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The past six months have brought scenes from a hungry apocalypse, as at least 14 countries have been wracked by food-related violence. By mid-April UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon acknowledged that "the steeply rising price of food has developed into a real global crisis." It's the product, economists say, of multiple factors: high oil prices, prolonged drought, biofuel production, and burgeoning meat consumption. In the short term, food aid will help. In the medium term, market-distorting trade tariffs and farm subsidies must end. But the long-term task is monumentally harder: transcending the limits of today's global food production.

While Montague isn't ready to share the results - he's still gathering data - what he's found so far is, he says, "stunning, shocking even…. For me the lesson has been that people act very badly in groups. And now we can see why."

DIYbio is a group of people who are interested in doing amateur biotechnology. Amateur, meaning doing something that you love for the sake of doing it. In a broad sense, we're developing an infrastructure that enables people not in traditional institutions to take advantage of the tools that those institutions typically provide.

ScienceBloggers discuss the advantages of open science and debate the necessity of the current peer-review system.

As cultures and languages vanish, along with them go vast and ancient storehouses of accumulated knowledge. And as species disappear, along with them go not just valuable genetic resources, but critical links in complex ecological webs.