Category: Chemistry-RACI

Eight for apples, 46 for muffins

Niall on 8 July, 2010

What does food do – time to move beyond the glycaemic index

It’s time to get smarter about food labelling according to Dr John Monro, speaking at the international chemistry conference in Melbourne this week.

“We need to know not just what is in the food, but what the food is going to do in our bodies,” he says. John is a researcher with the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research.

“And we need easy to follow guides that make sense when we’re pushing our trolleys around the supermarket.”

Spinning the world clean

Niall on 8 July, 2010

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.” Read More about Spinning the world clean

Eight for apples, 46 for muffins and other chemistry stories

Operations on 8 July, 2010

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. Read More about Eight for apples, 46 for muffins and other chemistry stories

Plants protect plants and triple yields in East Africa

rohan on 8 July, 2010

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.

Locust plagues, feeding nine billion people and vegetable oil for your car, tractor and truck

Operations on 7 July, 2010

Worst locust plague in 30 years this summer

Can we feed nine billion people by 2050?

Vegetable oil to lubricate your car, tractor and truck

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. Read More about Locust plagues, feeding nine billion people and vegetable oil for your car, tractor and truck

Worst locust plague in 30 years this summer

Niall on 7 July, 2010

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. Read More about Worst locust plague in 30 years this summer

Can we feed nine billion people by 2050?

Niall on 7 July, 2010

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.

Vegetable oil to lubricate your car, tractor and truck

rohan on 7 July, 2010

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.

Weed fighting lawns, a new chick magnet, potato flakes for breakfast and is GM working for cotton growers?

Operations on 6 July, 2010

Today at Tuesday, 6 July 2010 at Chemistry for a Sustainable World an international conference organised by RACI, the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. Read More about Weed fighting lawns, a new chick magnet, potato flakes for breakfast and is GM working for cotton growers?

Could your lawn, golf course or pasture make its own weedkiller?

rohan on 6 July, 2010

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.