Planet Earth is doomed with a fast growing global population and a limited amount of farmland to produce food for everyone. That means that we’re going to need to figure out how to maximize what we’ve got—and researchers just made a major breakthrough in getting the most from our crops. Biologists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have come up with a new agricultural technique which they say increases their crop yields by an incredible 50 percent. The key, they say, lies in figuring out how to use an existing genetic mutation that’s been creating some really weird-looking ears of corn. Scientists have long suspected the existence of a genetic pathway that acts like a set of brakes on a growing corn plant and stop an ear of corn before it got too big. As outlined in a new paper in Nature Genetics , researchers finally identified that pathway. And […]