Prof Colin Raston and his colleagues in the Centre for Strategic Nano-Fabrication at the University of Western Australia are setting about cleaning up the world—and chemical industry in particular—through developing a suite of technologies to enable continuous, rather than batch, processing.

“We’re working at getting rid of the round-bottom glass in the laboratory, and the array of tanks and pipes in chemical plants.” [continue reading…]

Eight for apples, 46 for muffins

Plants protect plants and triple yields in East Africa

Spinning the world clean

Thursday, 8 July 2010 at Chemistry for a Sustainable World, an international conference organised by RACI, the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. Speakers in Melbourne and available for interview. More info on all stories online. [continue reading…]

More than 30,000 East African farmers are using plants to protect their corn (maize) crops from insect and weed attack. The crop protection strategy was developed by Kenyan and UK scientists.

Termed “Push-Pull’, it relies on strategically deploying attractive and repellent plants in alternating rows to control the growth of African witchweed and stemborer insects. These are the biggest threat to cereal crops in Sub-Saharan Africa. Stem borers often destroy 80% of a crop.

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Wednesday, 7 July 2010 at Chemistry for a Sustainable World, an international conference organised by RACI, the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. Speakers in Melbourne and available for interview. [continue reading…]

Victorian farmers are in a phony war right now – but in spring the invasion will come. We’re likely to see the worst locust plague for 30 years. David Hunter will tell the conference how plagues occur and what can be done to reduce their impact. [continue reading…]

IUPAC Plenary Six and Seven, Wednesday 9:45am

Chris Leaver, University of Oxford

The world’s population has more than doubled in the past 50 years and the relative abundance of food has kept pace, with the poorest benefiting most. Yet one billion people are malnourished and live below the poverty line.

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IUPAC Symposium 6B – Crop Biofactories: Plants as Sustainable Bio-Production Systems for Industrial Raw Materials, Wednesday 3:30pm

Sten Stymne, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

Vegetable oil is the agricultural product that chemically most resembles fossil oils and has therefore great potential to replace it, says Sweden’s Sten Stymne.

He’s part of an 11-million-Euro global project to engineer seed oils for bio-lubricant uses.

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Today at Tuesday, 6 July 2010 at Chemistry for a Sustainable World an international conference organised by RACI, the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. [continue reading…]

IUPAC Symposium 4A – Natural Products, Tuesday 1:45PM – 3:00PM

Leslie Weston, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga

Leslie Weston has discovered and patented two weedkillers made by plants. Now she’s investigating Patterson’s curse to see what tricks it uses to invade grasslands and repel herbivores. Her vision is to use plants or plant extracts to control plants, as an alternative to synthetic pesticides and herbicides.

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RACI Symposium – Cereals & Disease Prevention, Tuesday 4:30pm

Paul MacLean, University of Colorado

Resistant starch could transform our breakfasts, our gut health and help us lose weight.

Paul MacLean has shown that replacing simple sugars and digestible starch with starch that is resistant to digestion in the small intestine can have big consequences.

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IUPAC Symposium 1A – Formulation: Efficacy and the Environment

Ingo Fleute-Schlachter, Cognis, Germany

Friendlier pesticides are on the way. Every pesticide contains an active ingredient. But there is more in the can. The formulation may need additives and adjuvants which boost performance: working as emuslifiers, wetters, dispersants, or sticking agents to deliver the pesticide to where it’s needed – the surfaces of leaves for example.

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IUPAC Symposium 3B – Changing Pesticide use and Risk Scenarios with the Introduction of GM Crops Monday 3:30pm

Gary Fitt, CSIRO Entomology

GM cotton was released in 1996, as part of the fight back against Helicoverpa – arguably the most destructive agricultural pest in the world.  Bollgard II varieties now make up 90% of the Australian cotton industry. What difference have they made?

Gary Fitt from CSIRO Entomology in Queensland will report that farmers have reduced pesticide use by up to 90% providing on-farm benefits and greatly reducing environmental disruption.

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IUPAC Symposium 4B – Natural Products, Tuesday 4pm

John Pickett, Rothamsted Research

John Pickett and his British colleagues are creating new kinds of perfumes or attractants for pest insects.

They’re employing farnesyl diphosphate—the ‘parent’ molecule  that insects use as the starting point for many chemical signals such as sex pheromones—to create new, more powerful attractants that will be cheaper and easier to make.

IUPAC Symposium 4B – Formulation, Efficacy and the Environment

Monday 4:30pm

Heping Zhu, United States Department of Agriculture

“Current label-recommended levels of pesticides for spray application technology, pest pressure and crop growth structure are vague, frequently resulting in excessive use of pesticide,” says Heping Zhu from the USDA in Ohio.

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David Leach, Southern Cross University

A wood extract has been registered as the first natural termiticide in Australia by the Australian Pesticide and Veterinary Medicines Administration.

David Leach and his colleagues from Southern Cross University and the University of Western Sydney identified the active extract in Eremophila mitchellii also known as budda, false sandalwood.

The achievement illustrates the potential to learn new tricks from Australia’s native plants and animals.

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IUPAC Symposium 3A – Chemical Ecology and Crop Protection, Thursday 9:30am

Peter Gregg, Cotton CRC

A plant perfume that attracts female moths—a world-first attractant invented by the Cotton Catchment Communities CRC and its partner Ag Biotech Australia—is already reducing pesticide use by Queensland and NSW cotton growers.

Peter Gregg and his colleagues have developed a ‘moth magnet’ that attracts Helicoverpa, the cotton boll worm moth which causes billions of dollars of damage to agriculture world-wide.

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IUPAC Symposium 1A – Resistance Management: Insect Disease Vectors & Agricultural Pests Tuesday 2:30pm

Hilary Ranson, The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

Pyrethroid insecticides are the front line weapon of choice against malaria-carrying mosquitos.

These are the only class of insecticide that can be used to treat bednets and they are being used extensively for indoor spraying (replacing DDT in many areas). These two interventions are being rolled out on a massive scale across Africa (the goal is to achieve 80% coverage).

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Paul Miller, Waterborne Environmental, Inc

UK scientist Paul Miller will be presenting his work on modelling and thus minimising spray drift.

His work with field trials, wind tunnels and simulations have shown that boom height and the droplet size distribution from the nozzles are the most important variables influencing drift risk with changes in boom height having a greater effect than changes in wind speed.

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IUPAC Plenary Four & Five, Tuesday 9:45am

Colin Berry, QML London

Sir Colin Berry will say that modern synthetic chemicals have contributed to giving each of us an extra 30 years of mostly healthy, active life.

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