Someone named P. Marchio filed this patent for a “banana extractor and ice cream injector” in 1932. What a wonderful idea! Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that this was ever actually made, nor is there any sign that a banana with ice cream in it will ever replace the classic banana split.
More: Banana-Ice Cream Injector Patent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A mutation in a single gene can turn hybrid tomato plants into super producers capable of generating more and much sweeter fruit without genetic engineering, scientists said in a study released on Sunday.
The study also showed that using classic plant-breeding techniques can boost yield as dramatically as using genetically modified organisms, said researcher Zachary Lippman of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.
Read more: Single gene powers hybrid tomato plants: study
(Reuters) – An international team of scientists has managed to transfer disease resistance from one plant family to another, offering broader protection from potentially costly and destructive pests.
A team led by Cyril Zipfel at Britain’s Sainsbury Laboratory found that transferring a single gene from a wild plant to disease-susceptible crop plants made them more robust against infections like bacterial wilt and other diseases.
If the results can be duplicated more widely, they could help prevent massive crop losses and avoid environmental, health and financial costs associated with using pesticides, the researchers wrote in the Nature Biotechnology journal on Sunday.
Read more: Scientists find new way to help crops fight pests
FRESNO, Calif. – One of the dirty secrets of California’s wine country is now on everyone’s lips. Somehow a voracious grape-eating moth has found its way nonstop from Europe to the heart of the Napa Valley, the land of three-figure cabernet. With valuable fruit at risk, the region’s fast and loose play with federal agriculture quarantine laws is getting new scrutiny from investigators and researchers.
Suitcase smuggling is the winked-at act of sneaking in cane cuttings to clone vines from France’s premier vineyards, hoping to replicate success. Vintners say it helped build a handful of exceptional vineyards in the 1980s when U.S. plant choices were limited and import testing took seven years.
Read more: Moth forces wine country’s secret into the open
