New scorecard reports 10 major U.S. food retailers’ progress on protecting bees from toxic pesticides

Giant Eagle, Whole Foods, and Walmart take top positions on Bee-Friendly Retailer Scorecard Friends of the Earth recently released its latest Bee-Friendly Retailer Scorecard, ranking 25 of the largest US grocery retailers on pesticides and pollinator protection in their food and beverage supply chains. Ten retailers improved their scores since last year, with Giant Eagle, Whole Foods, and Walmart ranking […]

Synergistic action of pesticide “cocktails” is escalating bee mortality

A meta-analysis of 90 studies found that bees are dying in greater numbers from the overall synergistic effect between multiple anthropogenic stressors—including agrochemicals, nutritional stressors, and/or parasites. Impacts of these stressors individually were already taking a toll on bee populations; but strong evidence of synergy when bees are exposed to multiple agrochemicals at field-realistic levels […]

Field of Schemes: How GMO alfalfa messed up a perfectly good thing

By Melissa Waddell, Non-GMO Project Most of us don’t think about alfalfa very much. Outside of agricultural communities and diehard fans of Our Gang, it is safe to say alfalfa is not a hot topic. We’d like to challenge that notion. Bear with us: In the US, alfalfa is grown on roughly 23 million acres annually, most […]

Jurassic Park coming to the Arctic? Scientist aims to “de-extinct” wooly mammoth as solution to climate change

In what would seem to be a “Colossal” publicity stunt or a headline from The Onion, a tech entrepreneur and Harvard geneticist have hatched a plan to genetically engineer Asian elephants to resemble long-extinct wooly mammoths as a way to slow global warming. What could possibly go wrong? Entrepreneur Ben Lamm and geneticist George Church, […]

$200M facility in Ohio will farm AquaBounty’s genetically engineered salmon

By 2023, 10,000 metric tons of genetically modified salmon will come to market each year from a land-based Ohio fish farm being built by AquaBounty. The developer of the first GM animal approved for human consumption in the U.S. is investing $200 million in a 479,000-square-foot facility, expanding by eight times the capacity of its […]