Word: plantes
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...true in today's world as it was in the antebellum South: cotton is king. The plant has been cultivated for its fiber for over 7,000 years, and today it's grown by more than 20 million farmers in some 80 countries. But while cotton accounts for nearly 40% of the fiber used worldwide to make clothing, there's one thing the plant has never been able to do well: feed people. Cottonseeds are a rich source of protein--the current cotton crop produces enough seeds to meet the daily requirements of half a billion people a year...
Remove the gossypol, however, and you'd have a cheap and abundant form of protein for everyone. But get rid of all the gossypol, as plant breeders did in the 1950s, and insects will devour the defenseless cotton. Enter Keerti Rathore, a professor at Texas A&M University, who found a way around the problem through genetic engineering. In new field-trial data, Rathore's team demonstrated that it can turn off the genes that stimulate the production of gossypol in the cottonseeds while the rest of the plant keeps its natural defenses. "This research potentially opens the door...
...that could quickly be converted to produce bomb matériel. Stating Washington's case at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna this week, Ambassador Glyn Davies warned that Iran had already created enough low-enriched uranium that, if it kicked out nuclear inspectors and reconfigured its enrichment plant, could be re-enriched to provide matériel for a single bomb. "We have serious concerns that Iran is deliberately attempting, at a minimum, to preserve a nuclear option," Davies said...
...Progress also has a plan to sell synthetic gypsum, a by-product of its newly installed pollution-reducing stack scrubbers, to a plant that was scheduled to be built this year by wallboard maker CertainTeed. Gypsum is a critical component of wallboard, which is a critical component of housing construction. You know where that story goes. Because construction has collapsed, CertainTeed has postponed the wallboard plant until...
...That's too bad, because according to John Donaldson, president of CertainTeed Gypsum, the plant would have needed a supply-chain analyst. Someone like Brian Whitfield...