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Simpsons Fan Creates Real Tomacco Plant
An anonymous reader writes "So, according to a KPTV newscast, a Simpsons fan with too much time on his hands grafted a tobacco plant and a tomato plant and, ta-da: tomacco! Leaves and most likely the fruit (yes, tomato is a fruit technically) contain nicotine. Delicious AND deadly!" Simpsonschannel.com has a small news piece on the breakthrough, but in a Frink-like move, although scientists have found "nicotine in the leaves", it turns out "the lab hasn't tested if the actual tomato has nicotine in it yet, but they say it probably does."
They are actually a type of vegetable called a fruit vegetable. Like a pumpkin.
I might have given it one of my current mod points if you had gotten the quote right, you tool.
//FIXME: Bad
It will be low calorie, high in vitamins and addictive. At least you get something for your nicotine poisoning.
Fight Spammers!
Start them early with Tomacco's! They'll start craving vegetables.. then just give them regular tomatoes. They'll have already made the connection that tomatoes make you feel better!
Also seems like a good way to try to quit smoking?
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
The article you're referencing doesn't live there anymore. It's here.
Setting fire to tobacco leaves and breathing in the smoke gave Nicotine, an innocent bystander (in moderation), with potential for improving the brain's concentration levels, a bad name.
Bad company corrupts good character. And in the case of Nicotine, bad cigarette companies.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Delicious AND deadly!"
this is wrong. nicotine itself has many benefits, including making you think clearer and faster. this is part of the reason it's so addictive.
it's the delivery device (cigarettes) that's the problem.
Bizarrely enough, there's actually a US Supreme Court Decision on this (Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893)). There was a tariff on fruits, but not veggies, imported from the West Indies. Plaintiff claimed that, since tomatoes are fruits, his imported tomatoes should be exempt from the tariff. The Supremes begged to differ:
... all these are vegetables, which are grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cooked or raw, are, like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery and lettuce, usually served at dinner in, with or after the soup, fish or meats which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert.
"Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans and peas. But in the common language of the people
"The attempt to class tomatoes with fruit is not unlike a recent attempt to class beans as seeds, of which Mr. Justice Bradley, speaking for this court, said: 'We do not see why they should be classified as seeds, any more than walnuts should be so classified. Both are seeds in the language of botany or natural history, but not in commerce nor in common parlance.'"
Hence, tomatoes are legally vegetables in the US, botany be damned.
Altria is Phillip Morris... or was, Phillip Morris International changed its name to Altria. Altria owns both Phillip Morris USA (the tobacco company), and Kraft Foods.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
What makes you think they don't already? Not tobacco, per se, but some other organic addictive substance?
:wq
Too bad that won't work with cannabis, despite the old urban myth that it does. Mmmm, I'd be sure to get my daily recommend dose^H^H^H^Hserving of vegetables per day.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 -- Mathematics is the Language of Nature.
In general, if what you eat has seeds (or is supposed to have seeds, like bananas and certain grapes), they you are eating fruit. We eat corn and bean fruit by strict botanical definitions. "True" vegetables are when we eat the leaves, roots, stems, or flowers.
We (mankind) have done so much genetic manipulation with our crops (for milleniums, not just from Monsanto) that most would never be able to survive without our continued cultivation.
Whether we domsticated them, or they domesticated us, is debatable. From their perspective, it looks like they have enslaved the human race to do their bidding (spread their genes around the would and into the future).
In order to do something like this with marijuana you'd have to resort to genetic engineering.
Having in mind that 1956 was still a year when Lysenko (Stalin's ally, Genetic killer) was at power in Soviet biology, I would be really not sure about the real results produced for this paper...
Good question. I've got one of my own. I'lll preface this by saying that I know absolutely NOTHING about botany, or plants. I can barely identify an oak tree. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I can identify an oak tree. Now then,
;)
So, you can graft together a fruit and tobacco, and get a fruit with nicotine. Could you graft a fruit and, oh, I don't know...say...a cannabis plant, and produce a fruit with THC? Would that be illegal? I mean, marijuana is illegal...but is a tomaijuana? (that would be a tomato with THC in it).
Purely theoretical, of course....just wondering and all
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Try hops.
It was reported by Warmke and Davidson (1944) that hop scions grafted onto Cannabis stocks produced cannabinoid resins and this led to interest in the technique as a means of producing such material while avoiding legal restrictions.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The big problem with ID is reliance on probability as proof of existence of God. Improbable things happen on regularly, or at least improbable sequences (take lottery winners over a fairly short period (1-2 yr.) in a single state); the probability of a single sequence of lottery winners is on the order of the probabilities quoted for the development of organs such as the eye. Instead of many slightly improbably events, there are a few highly improbable ones - both situations reduce to the same thing. Ultimately, in many situations, all of the events are improbable, so an improbable event must occur. Probability (even of highly improbable events) doesn't distinguish between the existence or absence of God - either the argument becomes circular (highly improbable events are done by God) or falsifiable (how do you distinguish between improbable events facilitated by God and events not facilitated by God?). In addition, the cutoffs for "probable" events are arbitrary - again enters circularity.
Of course, this becomes irrelevant in a religious sense. If God means what science can't explain, you get the "God of the gaps" (see Wired - 2002 -article about the Vatican chief astronomer). Faith isn't determined by proof - if so, it's fact, not faith. ID is an attempt to mandate God - either to support a faith that is weak and needs proof or to force others to believe in a god of your choosing. It is not necessarily Luddite - people want power over others, power that comes from asserting absolute right, although this is destructive to the means (faith) and the ends (choice of individuals to believe and achievement of the results of that belief). I don't think the people asserting ID neceesarily want people to go back - a technologically advanced world might be OK if they could control it. The difficulty in controlling technology makes this hard to do - so they try to get rid of what they can't control, which is ultimately everything.
ID is bad science and worse theology.
Could this be used to wean people off of cigarette addictions?
If a Tomarijuana (or some such) plant is ever made (and the insane inflation of the price of marijuana created by the War on Drugs virtually assures that it eventually will be) it won't be done by simple grafting. It will be done with gene splicing, the gene that encodes the THC production in MJ will be inserted into another organism which will then produce THC in it's own cells. I don't know why this hasn't been done yet, it seems almost trivial considering the number of genetically modified crops that already exist. BAKED POTatoes anyone? (sorry) :-]
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
It isn't the nicotine that causes cancer (IIRC) in cigarettes, it's the tar in the lungs, to the greatest degree. Lip cancer (from chew) is predominantly caused by the other things in the chew (such as draino-type chemicals and fiberglass) that agitate the skin over a long period of time.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Actually no. My definition is from a psychologist, whose field was the first that studied "intelligence". Because "intelligence" was such a controversial thing to define, they choose a minimal, inarguable definition so that research results could be unambiguously compared.
The Turing test is not used by many (any?) scientists yet, not even CS or AI types. And it's not intended to measure intelligence either... all it could really present is a boolean guess.
A real intelligence test is conducted by a dedicated psychologist, and has a greater range of values the scan-o-matic forms you may be used to. It's capable of measuring, supposedly, low intelligences like a dog (15 IQ) or venus flytrap (1 IQ). (And yes, there are some humans who score that low) As part of the process, the examiner will converse with the subject, thus subsuming the activities of a Turing test.
I have a workmate who was the Manager at a McDonalds franchise in Brisbane, Australia, and he says he has seen documentation showing how the bread rolls used for the burgers are jacked up with sugar because of past research that shows foods with a high sugar content can increase cravings. He reckons an unadorned hamburger bun contains as much sugar as an iced donut of comparable size. It wouldn't surprise me at all if McDonalds used underhanded ways to keep people eating their garbage.
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...