As desert locusts ravage African crops, EU-funded NGOs maneuver in the Kenyan parliament to leave farmers defenseless. Caught flat-footed by the emergency, the FAO struggles to purchase enough pesticides to avert catastrophe.

Experts fear it may be too late to avert famine.

Neanderthal DNA sequences are more common in modern Africans than previously known, and different non-African populations have levels of Neanderthal ancestry surprisingly similar to each other, according to a new study in Cell.

Researchers arrived at these findings by developing a new statistical method, called IBDmix, to identify Neanderthal sequences in the genomes of modern humans. The results also suggest that African genomes contain Neanderthal sequences in part due to back-migration of ancestors of present-day Europeans. 

Sometimes bees die off in large groups. Since the first beekeeping recorded in history, in the 10th century, there have been documented cases where entire hives perished. Some blamed bad bee husbandry, some blamed weather, and then in recent cases some tried to blame pesticides.

The ATLAS Collaboration has released last week the results of a careful analysis of a large dataset of proton-proton collisions acquired during Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider. This is a measurement of CP violation effects in the system of B hadrons.

Although LHC and ATLAS are things that readers of Science20 may be acquainted with, I realize that the previous 14-word sentence contains already a mention of at least four unknown entities to 99.99% of non specialists, so I suspect I have to open a parenthesis already now.

Energy is the great equalizer in human existence. 

Don't have enough water? Energy can fix that. Want to make a culture that prizes libraries, art, and education? Give people affordable energy. We can even do what ancient alchemists could not, turn lead into gold, with enough energy.

It goes almost without saying that energy made the difference when it comes to farming. In the early days of agriculture, one person might work harder than another, and they might even be prized for that, but nothing boosted productivity like when oxen came into use. No person could do the work of eight others but the ox could. Then the heavy plow raised the bar of energy efficiency again, and then the tractor. 

New genetic analysis of 10 genome sequences of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) from nine patients in Wuhan finds that the virus is most closely related to two bat-derived SARS-like coronaviruses, according to a study published in The Lancet.

The authors say that although their analysis suggests that bats might be the original host of the virus, an animal sold at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan might represent an intermediate host that enables the emergence of the virus in humans. 

Pyrus calleryana (Callery pear) is a tree native to China and Vietnam that California government introduced a hundred years ago after natural fire blight wiped out much of the European pear crops grown in the state. 

Since the callery pear was highly resistant to fire they wanted to graft it to the European pear trees, so researchers traveled to China, then took a four-day boat ride from Wuhan up the Yangtze to where the natural trees grew in abundance. As a bonus, they found it could grow anywhere, and that meant it could grow as landscape even in a state that is mostly desert and artificially watered like California.

Plutella xylostella (diamondback moth) does tremendous damage to brassica crops such as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and canola. A new strain of diamondback moth developed by Oxitec Ltd, (OX4319L) is modified to control pest diamondback moth in a targeted manner. It limits its  pest counterparts because they find and mate with pest females, but they pass along a self-limiting gene to offspring, which prevents female caterpillars from surviving.

With sustained releases, the pest population is suppressed in a targeted, ecologically sustainable way. After releases stop, the self-limiting insects decline and disappear from the environment within a few generations.

Surveys sought to find out how common suicidal ideation and mental health disorders were during combat deployment and to examine the associated risk factors. Some of the greatest risks were being white, having past non-combat trauma, and past major depressive disorder.

An exploratory result, published in Military Medicine, finds that soldiers with traumatic brain injury are more likely than soldiers with other serious injuries to experience a range of mental health disorders.

The retrospective analysis examined the cases of 4,980 military members who were severely injured during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2002 and 2011. Nearly a third of them suffered moderate or severe traumatic brain injury (TBI).