by
Anastasia on 16 December 2011
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 I’d like to focus on the post. I’ll let you check out the post content yourself, but I want to focus on the works cited list.
There are 29 citations. We find 11 sources that are by ISIS authors. It’s ok to refer to your previous work, we do it on Biofortified all the time, but having almost 40% of the citations be self-citations feels like an attempt to pad the citations list. Many of the rest of the sources are either by biased organizations or have been previously debunked either in the literature or in the blogosphere.
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by
Anastasia on 29 June 2010
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 approach has been quite successful but the details can be confusing.
If you’re looking for science-based information on Bt crops, check out the Bacillus thuringiensis info page that was developed by Karen Chien of
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by
Anastasia on 12 September 2008
I went to a seminar titled “Harvesting ecosystem services from cellulosic biofuel landscapes” at Iowa State yesterday. The speaker was Michigan State Professor of Entomology Douglas Landis. His research is very practical, focusing on which types of plants should be used in biomass production for biofuels to encourage the highest biodiversity of insects. This is important because insects provide many ecosystem services, including pollination and predation of pests.
His work shows that switchgrass and mixed
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