Herbicide resistant weeds cause trouble in the cotton industry – Cotton farmers are facing a tough foe: a very stubborn weed called Amaranthus palmeri, a type of pig weed. The problem? Amaranthus grows quickly (and up to 10 feet tall!) and resists the most common commercially available weed killers (such as Roundup). And it’s spreading across the U.S. Experts suggest using a variety of herbicides, but that’s an expensive proposition.

Scientists explore an underwater forest – Exploration of Michigan’s Great Lakes has revealed a land bridge that existed 10,000 years ago and a petrified forest of trees some 7000 years old. The forest is in Lake Huron about two miles off the current shoreline. The study is the subject of a documentary film about the region shown recently at the Cranbrook Institute.

Rice gone bad – U.S. domesticated rice is getting some intraspecies competition from a variety of rice called Red rice, which is useless to farmers and contaminates domesticated rice harvests. Red rice is tough to eliminate because it is the same species as domesticated rice, so herbicides are useless. Scientists, funded by the Plant Genome Comparative Sequencing Program, are using knowledge gained from the Rice genome to combat the problem by attempting to identify genetic differences between the domesticated and the possibly ‘feral’ varieties.