The coconut is the sixth most cultivated fruit on earth and thanks to fads around things like coconut oil and water, demand continues to rise.

Growing products that rich people want is great for developing nations but they face challenges. Trees grow slowly and natural plagues Lethal Yellowing Disease put existing ones at risk. The answer may be what made bananas the staple they are now: cloning.

"Coconut plants do not form side shoots. They put all their energy into one shoot that has to grow as fast and as tall as possible. This makes it very difficult to clone and store the plants," said Bart Panis of KU Leuven.


Image courtesy of Hannes Wilms at KU Leuven

Man's best friend learns to understand human emotions, and that can help them predict our behavior and informs their decision making.

Coronavirus may only have been identified as distinct from the common cold in the 1960s, and it may have only had two pandemics (SARS and MERS) in this century prior to COVID-19, but there is a reason it is called COVID-19 and not just COVID. There have been too many to know about.

Viruses evolve and adapt. New research shows Sarbecoviruses they have been hitting us with disease for over 20,000 years.

In 2019, astronomers spotted a snowball in space moving at over 110,000 miles per hour. They quickly realized they had never seen it before. It was not even from our solar system.

Now named Borisov, it was the first interstellar comet ever detected by humans. That doesn't make it rare.

A new computer estimate instead believes that in the Oort Cloud—a shell of debris in the farthest reaches of our solar system—interstellar objects outnumber objects belonging to our solar system.


Borisov comet. Credit: NASA, ESA and D. Jewitt (UCLA)

Dietary supplements containing Garcinia cambogia extract and green tea can cause similar liver, finds an analysis of the Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network.

G. cambogia, alone or with green tea, are touted by companies who sell alternatives to medicine and bought by people who believe in them, commonly for weight loss. But the analysis reveals that in the period covered the drug-induced liver injury caused by the supplement led to 91% being hospitalized, while 2 died and 1 survived due to a liver transplant

Citrus canker, caused by the bacterium Xanthomonas citri, was first identified in the United States near the Florida-Georgia border in 1910 and then raged across southern states. 

It was considered eradicated in 1933, thanks to chemical intervention, but in 1995 it was found again in Miami-Dade County, Florida. This time, Florida found it impossible to eliminate and worked on containment. It moved to Louisiana in 2014 and 2016, USDA confirmed the presence of the Asiatic A strain, a more severe form of citrus canker, on two sour orange trees in Houston.