What does food do – time to move beyond the glycaemic index
It’s time to get smarter about food labelling according to Dr John Monro, speaking at the international chemistry conference in Melbourne this week.
“We need to know not just what is in the food, but what the food is going to do in our bodies,” he says. John is a researcher with the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research.
“And we need easy to follow guides that make sense when we’re pushing our trolleys around the supermarket.”
Read the full article →
Prof Colin Raston and his colleagues in the Centre for Strategic Nano-Fabrication at the University of Western Australia are setting about cleaning up the world—and chemical industry in particular—through developing a suite of technologies to enable continuous, rather than batch, processing.
“We’re working at getting rid of the round-bottom glass in the laboratory, and the array of tanks and pipes in chemical plants.” Read the full article →
More than 30,000 East African farmers are using plants to protect their corn (maize) crops from insect and weed attack. The crop protection strategy was developed by Kenyan and UK scientists.
Termed “Push-Pull’, it relies on strategically deploying attractive and repellent plants in alternating rows to control the growth of African witchweed and stemborer insects. These are the biggest threat to cereal crops in Sub-Saharan Africa. Stem borers often destroy 80% of a crop.
Read the full article →
Victorian farmers are in a phony war right now – but in spring the invasion will come. We’re likely to see the worst locust plague for 30 years. David Hunter will tell the conference how plagues occur and what can be done to reduce their impact. Read the full article →
IUPAC Plenary Six and Seven, Wednesday 9:45am
Chris Leaver, University of Oxford
The world’s population has more than doubled in the past 50 years and the relative abundance of food has kept pace, with the poorest benefiting most. Yet one billion people are malnourished and live below the poverty line.
Read the full article →
IUPAC Symposium 6B – Crop Biofactories: Plants as Sustainable Bio-Production Systems for Industrial Raw Materials, Wednesday 3:30pm
Sten Stymne, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Vegetable oil is the agricultural product that chemically most resembles fossil oils and has therefore great potential to replace it, says Sweden’s Sten Stymne.
He’s part of an 11-million-Euro global project to engineer seed oils for bio-lubricant uses.
Read the full article →
IUPAC Symposium 4A – Natural Products, Tuesday 1:45PM – 3:00PM
Leslie Weston, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga
Leslie Weston has discovered and patented two weedkillers made by plants. Now she’s investigating Patterson’s curse to see what tricks it uses to invade grasslands and repel herbivores. Her vision is to use plants or plant extracts to control plants, as an alternative to synthetic pesticides and herbicides.
Read the full article →
RACI Symposium – Cereals & Disease Prevention, Tuesday 4:30pm
Paul MacLean, University of Colorado
Resistant starch could transform our breakfasts, our gut health and help us lose weight.
Paul MacLean has shown that replacing simple sugars and digestible starch with starch that is resistant to digestion in the small intestine can have big consequences.
Read the full article →
IUPAC Symposium 1A – Formulation: Efficacy and the Environment
Ingo Fleute-Schlachter, Cognis, Germany
Friendlier pesticides are on the way. Every pesticide contains an active ingredient. But there is more in the can. The formulation may need additives and adjuvants which boost performance: working as emuslifiers, wetters, dispersants, or sticking agents to deliver the pesticide to where it’s needed – the surfaces of leaves for example.
Read the full article →
IUPAC Symposium 3B – Changing Pesticide use and Risk Scenarios with the Introduction of GM Crops Monday 3:30pm
Gary Fitt, CSIRO Entomology
GM cotton was released in 1996, as part of the fight back against Helicoverpa – arguably the most destructive agricultural pest in the world. Bollgard II varieties now make up 90% of the Australian cotton industry. What difference have they made?
Gary Fitt from CSIRO Entomology in Queensland will report that farmers have reduced pesticide use by up to 90% providing on-farm benefits and greatly reducing environmental disruption.
Read the full article →
Stories for the Royal Australian Chemical Institute’s 13th International Convention and the 12th IUPAC International Congress of Pesticide Chemistry.
