Word: cornes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Once touted as an environmental and economic cure-all, corn ethanol has had a rough year. The collapse in grain and oil prices, preceded by overinvestment in refineries over the past few years, badly hurt ethanol producers. Meanwhile, environmentalists have steadily chipped away at ethanol's green credentials. Far from being better for the planet than gasoline, many scientists now argue that ethanol actually has a sizable carbon footprint, because when farmers in the U.S. use their land to grow corn for fuel rather than food, farmers in the developing world end up cutting down more forests to pick...
...every acre of land planted with an energy crop - like corn or switchgrass - turning that biomass into electricity gives you more "miles per acre" than converting it to liquid ethanol, which is how biomass is used today, according to the study. A small SUV powered by bioelectricity could travel nearly 14,000 miles on the energy produced by an acre of switchgrass, while an ethanol-powered SUV could go only 9,000 miles. "It looks like converting biomass to electricity, instead of using it to make ethanol, makes the most sense for both transport and the climate," says Elliott Campbell...
Eighteen months ago, when the world was awash in asset bubbles, there was perhaps no market more overheated than commodities. Prices of everything from iron ore to palm oil to corn reached dizzying heights. Crude oil nearly quintupled in five years; rice tripled in only five months. World Bank President Robert Zoellick called rising food and oil prices a "man-made catastrophe" that had the potential to quickly erase years of progress in overcoming poverty. Protests and riots over high prices for necessities erupted across the developing world. Pundits dusted off Malthusian theories that the planet was physically unable...
...original version of this story misidentified the body's insulin-producing organ. It is the pancreas, not the liver. The story also misstated that high-fructose corn syrup is cheaper than glucose. It is not, but it is cheaper than sucrose...
...than pure glucose in our foods today? Glucose isn't as sweet as fructose, and because our collective sweet teeth have become accustomed to a certain level of sweetness, anything less might be unsatisfying. "The proportion of fructose in food probably hasn't increased that much, since high fructose corn syrup simply replaced sucrose in many cases," says Havel. "But people are also simply consuming more sugar in their diet." In fact, if you think that the study subjects drank way more sweetened beverages (25% of their daily energy requirements came from the sugar in their drinks) in this study...