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Radiation-Resistant Plants Could Be Used In Space
Hugh Pickens writes "New Scientist reports that two decades after the world's largest nuclear disaster, life around Chernobyl continues to adapt, with Chernobyl soya containing significantly different amounts of several dozen proteins, including one protein involved in defending cells from heavy metal and radiation damage. 'One protein is known to actually protect human blood from radiation,' says Martin Hajduch of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. In a study to determine how plants might have adapted to the meltdown, Hajduch's team compared soya grown in radioactive plots near Chernobyl with plants grown about 100 km away in uncontaminated soil. Results from the study suggest that adaptation toward heavy metal stress, protection against radiation damage, and mobilization of seed storage proteins are involved in the plant adaptation mechanism to radioactivity in the Chernobyl region (abstract). Determining how plants coped with life after Chernobyl could help scientists engineer radiation-resistant plants. While few farmers are eager to cultivate radioactive plots on Earth, future interplanetary travelers may one day need to grow crops to withstand space radiation."
Realistically, how was this not blindingly obvious?
If you put a bunch of life forms into a high stress environment, evolution is going to happen quickly. Clearly, the gene for radiation resistance is going to quickly become prevalent in a population exposed to large amounts of radiation....
Somewhere, Darwin smiles quietly.
Cemil.
This may be needed planet-side on occasion, as well, since not all planetary bodies we might consider as a home have the same aggressive magnetosphere that our own homeworld does: Mars has no better than a patchwork magnetosphere, and what of our own Moon? If we expect to grow plants in "biodomes" for food and use natural sunlight for photosynthesis, then those plants may have to be adapted to accepting something closer to the full brunt of that radiation than they have to endure on the face of this rather well-shielded marble.
People fear risks that are imposed upon them more than they fear risks that they take on themselves. See fear of cars vs. fear of aircraft.
Also, the cynic might suggest that most people see the "war on terror" in all its excesses, as a much lighter burden than a good diet and some exercise...
people will squeal like stuck pigs about food colourings, radiation, asbestos, CO2 (hah seriously) and then they will pop open a diet coke and eat some geneticly enhanced chicken mcnuggets.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
There are no "simple" kinds of life. Dismiss that notion from your mind. It may be what you learnt in school or from popular culture, but it isn't accurate.
Living things everywhere are shaped by evolutionary pressures. The niches they occupy and the threats they face differ, so too do the mechanisms by which they adapt. But from a basic level, there are no orders of lesser to greater life, except those that exist in our collective imagination.
Life does not become more advanced. It becomes better adapted to the challenges. "Survival of the fittest" here means fit in the sense of adapted, not "superior" (which is one reason why the phrase is rarely used by people who know the subject well).
Bigger life forms may be more complex in the sense of having more parts, or possessing intelligence, but they are not more advanced in any meaningful way. Culturally, we draw a distinction between intelligent and unintelligent life, but intelligence itself is simply another survival mechanism. One that we value as a species, but for reasons unrelated to survival itself.
The reason the smallest living things adapt swiftly to new threats like ionizing radiation has to with reproductive span. The faster you breed, the more quickly you can adapt. Larger forms of life breed, and therefor adapt, more slowly. So in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster (or war), the first to recover are naturally the smallest, but not because they are any simpler.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Food colouring? That was kinda random.
Asbestos has less to do with the dangers it poses, and more to do with the way we used it freely decades ago. People do overreact, but it's a response to a time in which the stuff was used for everything down to cigarette butts.
I'll agree with you on radiation though. There are far too few people who know enough about physics and biology to understand the problem rationally. Moreover, I think we as a culture are still stinging from the cold war, and the notion that we might one day face the reality of widespread fallout. "Nuclear" is still a dirty word.
Side note: you mentioned genetically engineered chicken as something people hypocritically don't worry about. That isn't the case in my experience; genetic engineering is becoming the new nuke in the eyes of the public. Google "frankenfood", or look at the popularity of food advertised as being free of engineering, in the same breath as advertising it free of pesticides and hormones.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Depends on what the opposite is.
Simple versus advanced, which is the way most people use the word, is plainly wrong when talking about biology. The myth of the "higher" and "lower" forms of life is one that persists in the public consciousness, but it's been rejected in scientific circles for the better part a century.
Simple versus complex is a slightly different story. You can describe a multi-cellular organism as more complex in biological terms than a single-celled one in the same way you can say a personal computer is more complex than a single microchip. In those cases, complexity is a shorthand way of referring to the number of "parts" involved, be those parts organ systems or machine components.
It's still not the preferred way of distinguishing the two, owing to the confusion it causes. When a biologist says "simple" people take it for granted that the opposite is "advanced", which is wrong.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Stop eating...EVERYTHING!
This whole GE bit is nonsense and drives me up the wall. We've been doing it for thousands of years with domestication, selective breeding, and tightly controlled pollination methods. Hello Mr. common moo-moo cow, common yellow banana(ever eaten a seeded banana? blah), flightless chicken, stupid turkey, various improved breeds of corn, wheat, rice, and rye.
Greetings Man's Best Friend, I realize we've been improving your species for the last 10,000yrs for various reasons. Still friends right?
Special interest groups, and the media need to dig their heads out of their asses.
Om, nomnomnom...