By James Dinneen Solanum jamesii, aka the Four Corners potato, has sustained Indigenous people in the American Southwest for 11,000 years; USDA is now studying its 8-year shelf life, and its resistance to disease, heat,…
By Terrence Doyle More than a billion marine animals died in the heatwave that swept across the Western U.S. and Canada last month. The climate crisis doesn’t exist in some hypothetical future — it’s already…
By Govind Bhutada ▼ Use This Visualization Cocoa Cocoa From bean to bar, the cocoa supply chain is a bittersweet one. While the end product is something most of us enjoy, this also…
BY Adele Peters Around half of the habitable land onthe planet is now used for agriculture. A millennium ago—or more recently, in the case of many countries—it was mostly wilderness. Soon, technology could reshape that…
Story by Gabriel Popkin Jan. 22, 2021 Maryland farmer Trey Hill pulled in a healthy haul of corn last fall and then immediately planted rye, turnips, clover and other species, which are now spreading a…
By Cody Copeland for GRUNGE In the mid-1800s, a new beverage fad took over the United States and Europe. Coca wine was fortified wine infused with coca leaves, i.e., cocaine. According to The Drinks Business,…
BY ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARTIN OEGGERLI This story appears in the January 2020 issue of National Geographic magazine. THE MORE SCIENTISTS investigate the microbes living inside us, the more they learn about the…
As a child, Suzanne Simard often roamed Canada’s old-growth forests with her siblings, building forts from fallen branches, foraging mushrooms and huckleberries and occasionally eating handfuls of dirt (she liked the taste). Her grandfather and…
By Wolf Richter Eight months into the Pandemic, about 78% of the US restaurants that had taken reservations before the Pandemic took reservations again during the last week in October, the highest since the start…
On September 12, Iverson Family Farms posted ominous images on social media of their fields under a ruddy red sky, thick with a stagnant, dense haze—a stark contrast to the vibrant annual Wooden Shoe Tulip…