Word: soils
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...benefits only begin there. When added to thin and acidic soil of the kind found in much of South America and Africa, char produces higher agricultural yields and lets farmers cut down on costly, petroleum-heavy fertilizers. Subsistence farmers seeking better soil have traditionally relied on slash-and-burn agriculture, which generates greenhouse gases and decimates forests. If instead those farmers slow-smoldered their agricultural waste to produce charcoal - in effect, slash-and-char agriculture - they could fertilize existing plots instead of clearing more land. This in turn would reduce emissions in the atmosphere, and so on in a virtuous...
Centuries later, it was still there, enriching the soil. "You couldn't help but notice it. There would be all this poor, grayish soil, and then, right next to it, a tract of black that was several meters deep," says Johannes Lehmann, a soil scientist who worked in Manaus, Brazil, in the late 1990s. After he left the Amazon in 2000 for a job at Cornell University, N.Y., Lehmann started wondering what would happen if farmers today could make their own terra preta. He has found one answer in a field trial in Kenya, where 45 farmers achieved twice...
...Most Pakistanis reacted with horror to news of the Mumbai killing spree starting Wednesday, having lived through equally devastating attacks on their own soil. But that initial sympathy quickly gave way to hostility as the focus of blame landed on Pakistan - a knee-jerk first reaction, rather than one based on any solid evidence. "It is a tragic incident, and we also felt bad about it as Pakistan is going through the same problem," says Abdur Rashid, a 67-year-old retired government servant in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad. "But it was really unfortunate to see that even before the operation...
Competition is intensifying. The Sahara is advancing steadily south, smothering soil with sand. Added to that - or perhaps explaining it - is global warming. In November 2006, the United Nations Climate Change Conference heard a warmer earth will put at risk the lives of 65 to 95 million Africans over the next quarter of a century, most of them in and around the Sahara. The U.N.'s predictions prompted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to declare Africa "the continent most vulnerable" to global warming...
...belong to China's Uighur (pronounced WEE-gur) ethnic minority. There is an active Uighur separatist movement in China, and elements of it have been accused of terrorist acts in the People's Republic. The U.S. has not admitted any freed Guantánamo prisoners onto its soil, Padmanabhan was reminded by officials from countries around the world. So why should any other nation do so - especially when doing so could sour relations with China...