New technology uses scent to detect biological risk in crops - The Western Producer

Fertilizer is crucial for the global food supply, but making it uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of emissions. Some companies hope microbes can help. A growing body of research shows that seeding the soil around a crop’s roots with beneficial microbes can help feed the plant, providing crucial nitrogen to help it grow. This could help reduce the need for chemical fertilizer, production of which accounts for roughly 2% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. It could also cut costs for farmers, a big boon—especially as the Iran war has sent energy and fertilizer prices skyrocketing in recent months.  Humans have used biological fertilizers like manure for thousands of years, and companies have long been developing microbial fertilizers, including some that rely on genetic engineering. But it’s difficult to engineer microbes that can reliably provide nitrogen for crops while also thriving themselves.  A startup called Switch Bioworks is taking a new approach that essentially allows microbes to establish themselves and grow into healthy colonies before shifting into nitrogen-producing mode. “We have to reinvent fertilizer,”  says Tim Schnabel, the company’s founder and CEO.

Despite decades of perfume marketing and pop-science claims, researchers have never confirmed the existence of a human sexual pheromone that triggers attraction. Instead, controlled brain-imaging and behavioral trials reveal a far more subtle reality: human scent acts as a fleeting emotional signal rather than a switch for sexual desire. From neural timing studies in PNAS to behavioral trials in PLOS ONE, scientists are uncovering how scent alters social judgment, and where the biological limits actually lie.

Saturday evenings spent wandering the aisles of a video rental store, searching for the perfect movie to accompany a cosy night in was a familiar ritual for generations of families from the mid-70s through to the early 2010s. These days, the ritual looks a little different, replaced by endless scrolling through streaming services, only to find something most in the room will watch with one eye, the other fixed on their phone.