This article is scaring people, with the usual “all going to be extinct soon ” hype that we have had so many stories about this year. It is running in many news sources. I am not singling out the BBC as such but many people have come to rely on the BBC as a respected source on such matters so I'm taking them as an example. Similar remarks apply to most journalism in this topic area recently. In this case most of the articles were more measured, and the BBC one unusually was the most click bait of them all.

When we think of agriculture, we don't think of nomadic hunter-gatherers who simply followed nature rather than harnessing it. 

But they engaged in trade also. Millet, originally domesticated in China, was likely consumed at low levels by pastoralists inhabiting the far-flung regions of Siberia and southeastern Kazakhstan, possibly as early as the late third millennium but with the expansion of trans-regional networks across the steppe, when objects and ideas were first regularly exchanged over long-distances, millet consumption began to increase.  

Researchers set out to find a wine grape so popular no one wanted to change it. 

And they did, thanks to a genetic database of modern grapevines and 28 archaeological seeds from French sites dating back to the Iron Age. They discovered that Savagnin Blanc (not Sauvignon Blanc) from the Jura region of France was genetically identical to a seed excavated from a medieval site in Orléans. 

That means the variety still grown now has grown for at least 900 years as cuttings from just one ancestral plant.

It's quite common for the circle of life to have animals eating plants in order to become bigger food for other animals and then animals die and become food for organisms in the soil but nature has flipped the script again. 

A mysterious large mass of material has been discovered beneath the Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin, the largest crater in our solar system.

The crater, thought to have been created about 4 billion years ago, is oval-shaped and as wide as 2,000 kilometers (roughly the distance between Waco, Texas, and Washington, D.C.) and several miles deep. Despite its size, it cannot be seen from Earth because it is on the far side of the Moon. 

Industrial processes in the United States produce 8 gigagrams of methane emissions per year, according to experts. But Environmental Defense Fund, using a sensor on a Google street view car, is claiming otherwise in a recent article they paid to publish in a small Berkeley-based journal (Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene) that promotes stories about how humans are killing the planet.

This asteroid is now known to miss. It was always classified as NO HAZARD so it was no surprise at all when they proved it couldn’t hit.

UPDATE - they proved it would miss in July through non detection.

On July 4th and 5th they focused on the small patch of sky where it would have to be if approaching Earth. It wasn't there, so can't hit. It is the first example of ruling out an impact through non deteciton.

ESA and ESO confirm asteroid will miss Earth in September | EarthSky.org

In a new survey, 80 percent of gun owners support the concept of personalized guns, referred to as "smart" guns because they include safety features like fingerprint locks to help prevent use by unauthorized individuals. But only 18 percent are willing to buy them.

People who smoke marijuana and are considering having children in the future need to be aware about four serious issues that may impact both men and women according to an article ("Five things to know about ... marijuana and fertility" - the title says five things, but there are only four, the fifth is a plea to send more money) in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

The following is useful information for people who may want to conceive. 

Four things to know about marijuana and fertility:

Scientists continue to gain ground in the race against wheat stem rust, a pathogen that threatens global food security because of its ability to kill wheat. The new chink in nature's armor was discovered in the first rust virulence molecule that wheat plants detect to 'switch on' built-in resistance and stave off the disease.