Pills from Plastic, Saving Species + 3-D Printing on Mars

🍦Vanilla’s Sticky Situation

Poor vanilla. The flavor everyone loves to snub as too common is now becoming ever rarer, under threat from climate change and habitat loss for its native pollinators. Bethany Brookshire reports for Science News on the changing conditions.

🌸Whither Vanilla?

Let’s start with a primer on where vanilla comes from. While the vast majority of the world’s vanilla is made in Madagascar, that cultivated strain was introduced from Mexico. In Madagascar, vanilla flowers are pollinated by hand, while Mexican vanilla comes from an orchid pollinated by bees. Today in Mexico, warming conditions are threatening both the plant and its pollinators.

Enter Charlotte Watteyn, an ecologist at the research university KU Leuven in Belgium and the University of Costa Rica. She and her team created computer simulations to examine habitats for 11 vanilla species and their bees, and found that without intervention, it’s likely that by 2050 the plant and the bees may not be able to coexist in the same climate.