Soybeans recruit beneficial soil microbes to defend against major pest
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 20-Jun-2026 13:16 ET (20-Jun-2026 17:16 GMT/UTC)
An MIT study suggests the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide could be toxic to certain microbes at the plant root, perhaps influencing plant health.
A variety of proteins extracted from rice milling byproducts were shown to provide different qualities desired in plant-based cheesemaking, including firm texture and meltability. Mahfuzur Rahman, a food scientist and grain processing engineer with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, and graduate student Ruslan Mehadi Galib published their results in the journal Future Foods under the title "Three shads of plant protein from a single rice cultivar: Insights into subunit profiles, molecular structures, functional and nutritional properties, and cheesemaking performance."
Indigenous peoples have used forest thinning to protect against wildfires for millennia. These traditional methods – including cultural burning – have often been neglected in modern times, which is thought to have contributed to wildfires in the US and elsewhere. Now, researchers have shown for the first time in a regional hotspot for wildfire risk and drought risk that forest thinning with modern tools has an additional benefit: it increases the snowpack in winter by 16 to 30%, thus recovering lost water and helping to safeguard its supply for natural and human needs.