The post China’s Shanghai Children’s Book Fair Names 2024 Dates appeared first on Publishing Perspectives. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives

[ Publishing Perspectives | 2024-02-12 17:35:55 UTC ]
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‘We didn’t expect this phenomenon to last’: France’s comic-book tradition is hitting new heights

The market for bédé visual storytelling almost doubled over the course of the pandemic, but can the birthplace of Asterix continue to nurture creators?Like thousands of French people, Sylvie Pinault discovered comic books during the pandemic. Though bandes dessinées – literally meaning “drawn... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2024-02-06 14:00:36 UTC ]
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Dhonielle Clayton Is Working to Make the Book World More Diverse

Her solution? A packaging business that sells ideas for commercial genre fiction featuring characters from broadly diverse backgrounds. Continue reading at The New York Times

[ The New York Times | 2023-12-10 10:00:31 UTC ]
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Book Review: ‘Critical Hits,’ edited by J. Robert Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado

In the anthology “Critical Hits,” gamers like Hanif Abdurraqib, Alexander Chee and Larissa Pham explain what the medium means to them. Continue reading at The New York Times

[ The New York Times | 2023-11-20 10:00:28 UTC ]
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Scholastic will drop policy that makes it easier for school fairs to exclude diverse books

Scholastic Inc. will end a widely criticized policy that made it easier for school book fairs not to sell works with racial, disability and LGBTQ+ themes Continue reading at ABC News

[ ABC News | 2023-10-25 19:50:33 UTC ]
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Scholastic Says They’ll Walk Back Their Separate Diversity Collection for Book Fairs

Scholastic Book Fairs will no longer offer a separate diverse voices book case. But they still fail to address many questions. Continue reading at Book Riot

[ Book Riot | 2023-10-25 14:12:58 UTC ]
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Penguin Random House and We Need Diverse Books Open Submissions for the 2024 Creative Writing Awards

The awards partnership between Penguin Random House and We Need Diverse Books will award $60,000 in scholarships. Continue reading at Book Riot

[ Book Riot | 2023-10-18 18:22:57 UTC ]
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Rollout of Scholastic Book Fairs' New Diversity Offering Comes Under Fire

Scholastic said that it created its new "Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice" offering as a way to protect librarians and school officials dealing with restrictive new state laws and policies, but critics say that the program invites censorship. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly

[ Publishers Weekly | 2023-10-17 04:00:00 UTC ]
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Hitting the Books: Voice-controlled AI copilots could lead to safer flights

Siri and Alexa were only the beginning. As voice recognition and speech synthesis technologies continue to mature, the days of typing on keyboards to interact with the digital world around us could be coming to an end — and sooner than many of us anticipated. Where... Continue reading at Engadget

[ Engadget | 2023-10-15 14:30:20 UTC ]
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Hitting the Books: Meet Richard Arkwright, the world's first tech titan

You didn't actually believe all those founder's myths about tech billionaires like Bezos, Jobs and Musk pulling themselves up by their bootstraps from some suburban American garage, did you? In reality, our corporate kings have been running the same playbook since the 18th century when... Continue reading at Engadget

[ Engadget | 2023-09-11 20:50:45 UTC ]
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Hitting the Books: Meet Richard Akrwright, the world's first tech titan

You didn't actually believe all those founder's myths about tech billionaires like Bezos, Jobs and Musk pulling themselves up by their bootstraps from some suburban American garage, did you? In reality, our corporate kings have been running the same playbook since the 18th century when... Continue reading at Engadget

[ Engadget | 2023-09-10 14:30:56 UTC ]
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Hitting the Books: Why AI won't be taking our cosmology jobs

The problem with studying the universe around us is that it is simply too big. The stars overhead remain too far away to interact with directly, so we are relegated to testing our theories on the formation of the galaxies based on observable data. Simulating these celestial bodies on computers... Continue reading at Engadget

[ Engadget | 2023-06-18 15:30:05 UTC ]
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Hitting the books: Why you shouldn't blog about asking a cop to go shopping for you

You get free stuff, you get free travel, you get the nifty cool title of "brand ambassador," what's not to love about being an internet influencer? There's the consequences, for one. Not even just the warranted consequences of your actual actions, mind you, but also those arriving unbidden based... Continue reading at Engadget

[ Engadget | 2023-06-11 14:30:57 UTC ]
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Hitting the Books: Why we like bigger things better

We Americans love to have ourselves a big old time. It's not just our waistlines that have exploded outward since the post-WWII era. Our houses have grown larger, as have the appliances within them, the vehicles in their driveways, the income inequalities between ourselves and our neighbors, and... Continue reading at Engadget

[ Engadget | 2023-06-04 14:30:20 UTC ]
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Bloomsbury reports sales surge as people buy books as ‘affordable diversion’

Harry Potter publisher says in challenging economic times books are seen as cheap form of entertainmentBloomsbury Publishing, the home of Harry Potter, has revealed a rise in annual sales as it said people were turning to books as a cheap form of entertainment as finances were squeezed.Sales of... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2023-05-31 13:38:54 UTC ]
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Hitting the Books: Renee Descartes had his best revelations while baked in an oven

Some of us do our best thinking in the shower, others do it while on the toilet. Renee Descartes, he pondered most deeply while ensconced in a baker's oven. The man simply needed to be convinced of the oven's existence before climbing in. Such are the quirks of the most monumental minds humanity... Continue reading at Engadget

[ Engadget | 2023-05-28 14:30:30 UTC ]
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Hitting the Books: The abrupt and ignoble downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried

Seemingly overnight, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, went from cryptocurrency wunderkind to wanted for questioning by the FBI. After years of unfettered success, the walls of SBF's blockchain empire came crumbling down around him as his tricky financial feats failed and his generalized... Continue reading at Engadget

[ Engadget | 2023-05-14 14:30:33 UTC ]
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