This is the first in a new series called "Better Know a Scientist". The goal of these interviews will be for scientists to share their research, for us readers to gain more knowledge in a field we may not be…
Read More Better Know a Scientist: Entomologist Erfan Vafaie
Written by Jonas Kathage Despite the fact that the global area of GM crops has grown rapidly over the past decade and now encompasses more than 170 million hectares it is still questioned whether current applications of genetic engineering in…
Read More A new meta-analysis on the farm-level impacts of GMOs
Written by Stephanie Gorski Hi, I started this series to explain a little more background behind the news and opinion articles you may have seen about Bt-resistant corn rootworms, with scary titles like Voracious worm evolves to eat biotech corn…
Read More Sex and death in the cornfields, Part II- Why rootworms?
Written by Stephanie Gorski A lot of people have sent me news articles about the spread of Bt-resistant corn rootworm because they know I am interested in transgenic Bt. These articles have alarming titles like Voracious worm evolves to eat biotech…
Read More Sex and death in the cornfields: What is a refuge?
What happens when a caterpillar eats the Bt protein? Learn all the details in this post.
Written by Jonas Kathage The issue of pest resistance to insect resistant Bt crops receives regular media attention, partly because anti-biotechnology lobbies use it as an argument to vilify GM crops. The German NGO testbiotech, in a recently published report…
There's a lot of interesting and sometimes conflicting things about Bt out there. Most people know that the Bt gene originally came from Bacillus thuringiensis bacteria, which are common in soil, but there's a lot more to know! Here, I'll discuss…
Written by Steve Savage We Americans love sweet corn - our uniquely national vegetable. We consume ~9 lbs of sweet corn per person per year (see how that compares to other vegetables in the graph above). The farmers that…
Read More The Frustrating Lot Of The American Sweet Corn Grower
On Twitter yesterday, @seekblunttruth shared a link with @franknfoode that I thought deserved greater scrutiny. The link is to an ISIS post* titled Bt Crops Failures & Hazards. Others may spend some time criticizing ISIS itself, and that criticism may be worthy, but here…
Bt, short for Bacillus thuringiensis, is a bacteria that produces a protein that kills certain types of insects. Different types of the gene that produces thais protein have been engineered into crops to make them resistant to those insects. The…
