According to  The New York Times, Sergey Brin, Russian-born American entrepreneur who co-founded Google with Larry Page has made a $5-million down payment to book a seat on a future orbital space flight with Space Adventures, the space tourism company.

In the year 2011, Sergey Brin will hop aboard a Soyuz rocket. The ship will dock with the International Space Station, where Brin will likely discover just how fun zero gravity is.

The Green Revolution

The Green Revolution refers to the transformation of agriculture that began in 1943 in the developing world, and led in some places to significant increases in agricultural production between the 1940s and 1960s. The Green Revolution has had major social and ecological impacts.

• With the experience of agricultural development begun in Mexico judged as a success, the Rockefeller Foundation sought to spread the Green Revolution to other nations.
• In 1961 India was on the brink of mass famine. Indian state of Punjab was selected by the Indian government to be the first site to try the new crops because of its reliable water supply and a history of agricultural success. India began its own Green Revolution program of plant breeding, irrigation development, and financing of agrochemicals.
• India soon adopted IR8 - a rice variety developed by the International Rice Research Institute that could produce more grains of rice per plant when grown properly with fertilizer and irrigation.
• In the 1960s, rice yields in India were about two tons per hectare; by the mid-1990s, they had risen to six tons per hectare. In the 1970s, rice cost about $550 a ton; in 2001, it cost less than $200 a ton. India became one of the world’s most successful rice producers, and is now a major rice exporter, shipping nearly 4.5 million tons in 2006.

It’s Time for a second green revolution in view of the global food crisis.

How to grow more food on the same amount of land: the challenge has been a constant in human history. New answers have allowed growth in population and in living standards, but with today’s surge in food prices the need to raise agricultural productivity is once again pressing. To grow more food is possible – but dogmatism about how or where to do so would be unwise.

More on FT.com [Time for a second green revolution] and [wikipedia]

image credit : greenschool.org

Image credit : waterencyclopedia

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s there occurred a “Green Revolution” in which scientists, through selective plant breeding, developed highyielding varieties of key food crops, especially wheat, rice, and corn. Relying substantially on these varieties, India for several years in the 1970s was able to feed its population of almost 1 billion, and still have grain left over for export.

Indian President Pratibha Patil said a “second green revolution was need of the hour” in view of the global food crisis. She said that agriculture should be taken up with the same passion and drive as at the time of the green revolution in the 1960s.

Farmers are converting more and more land for agricultural use to cater the ever-increasing food demands of humans.

As a result, more than one third of the Earth’s landscape is used for agricultural activities and this transformation has emerged as one of the driving forces of global environmental change, according to a new report from the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.