Courtesy of MonsantoRice, the most widely consumed staple food grain, is harvested on about 10 percent of the world's arable land. Researchers are cranking out genomes faster than many scientists can digest them. Just 10 days after publication of Drosophila's sequence (see page 10), Monsanto Co. announced it will soon release a rough draft of the rice genome containing 400 million bases of DNA. Rice is the world's most important food crop. The International Rice Research Institute in the Phi

Once a favorite of Chinese emperors, tofu is now big time. From supermarkets to health food boutiques, diet-conscious Americans are buying soybeans, not just as tofu but in infant formula, soy milk, and soy burgers. Soy even has the Food and Drug Administration's seal of approval. Last October the FDA responded to a petition by Protein Technologies International, a St. Louis-based DuPont company specializing in soy products, by authorizing claims that soy protein is good for the heart. Acc

Most soldiers in the biotech revolution think the public will eventually accept genetically modified (GM) foods, thereby ending hostilities. However, science must first offer something of value, such as improved nutrition. Just making life easier for farmers with pest-resistant crops won't outweigh real or imagined risks to people or butterflies. That's the message of a new consumer poll done by Roper Starch Worldwide for the American Farm Bureau Federation.1 Metabolic or nutritional genomics--

Raven Advances at AAAS The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) will ring in the millennium with a new president-elect: Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and Engelmann professor of botany at Washington University in St. Louis. Raven succeeds Mary Good, who moves up to president at the end of Stephen J. Gould's term. Raven told The Scientist, "I'm very proud to have been elected. I'm impressed by the way AAAS has developed, and I want to do what I can to

Charles Darwin's frustration with the evolutionary origin of flowering plants--he called it "an abominable mystery"--stood for more than a century, as hypotheses, like flowers, bloomed and faded. Botanists even argued over whether ancestors of the 250,000 flowering plants, or angiosperms, were tender herbs or woody, like shrubs. Now they may be writing the final chapters of Darwin's whodunit, not with the traditional phrases of fossils and plant anatomy, but with the letters and words of gene se

For years, evolution's critics picked on supposed gaps in the historical record--missing links between different forms or species in biologists' evolutionary lineages. Evolutionary leaps, say from dinosaurs to birds, are inconceivable without intermediates, so the reasoning went. Finding key fossils is no easy matter, but creationists interpreted the absence of evidence as evidence of absence--no links, no evolution, only supernatural design. Paleontologists were patient, though. They predicted

In 1977, Steven Lindow, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, discovered that a mutant strain of the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae altered ice nucleation on leaves in a way that enabled plants to resist frost. He continued the work at the University of California, Berkeley, and a decade later, with the blessing of the appropriate federal agencies and the townfolk of Tulelake, Calif., Lindow planted 3,000 potato seedlings coated with "ice-minus" bacteria. By the next mor

A scene from the Missouri Botanical Garden The saying "if you want something done, give it to a busy person" fits Peter Raven like a glove. Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden since 1971, home secretary of the National Academy of Sciences, and author of textbooks in biology and botany, Raven hosted about 5,000 scientists from more than 100 countries as president of the XVI International Botanical Congress in St. Louis August 1-7. With Harvard University's Edward O. Wilson, Raven is biodi

The 1997 resurrection of a snippet of Neandertal mitochondrial DNA electrified human paleontology and attracted wide media attention.1 By comparing the number of base changes in that Neandertal sample to variability in modern humans, scientists concluded that a common African ancestor existed about 600,000 years ago, far earlier than the generally accepted origin of modern humans about 150,000 years ago. And while Neandertals were still around as late as 30,000 years ago, it's unlikely that mod

Global warming has a strong effect on butterfly populations. Camille Parmesan , assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas in Austin, cares about butterflies, so she's concerned: Global warming is bugging her beloved insects. Three years ago, Parmesan reported that Edith's checkerspot butterfly had moved northward along the west coast of North America over the past century.1 Specifically, local populations were four times more likely to go extinct in Mexico, at the

John Losey thought his Nature paper might attract some attention, but not the media "whirlwind" of "a good 60 calls" that disrupted his life for a few days. Losey, assistant professor of entomology at Cornell University, "expected to be busy, but not quite this busy." What prompted the fuss? By claiming that a gene for a Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxic protein makes corn pollen poisonous to Monarch butterflies,1 Losey's team ignited another round in the volatile politics of genetically modifi

ANTSY ANTIBIOTICS Humans didn't invent self-medication. Ants got into the act 50 million years ago. The attine ants are expert gardeners, cultivating edible fungi in subterranean "mushroom farms" on food harvested above ground. The most famous attines are the leaf cutters, whose superorganismlike colonies of several million ants are organized into functional castes led by a queen (B. Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants, Harvard University Press, 1994). Their prodigious harvest