Agricultural waste that is usually burned or left to rot could play a far bigger role in tackling climate change if it were instead used in long-lasting building materials, according to new research from the University of East London (UEL).

Venkatesan Sundaresan, a Distinguished Professor of plant biology and plant sciences at UC Davis, has been awarded a Gates Foundation grant to develop self-cloning crops for Indian farmers. The five-year, $4.9 million project is a collaboration with researchers Myeong-Je Cho at UC Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), Viswanathan Chinnusamy at the ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute (ICAR-IARI), New Delhi and Ravi Maruthachalam at the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER-Thiruvananthapuram). The project aims to sustainably improve agricultural productivity by producing high-yielding crops that clone themselves, allowing farmers to save their superior seeds from one season to the next.

Within the next few decades, intensifying heatwaves could expose a significant share of Europe’s cattle to dangerous levels of heat stress. New research maps where and how millions of animals may be affected by mid-century.

Avishesh Neupane, assistant extension professor of soil science in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources, conducted a laboratory experiment to see if adding the chemical element manganese to soil could help reduce nitrogen runoff in agricultural soil.

He published these results in Applied Soil Ecology.

Until this study, no research had directly tested how manganese affects nitrogen cycling under agronomically relevant conditions.