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Here's an interesting article from the wire
services:
Cosmic rice helps fill China's
paddies
BEIJING, Feb 21 (Reuters) - Ever on the lookout for innovative ways to feed its 1.2 billion people, China has turned to conditioning rice and wheat seeds in space to lift crop yields, state news media said late on Saturday. Seven times in the past 11 years China has
launched seed-laden satellites and balloons into the upper reaches of the
earth's atmosphere to expose them to strong doses of solar radiation, Xinhua
news agency said.
The result was a minimum 10 percent boost over
normal crop yields when the irradiated seeds were planted back on Earth.
``Seeds subjected to radiation at an altitude of
between 20-400 km and other forms of special treatment offer greatly improved
and much higher yields,'' it quoted Li Jinguo, a genetics expert at the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, as saying.
The conditioned seeds have been planted across
70,000 hectares (175,000 acres) in Heilongjiang province in the northeast,
Jiangxi and Shandong provinces in the east, and Hunan province in central China,
Xinhua said.
01:59 02-21-99
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