A 'Third Way' to Fight Climate Change
There is a “third way” to deal with climate change that is almost entirely neglected in political negotiations and public debate. It involves capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it or using it to create things we need. One biological approach involves converting plant matter into biochar, a process that yields valuable chemicals and fuels at the same time that much of the carbon content is stabilized for storage.

A 3-D Food Lab and Restaurant Wants to Turn Yuck into Yum
Dorothée Goffin is the director of the Smart Gastronomy Lab, a kitchen outfitted with 3-D printers and digital milling machines. She and her colleagues aren't just playing with their food — they also want to figure out how to make 3-D printed foods more palatable to people. The goal, eventually, is to create foods with enhanced nutritional profiles that people actually want to eat.

Cloud-Brightening Experiment Tests Tool to Slow Climate Change
A team of elder Silicon Valley scientists is building an audacious device that might solve one of humanity's most profound dilemmas a "cloud whitener" designed to cool a warming planet. Their goal is to launch the nation's first open-air field trial of controversial "geoengineering.” They would test the ability of an energy-efficient machine to hurl tiny seawater droplets into a graceful trajectory the first step of a research project to boost the brightness of clouds to reflect rays of sunlight back into space.
 
Better Crops for Better Nutrition
Farmers now have an additional way to improve their nutrition: growing food staples that now include significantly more of much-needed vitamins and minerals. This breakthrough is known as biofortification — using conventional crop breeding techniques to make crops, and food, healthier. Today, 10 million people in rural households are growing and eating biofortified foods, and with partners, we are scaling up to reach millions more. 
 
Can Desalination Counter the Drought?
IDE Technologies is an Israeli company that designs and operates mega-scale desalination plants worldwide. A billion-dollar desalination plant now under construction in Carlsbad, California will be the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere. Nearly a tenth of the San Diego County’s total water supply—enough for about four hundred thousand county residents—will come from this facility. 
  
GMO Rice Could Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Study Says
Over half the people on the planet eat rice as a staple food. Growing rice emits methane, to the tune of 25 million to 100 million metric tons of methane annually, a notable contribution to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. As the world’s population grows and needs more food, the problem is likely to get worse, but genetic engineering could help, a new study says. By transferring a barley gene into a rice plant, scientists have created a new variety of rice that produces less methane while still making highly starchy, productive seeds.