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Irish Girls Win Google Science Fair With Astonishing Crop Yield Breakthrough
An anonymous reader writes Irish teenagers Ciara Judge, Émer Hickey and Sophie Healy-Thow, all 16, have won the Google Science Fair 2014. Their project, Combating the Global Food Crisis, aims to provide a solution to low crop yields by pairing a nitrogen-fixing bacteria that naturally occurs in the soil with cereal crops it does not normally associate with, such as barley and oats. The results were incredible: the girls found their test crops germinated in half the time and had a drymass yield up to 74 percent greater than usual.
It's helpful if you read the fucking article: "We decided to use Rhizobacteria as this was the group specifically mentioned by our science teacher. We used one acidic strain (r.leguminosarum) and one basic strain (r.japonicum)."
I don't respond to AC's.
I have been a judge at the national level for the Intel Science Fair. If this is like the Intel version these are not just a couple of dorks lost in high school. These are smart kids whose parents are likely highly educated and may well be biologists. The kids I met, though, were able to answer nearly every question thrown at them. They were impressively sharp kids.
This is normal behavior for a plant inoculated with mycorrhizae; you inoculate the soil with mycorrhizae bacteria and the results are more hardy plants, better nutrient delivery and better handling of dry spells. The webbing produced by the mycorrhizae helps keep soil clumped together better and produces a sponge like mass that holds water better. They also transport nutrients from elsewhere in the soil whereas they would normally flush down with rainwater in exchange for some carbohydrates from the plants roots; plant roots can only really get nutrients dissolved in the water or from soil immediately (within a quarter inch or less). The problem is that anytime the soil is turned you annihilate the local population so you need to inoculate every year with direct contact between the spores and the root mass.
Read a Budweiser label. It's made with barley and rice. Many other American beers include "select grains" as well.
Rainforests 28%, oceans 70%, other 2%.
http://education.nationalgeogr...
In short...
None of the stuff claimed is true and nobody at Google Science Fair apparently read their project report.
They won for being cute little girls. Possibly for having a puppy in the presentation for extra cuteness.
I initially wanted to correct myself on numbers above, cause it's just the germination that was up to 50% and Google Science Fair summary DOES state that the results showed "crop germination by up to 50%, and increased barley yields by 74%".
And then I checked the video and their results.
Which are both loaded with weasel words, omissions and plain old padding the numbers.
From the project documentation:
https://www.googlesciencefair....
13%, 40%, 28% and 23% reduction in germination time for various crops. Reported as 50%.
10.4% increase in length for barley.
13% increase in dry mass for barley and "a greater dry mass" for oats in small scale test.
Only problem is... length increase was noted for n=300 plants.
Dry mass increase for only n=24. Cherry picking? P-hacking?
You won't find those numbers in the text though. Only in the tiny low resolution graphs.
74% increase (and 44% increase for an alternative method) in dry mass is there BUT...
It's dry mass of the entire plant. Roots and all. And this time, without the numbers on the length of the plants.
And no information on if there is correlation between the length of the plant and its weight.
I.e. Is it barley grain or barley grass?
Cause, as we are not talking about acres but of mass, crop yield of barley is just a fraction of the mass of the plant.
So "an average increase in plant dry mass" IS NOT "increased crop yield by an average of 30% with some results exceeding 70%", as stated in the conclusion.
This is just Google throwing money at anything that will make them look good.
No proof of results necessary. Just make it LOOK good.
Which gives me a very icky feeling of exploitation. Of children, minorities, certain genders...
2011 - three girls, from USA, two of them racial/ethnic minorities.
2012 - a "Caucasian" girl from USA, three boys from Spain (i.e. Latinos AND foreigners so it's a little more diverse and not all USA) and a
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Which don't get me wrong, I'm all for. But modern farming sacrifices some land productivity in exchange for much higher labor productivity.
Wrong wrong wrong!!! Modern high-intensity agriculture produces several orders of magnitude more food per unit of land than does any other type of agriculture which is why we do it. The labor saving isn't really there (except for the obvious labor saving of machinery) and it takes a bit more work to do high-intensity ag. Putting the plants into nice rows really don't have much to do with it. That's something you are projecting.
You could do machinery assisted permaculture based ag but you would still be getting a small fraction of the yield per acre. In fact, without high-intensity ag we probably couldn't feed our current population even if we had a perfect food distribution system. Please at least visit a farm and talk to a farmer (like my father, and his father, and his father...) before talking about this stuff cause you might be surprised how much incorrect information you've been exposed to on this topic.