Spain’s second largest bank under investigation in massive espionage scandal https://t.co/OJLwPBG2Q2— BOC Intel (@blackopscyber1) July 31, 2019
Video:
#Infested President Trump was only repeating what Rep. Cummings said about Baltimore - #TFN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im4515sRIZQ&feature=youtu.be
Indigenous Maize: Who Owns the Rights to Mexico’s ‘Wonder’ Plant?
A nitrogen-fixing maize grown in an indigenous region of Mexico has the ability to fertilize itself, recent research shows. Now, as a global company and U.S. scientists work to replicate this trait in other corn varieties, will the villages where the maize originated share fairly in the profits?
BY MARTHA PSKOWSKI • JULY 16, 2019
I n a 1979 visit to Totontepec, a small town in Oaxaca, Mexico, naturalist Thomas Boone Hallberg marveled at the local maize. The plants grew nearly 20 feet high in nutrient-poor soil, even though local farmers did not apply any fertilizer.
The maize had aerial roots that grew a mucous-like gel just before harvest season. It seemed impossible, but Hallberg wondered if the maize was fixing its own nitrogen: extracting it from the air and somehow making it usable for the plant. He had visited countless towns since moving to Oaxaca in the 1950s, but what he saw in Totontepec stuck with him.
In 1992, Hallberg returned with a group of Mexican scientists. The maize, known as olotón, was almost ready for harvest and its aerial roots glistened with gel. Ronald Ferrera-Cerrato, a microbiologist, took samples back to his lab outside Mexico City to test the bacteria in the gel. His preliminary results, published in a 1993 report, showed that the maize received nitrogen from the air, through its aerial roots, but his work did not prove that those bacteria were capable of actually fertilizing the corn.
At the time, scientists around the world were puzzling over similar questions. In a 1996 paper in Plant and Soil, microbiologist Eric Triplett, then at the University of Wisconsin, described the possibility of corn plants that fix nitrogen as “the ‘holy grail’ of nitrogen fixation research” because of the potential to reduce fertilizer demand.
It took more than two decades before the suspicions about Totontepec’s maize were confirmed in a peer-reviewed journal. Last August, researchers from the University of California, Davis, the University of Wisconsin, and Mars Inc. — the global food and candy conglomerate — published the results of a 10-year study in PLOS Biology, describing how bacteria that thrive in the low-oxygen environment of the maize’s mucus pull nitrogen from the air and feed it to the plant...