Chinese research team makes Kenyan corn grow from 1 meter to 2 meters! | Expo Daily

Chinese research team,

Let Kenyan corn grow from 1 meter to 2 meters!

Kenya is located in eastern Africa, with the equator running through the middle. It covers an area of ​​582,646 square kilometers and supports a population of 47.56 million. Although the land is vast, more than 80% of the land area is in arid and semi-arid areas.

The flight from Lanzhou, China to Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, takes 16 hours and covers a distance of 25,600 miles. Across the "25,000 miles", Xiong Youcai's team brought China's advanced ridge film covering technology to Kenya.

At the Katumani experimental base in Kenya, Chinese researchers used ridge-film covering technology to cultivate corn. Each plant is more than 2 meters tall and produces large and numerous fruits. Compared with local traditional flat-land corn without film covering, the height has more than doubled, the leaf area has also increased significantly, the yield has increased by 99%-240%, and the water utilization efficiency has increased by 127%-247%.

Nearly 20,000 people visited and learned the ridge film mulching technology. After field trials from 2012 to 2014, the yield and water use efficiency of corn covered with film increased several times.

If the ridge film mulching technology is promoted throughout Kenya, only one-third of the arable land will be used to produce enough food to feed the entire population. By then, Kenya will change from a famine-stricken country to a food exporting country.

Why do some people

Are you prone to allergies and asthma when you encounter thunderstorms?

From August to October, it is the pollen season of Artemisia and Humulus in northern China. The amount of pollen of these plants is huge, but due to their large size, they basically stop at the upper respiratory tract of the human body.

However, once a thunderstorm occurs, under the dual effects of electric charge and moisture, these pollens will swell and burst, and be broken down into smaller particles, which can easily be inhaled into the lower respiratory tract of the human body and cause severe asthma.

Another "culprit" that causes thunderstorm asthma is mold. This year, the rainfall in northern China has increased significantly, and weeds in humid environments will breed a lot of mold. With the help of wind, allergenic mold particles and pollen will float in the air together, triggering asthma.

There is no need to panic about "thunderstorm asthma". As long as you have anti-asthmatic drugs on hand, timely inhalation of the drugs can effectively control the symptoms.

It should also be noted that asthma induced by summer and autumn pollen does not only occur on thunderstorm days. Some people who are allergic to pollen may also experience acute asthma attacks on days when the sky is clear and windy. In severe cases, asthma may persist for 10 to 60 days or even longer, and may not subside until the frost falls.

Typhoons this year: Fewer but stronger!

From January to August this year, the cumulative number of typhoons generated in the northwest Pacific Ocean (12) and even the number of typhoons that landed in my country (5) were both lower than the same period in history!

However, among the 12 typhoons generated from January to August this year, "Mawa", "Dusurui", "Kano", "Lane", "Sura" and "Haikui" have all reached the level of super typhoons and have had a serious impact on East Asia. On July 4, 2023, the World Meteorological Organization announced that according to the comprehensive results from ocean and atmospheric observations, the conditions for the formation of El Niño in the tropical Pacific region have appeared for the first time in 7 years.

The emergence of El Nino is mainly due to the weakening of the southeast/northeast trade winds in the equatorial region, which leads to abnormally cold sea temperatures in the western equatorial Pacific and abnormally warm sea temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. The changes in sea temperature also cause changes in atmospheric circulation.

Therefore, the emergence of the El Niño phenomenon means that the atmospheric and oceanic systems in the equatorial region have experienced abnormal phenomena that deviate from normal modes, which will inevitably affect various environmental factors closely related to typhoons, thereby affecting the number of typhoons generated, the intensity of their development, and so on.

On July 27, 2023, the Secretary-General of the United Nations said in a speech that the era of global warming has ended and the era of global boiling has arrived. Under the combined influence of global warming and the El Niño phenomenon, typhoons, a weather system that causes extreme natural disasters, have quietly entered the vision of more and more people in an extremely "aggressive" manner.

Schematic diagram of the typhoon formation process, from right to left ~ (Image source: aristo, translated by Chen Kexin)

The content is compiled from China Science Popularization Expo Weibo, Science and Technology Daily, Science Network, and Science Academy

This article was first published in China Science Expo (kepubolan)

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