Word: hybridization
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Airplanes are fast, but they use a lot of power to keep a payload in the air. Surface ships carry a lot of cargo, but water resistance keeps them slow. Last week Britain's Saunders-Roe, Ltd. (aircraft) demonstrated a hybrid craft that is neither ship nor airplane, but has some of the advantages of both. Called the Hovercraft, it moves a little way above the surface of land or water, supported on a nearly frictionless cushion...
...mystery which would have found its logical setting in an English country home on an English country week-end. Instead, the authors have chosen to borrow liberally from the journalism of Art Buchwald and Cleveland Amory and transport their characters to a combination of Biarritz and Capri. The resultant hybrid is not happy. Nor, sad to say, are the lines the participants are made to speak in their non-musical moments. The jokes, such as they are, represent the scum of dining room repartee, heavily reliant on puns about sex. The satirical moments succeed only once, when the characters rush...
Corn the Key. If any single event can be said to have touched off the farm revolution, it was the development of hybrid corn. It opened the eyes of farmers and scientists alike to the vast increase that could be made in food production. Following Mendelian genetic principles, Professor George Harrison Shull of the Carnegie Institution of Washington developed the first hybrid corn in 1908. This was more than mere crossing: by generations of inbreeding he got pure strains which when mated yielded an almost explosive yield increase given the name of "hybrid vigor." But Shull's work...
Last year U.S. farmers seeded 90% of their corn acreage with hybrid corn, got a total yield of 3.4 billion bu.-750 million bu. higher than they could have produced with regular corn. The wonders of hybrid corn are still surprising the scientists. For example, last year Illinois Farmer James Holderman decided to try a new type of hybrid corn, even though the experts warned him it was not suitable for his land. He doubled the amount of fertilizer, planted the rows closer together, and his yield jumped to 175 bu. an acre, compared to an average...
Genetic Freaks. Corn is a hybridizer's delight because its male part (the tassel) and its female part (the immature ear) are separate on the plant and can easily be hand pollinated. Most other crops have their male and female parts close together. The long-sought key to separation of the sexes in order to hybridize other commercial crops came accidentally with the discovery of patches of sorghum that had hereditary male sterility. From this seedsmen developed a hybrid. This year the U.S. is planting 8,000,000 acres to hybrid sorghum for feed-half the entire sorghum crop...