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.

Comments

This is huge

[spiritplumber]

This is huge... although we already make enough food to feed 12B people; we throw away a lot of it. Still, efficiency!

Re:This is huge

[Anonymous Coward]

Increase C02 sequestration by reduced farmland size? Apply it to forest growth?

Re:This is huge

[lymond01]

It isn't how much we make, it's where we can make it and who can afford it. If something like this can be applied to areas where food is scarce to come by (by any method), good for all of us.

Re:This is huge

[Anonymous Coward]

Trees are almost irrelevant in sequestering CO2. Algae in the ocean and photosynthesizing bacteria are much more important. Trees are most important in the water cycle though.

Re:This is huge

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This is huge

[Immerman]

Because a CO2 rich atmosphere doesn't do the plants any good if the excess heat is captures so disrupts the weather systems that you don't get reliable rainfall.

Re:This is huge

[ShanghaiBill]

I wonder how much hunger in the world is caused by crop yeild vs other factors (war, political instability, etc).

A major factor is land ownership. It is extremely rare to see a peacetime famine where farmers own the land they are tilling. Nearly all peacetime famines result from some sort of collective ownership: communism, feudalism, nomadic grazing of common land, etc. But this research could have a big impact. Most food shortages are in poor tropical countries, and most tropical soils contain very little nitrogen. The girls produced their results on barley, which grows well in Ireland, but not in Africa. Lets see if we can get the same result with rice, maize, or wheat.

Re:This is huge

[sillybilly]

I don't know how they can make the plants not normally associated with those bacteria interact with those bacteria. The truth is that nitrogen fixating bacteria do so at a tremendous expense of energy, usually supplied by root nodules of a plant. If there were such associations with barley and these bacteria, in the past, you can bet your pants on it that it would be already standard practice, and also a sort of darwinist survival of the fittest natural existence. The fact is, unless genetically engineered, barley must not provide these root nodules, unlike alfalfa or beans. However, rice is grown in puddles that have cyanobacteria or similar critters that do fix nitrogen, which, ultimately, end up in the local nitrogen cycle on cycle on critter death. So with rice, with two independent organisms, one living on its own and doing nitrogen fixation, side by side with rice, the situation is similar to growing alfalfa and barley, on the same plot of land, at the same time, independently of each other, side by side, and then somehow picking only the barley, and leaving the alfalfa to rot. Unlike with rice where the picking the rice only and leaving the cyanobacteria in the puddle is easy, with barley and alfalfa (or beans or peas) independent harvesting is so costly, that instead a monoculture of each is grown, in a yearly crop rotation way.

Another way to put nitrogen into the soil locally, is to run a windmill, into an indestructible nickel-iron tote battery temporarily, from which doing lithium hydroxide electrolysis, then extruding lithium wires to age in the atmosphere, them getting coated with an oxide layer first, then under that Li3N, lithium nitride, which when contacted with water gives back the lithium hydroxide and ammonia, your nitrogen source. With carbon dioxide from a cylinder or even from carefully regulated and cooled (such as using a suction pump from the stack and a bubbler through an aqueous ammonia solution) chimney exhaust gas from natural gas or propane (which are soot free), ammonia can be turned into ammonium carbonate and bicarbonate, baking powder, which is a great fertilizer salt, volatile, but not as volatile as liquid ammonia itself.
By the way there is a patent on corroding metallic lithium pieces in air, whereby a thin surface oxide coating forms at first, and then the corrosion under that continues as the pure nitride, at room temperature, from around 1970, give or take. Google and the USPTO are so great at hiding it right now, which is why I assume this post was made, because that's such an important patent to hillbilly farmers, that expired, and the powers that be, such as those present at Google or the USPTO, would love to repatent the whole thing and sue the shit out of every poor "kulak" over it. Oh well. So anyway, true it's a slow process and wastes some of the lithium as oxide, but it does not require pure oxygen free nitrogen, expensive reaction vessels to heat lithium metal in, or even high temperatures, unlike the other processes that rely on heating lithium with pure nitrogen. All you really need to invest in is the lithium hydroxide to lithium metal electrolysis, the lithium recycled, and the process using excess electric power coming from a windmill or a solar panel array. The Edison nickel iron battery is indestructible, it can be drained to zero and kept there forever, has no memory, unlike nicad with memory or lead acid that self drains and self destructs if allowed to stay at 0 charge for a long time, and other type batteries with their issues, however, while it is hillbilly friendly, it too has issues, it is not very efficient at energy storage because of hydrogen gassing, and also it quickly self depletes on charge completely within about a month, so it won't hold charge for a long time, and you gotta convert the energy in it into some other, more permanent storage, either as fuel or fixed nitrogen fertilizer.

Re:This is huge

[rogoshen1]

they could also do a crop rotation with nitrogen fixing crops, such as peanuts. Grows well in Africa already.

Re:This is huge

[excelsior_gr]

This isn't about food. It's about the efficiency of arable land surface that can be used to produce biofuels.

Re:This is huge

[Defenestrar]

Hmm... Now there's a possibility. Find a symbiotic gut bacteria which can render fossil fuels edible.

Re:This is huge

[INT_QRK]

Moonshine?

Re:This is huge

[dvice_null]

Rainforests 28%, oceans 70%, other 2%.

http://education.nationalgeogr...

Re:This is huge

[dvice_null]

"FAO calculates that around half of the world's hungry people are from smallholder farming communities, surviving off marginal lands prone to natural disasters like drought or flood. Another 20 percent belong to landless families dependent on farming"

"there are 842 million hungry people in the world"

http://www.wfp.org/hunger/who-...

Re:This is huge

[TwoEyedJack]

It rains a lot in the hot tropics. More heat, more evaporation, heat rises, cools, rain falls. Pretty simple, really.

Re:This is huge

[ShanghaiBill]

they could also do a crop rotation with nitrogen fixing crops, such as peanuts. Grows well in Africa already.

Crop rotation is better than nothing, but will give you no where near the benefits described in the summary. Peanuts (and other legumes) use most of the nitrogen that they fix, and much of what is plowed under is not absorbed by the next crop, because it washes away, is depleted by weeds, or is just too far from the roots of the grain. If, instead, you have nitrogen fixing bacteria in root nodules on the grain, it is directly accessible to the crop, and you are fixing nitrogen 100% of the time, rather than only during the legume part of the rotation.

Re: This is huge

[He Who Has No Name]

Significant portions of what gets counted as "edible" in other nations as meal units would not pass food safety and public health regulations in America.

We throw away a lot of food, yes. A significant chunk of that is precautionary for sanitary and regulatory reasons, and that is not a bad thing.

Re:This is huge

[Anonymous Coward]

Except you know, when it doesn't work out that way. Like in a f*ing desert?

Re:This is huge

[rogoshen1]

Gotcha, thanks for pointing that out.

Re:This is huge

[Anonymous Coward]

Global warming will increase precipitation globally. This is why people who claim that evidence of growing ice sheets in Antarctica conflicts with global warming are idiots.

Global warming will hasten desertification in some places, and halt or reverse it in others, such as Antarctica. The fundamental moral issue with global warming (disregarding for the moment ecological ethics) is the pervasive and growing economic and social inequality that will result from the rapid changes in local climates. Global warming isn't necessarily inherently bad, per se (unless you're Captain Planet), it's what's going to happen to various human populations that is indisputably horrendous and immoral, even if you hate Nature in general.

Re:This is huge

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why reduce CO2? Higher CO2 concentration also improves crop yields.

Higher CO2 levels improve yields inside carefully tended greenhouses. In the real world plants need more than just co2, when you increase co2 you also increase the requirements for everything else like water, minerals and fertilizer - if those aren't available then the plants don't get any benefit from the extra co2. Furthermore some plants become less efficient at photosynthesis when co2 levels go up (after all they evolved in the current environment). Other plants like soy become more vulnerable to insects. Plants evolved to grow in specific temperate zones, you bump up the heat, change the weather systems (like more flash floods and less gentle rainstorms) and now the plants aren't as well adapted to grow in their environment.

Nature is a million different systems all interrelated. You poke at just one parameter and the result is never straightforward or simple.

Re:This is huge

[khallow]

Crop rotation is better than nothing, but will give you no where near the benefits described in the summary.

The benefits described in the summary may not actually be achievable. I find it hard to believe that no one has tried this before given how important nitrogen fixing is to agriculture.

Re:This is huge

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Or, you know, don't turn the soil?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

PS. fuck you slashdot for cutting off all the links.... site is getting more useless everyday...

Re:This is huge

[ebno-10db]

This is normal behavior for a plant inoculated with mycorrhizae ...

No kidding, but there is a bit more to their work. Otherwise please explain why these girls won three of the most prestigious science contests. I doubt the judges are idiots.

Re:This is huge

[hawkfish]

It rains a lot in the hot tropics. More heat, more evaporation, heat rises, cools, rain falls. Pretty simple, really.

Um, you do know that most of the world's deserts are on the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer?

Re:This is huge

[WillKemp]

Nowhere. Chemical fertilisers add nitrogen (in the form of nitrates or ammonia) to the soil. Those nitrogen compounds are made in a factory and cost a lot of money. Nitrogen fixing organisms get nitrogen from the air - for free.

Re:This is huge

[WillKemp]

Further to what ShanghaiBill wrote.....

There is a common misconception that nitrogen fixing crops / organisms add nitrogen to the soil. They don't - the nitrogen goes directly from the rhizobia (nitrogen fixing bacteria) to the plant. If you then plough that crop back into the soil (i.e., green manure), after it is broken down by soil organisms plant available nitrogen will be released into the soil. However, most crops aren't returned to the soil - they're removed and sold. Most of the nitrogen fixed by rhizobia in association with peanut crops will end up in the nuts themselves (nitrogen is a key component of proteins) - which will be removed.

Re:This is huge

[Applehu Akbar]

No, the effect of global warming is to make everything worse. That's why they predict drought at the same time as they predict massive hurricanes (which transport large amounts of water). All weather gets worse: hotter in the summer, colder in the winter, scarier all around.

Re: This is huge

[bill_mcgonigle]

Antarctic ice has actually increased significantly in the recent cold period (see the ancient Asian maps), at the same time as desertification has been on the march. It's hard to comprehend just how much water is locked up in the *miles* thick ice sheets. And yes, of course no matter low the oceans get, humans will move down to the seaside and build settlements. Whenever the oceans rise again those people will be affected, inevitability, and they will be both the subsistence poor and the wealthy in their mansions.

Re:This is huge

[Anonymous Coward]

Mycorrhizae are fungi, not bacteria. You're confusing two totally different things.

Roughly 90% of plant species have a symbiosis with mycorrhizal fungi, and yes they are highly beneficial to plants. They primarily just act as root enhancers, though - increasing the uptake of water and nutrients, as well as giving access to certain nutrients that plants on their own have trouble getting (but that are nonetheless already in the soil).

Diazotrophic bacteria (rhizobia being the most commonly talked about - which is probably the reason for confusing the two) are a whole different thing entirely - we're talking about nitrogen fixing bacteria that basically pull fertilizer out of the air. This is why crop rotation works (legumes w/ diazotrophs adding nitrogen to the soil), and it's been a fundamental part of rice farming in southeast Asia for centuries (look up Azolla and Anabaena). I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but far fewer plants have a natural symbiosis with diazotrophs. Incorporating more diazotrophs into normal crops is a simple thing to try (I'm astonished it hasn't been tried before...) and I'm very glad these girls are finding success with it.

Re:This is huge

[Anonymous Coward]

If that is the level of your understanding with respect to climate change then you should be embarrassed for yourself.

Re:This is huge

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Either you are an asshole who is deliberately ignoring the obvious intent of that statement or your one dumb fucking pedant. Either way, all that post does is make you look a total fuck.

Re:This is huge

[ShanghaiBill]

The benefits described in the summary may not actually be achievable.

They do sound wildly optimistic. I would normally be very skeptical about results like this. But in this case, their research has, presumably, been carefully checked by the judges.

I find it hard to believe that no one has tried this before

Many people have tried it before. There is a lot of research, both GMO and non-GMO, to get grain crops to support nitrogen fixing bacteria. It is just that no one else has achieved these results, or even close to this level of improvement.

Re:This is huge

[K. S. Kyosuke]

That's nice, but where's the carbon sink? Forests can only act like one when their biomass is increasing. To suggest that one third of all that increased industrial CO2 absorbed represents growing forest biomass seems quite shocking to me. That would basically mean significant reforestation in progress. (It also suggests that biochar might be a good idea for the future.)

Re:This is huge

[TheEyes]

It also makes the crops less nutritionally useful, so you have to eat more empty calories to get the essential vitamins and minerals to keep from getting malnutrition. This leads to higher rates of obesity, heart disease, etc.

The simple fact is that there really is no upside to high CO2 in the atmosphere, for anyone.

Re:This is huge

[Eunuchswear]

Don't worry, he's protected by the invincible shield of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Re:This is huge

[Barsteward]

"PS. fuck you slashdot for cutting off all the links.... site is getting more useless everyday..."

probably done deliberately to piss of the ACs

Re:This is huge

[tehcyder]

Honestly acquired wealth

An idea that would be charming in its naivety coming from a child.

Re:This is huge

[Albinoman]

Lumber? Paper? Though more is probably made in it's transport in production just from the oil used.

Re:This is huge

[dodobh]

Or inherited it.

The problem with extreme economic inequality is that it leads to a feudal system.

Re:This is huge

[dave420]

If you look at it pragmatically, it's a massive cause of social unrest. It creates "them" and "us", as you so poetically demonstrated, between the haves and the have-nots. This exacerbates crime, and allows the haves to pull away from the have-nots by simple virtue of wealth creating its own wealth. It does not indicate anything about wealth and value, only that one person has wealth and others don't.

So no, it's not "jealousy", even if that would make it convenient to ignore.

Re: This is huge

[dave420]

And even more is due to it being purchased and left to slowly decompose, or part of a massive meal which is thrown out when only half-eaten. You can read more here.

Re: This is huge

[ScottMiller]

Ok, here is what I have never understood about climate change science. The premise that elevated levels of carbon dioxide will lead to elevated temperatures on the planet. The reason that this is weird to me is that water vapor is a much more effective "greenhouse gas" than CO2. Water vapor is the gaseous form of water that is the result of evaporation and sublimation of liquid water and ice from the surface. The higher the temperature, the more water vapor that can be dissolved into the atmospheric solution. When the levels of water vapor in the atmosphere reaches its saturation point in the atmosphere surplus water vapor precipitates out in the form of rain. The problem is that additional things dissolved in the atmosphere, like CO2, reduce the amount of room available for water vapor. That means that the more CO2 (less effective greenhouse gas) there is in the atmosphere, the less room there is for water vapor (more effective greenhouse gas). It is basically like replacing a nice warm comforter with a cheap thin sheet. So, using the premise that the carbon dioxide we are adding to the atmosphere is enough to effect change in the climate, why is the temperature not decreasing since we are displacing (trading) the good insulator (water vapor) for a poor one (CO2)?

Re:This is huge

[Bob the Super Hamste]

And then there is the three sisters form of agriculture. Corn for the beans to climb, beans to fix nitrogen, and squash to provide ground cover to keep the weeds down and prevent evaporation. Each one provides something beneficial but mechanical harvesting can't be done (or no one has bothered to figured out how to do it.). Then there is the use of various soil amendments to make terra preta which seems to increase the nutrient holding ability of the soil as well as being basically a long term carbon sink.

Re:This is huge

[Immerman]

It also means the difference between tropical and polar temperatures is much reduced (since the poles are warming much faster as the heat-reflecting ice melts), and *that* means the thermal engine driving the jet streams becomes much weaker, allowing them to meander chaotically and trap weather patterns in unexpected places. As in this year the storms were trapped in an eddy and Place X suffered flooding while Place Y was in drought, and there's no way to predict what next year will look like. You can't reliably grow crops under those conditions.

Re:This is huge

[alvinrod]

The parts that aren't deserts tend to receive a rather high average rainfall. See the following images showing areas of the world which are deserts and the average rainfall: Average rainfall and desert distribution. Just because the majority of Earth's deserts are in the tropics doesn't also mean that it doesn't receive some of the highest average rainfall.

Re:This is huge

[Khyber]

" That would basically mean significant reforestation in progress."

How do you think the lumber/paper/tree industry works?

http://forestry.about.com/libr...

Same thing happening over in Europe.

Re:This is huge

[Khyber]

I have a small problem with your linked study.

Most plants will never utilize/see the benefits of the increased CO2 because the temperature was kept consistent. To utilize more CO2, you have to increase the transpiration rate - typically by raising the temperature.

At a controlled temperature, OF COURSE 10,000 umol of CO2 isn't going to help a plant. The rate of transpiration can't match up with the increase in CO2 levels because it's being held at a baseline.

I would like to see this study repeated utilizing various temperatures to find an effective maximum temp/CO2 saturation level.

Re:This is huge

[Khyber]

"It also makes the crops less nutritionally useful"

Uh, yea, source?

Cuz I do this for a living and I call bullshit.

Re:This is huge

[Khyber]

" you inoculate the soil with mycorrhizae bacteria"

DOES NOT EXIST. Fungus != Bacteria.

Re:This is huge

[K. S. Kyosuke]

How do you think the lumber/paper/tree industry works?

By replanting. But that's not the same thing as net reforestation. Furthermore, the US is not the whole world. World-wide net deforestation has slowed, but it hasn't reversed yet, so where's the global net reforestation to be seen? It is true that even diminishing forests do capture carbon, but the only way I see in which the forests of a net-deforesting Earth could act as a net carbon sink would be if a portion of the lumber larger than the difference between the lumbered and replanted areas were used for long-term sequestration, such as biochar projects. Things like paper or furniture are going to end up as fuel biomass one day, so they don't count for this purpose.

Re:This is huge

[stoatwblr]

More rain = more water flow = more nutrients being washed away.

Amazonian jungle soils are some of the poorest in the world, generally only good for a couple of seasons of crops under slash-and-burn agriculture.

This holds across most tropical regions.

More CO2 without nitrogen fixation == faster growth, but lower plant quality. Anyone who's experimented with CO2 enrichment in an aquarium setup will tell you that.

Re:This is huge

[stoatwblr]

The basic tenet of more frequent extreme weather events, happening to greater extremes holds true though.

Various models have shown that GW may well result in wet areas getting wetter and dry areas getting dryer, but we don't have enough computer power to model the real world and projects to process satellite imagery data from the last 50 years in order to more closely quantify existant changes are struggling for funding

(Disclosure: I do support work for one group working on this. Apart from the simple issue of funding for equipment and staff, one of the largest problems is that those who have the programming skills to do this kind of thing well can get paid 20-30 times more in private industry than in a university research job)

Re: This is huge

[stoatwblr]

"Antarctic ice has actually increased significantly in the recent cold period"

Antarctic ice _VOLUME_ is and has been decreasing at increasing rates.

Antarctic sea ice extent is increasing, partly because a lot of the land ice is ending up in the sea and partly because that land ice is freshwater and there's so much of that entering the sea around antarctica that it's essentially caused a freshwater layer floating on top of salt water (fresh is lighter than salty), and that freshwater freezes at higher temperatures. ( 0C vs -17C).

That translates to more ice on the water, but it's warmer than it has been in the past (land ice is also significantly warmer on average than it has been, which has resulted in faster glacier flows putting more ice in the water.)

Humans don't notice the temperature difference between -20 and -21, or even -20 and -40, and ice doesn't look much different until it's about to melt.

Likewise, 1 metre thick pack ice doesn't look any different to 10 metre thick pack ice, so ice pack destruction (in the arctic) happens invisibly right up to the point where the ice melts, at which point we think it's a sudden change.

Re:This is huge

[stoatwblr]

"It also makes the crops less nutritionally useful, so you have to eat more empty calories to get the essential vitamins and minerals to keep from getting malnutrition. "

This is already happening. Contemporary store-bought fruit and vegetables are well down on vitamin/mineral levels of the same products 70-80 years ago.

Re:This is huge

[budgenator]

Those feudal family dynasties always seem to either be out-right squandered or at least diluted through the generations. Humans simply don't do well with un-earned wealth.

Re:This is huge

[budgenator]

The tropics are at 23 26 16 (or 23.4378), the center of the desert belt is closer to 30

Re: This is huge

[budgenator]

First there isn't enough CO2 in the atmosphere to effect the amount of water vapor or humidity by changing the solubility of water in air, secondly it isn't about insulation, it's about scattering the infrared so the path to space is much longer because there is less straight line travel for the heat. What confuses me is why doesn't given
1. water's Standard molar entropy at 69.95 J/molK,
2. water's 18.01528 g / mol,
3. CO2's 44.01 g / mol,
4. air's 28.8 g / mol,
why doesn't the lighter than air, water vapor simply carry large amounts of heat above the scattering of the heavier than air CO2?

Re:This is huge

[budgenator]

You would be surprised at how much plant material is left on the fields, compared to how much is removed. When field corn is harvested the only thing taken off the fields is the corn kernels; the only exception to this is when the corn is harvested for silage. When wheat is harvested the wheat straw is typically baled and used for litter in the barn. Wheat is also the only crop that farmers plow after harvest in my area, but they use chisel plows and disc harrow instead of mouldboard plows and disc harrows which keeps the majority of the soil disturbance to the top few inches. In soy only the beans from inside the pods are removed, everything else is TLC, Thin Layer Composed. Our typical crop rotation is corn, soy, then winter wheat and farmers are tilling before planting the wheat and after harvesting the wheat to mitigate fire hazards on the fields, the corn is planted without additional tillage and the following year the soy is planted between the previous corn rows. The wildcard crop is sugarbeets, you have to win a lottery for a sugarbeet contract and the sugar plant leases the harvesting equipment to you and they actually test your crop and tell you how much and what fertilizer to use for your crop next year; a sugarbeet contract is quite lucrative and the long tap root left from the beets is very good for your soil.

Re:This is huge

[K. S. Kyosuke]

All those are mostly temporary, therefore unusable for long-term sequestration.

Re:This is huge

[jwhitener]

I'm not sure why this being touted as a 'new breakthrough'. Nitrogen fixing bacteria are well known.

I'm actually selling freeze dried bacteria right now, it is called Twin N - http://www.bridgetownorganics.com/ . It produces nitrogen way cheaper than buying N, doubly so if you are buying organic sources of N, like fish fert. N fixing bacteria are already being applied to thousands and thousands of acres of crops just in the pacific northwest alone.

What the article didn't say, was if their method was commercially viable. Can they reproduce the bacteria at high volumes? Can they freeze dry them for transport?

I wish them luck though. I'd like to see a lot more use of natural nitrogen fixing in commercial farming. Commercial nitrogen applications now tend to run off and into streams and rivers, making algae blooms and other detrimental side effects.

Re:This is huge

[jwhitener]

Or, you know, just apply more bacteria in place of liquid N each year:) http://www.mabiotec.com/main.php?page=twinn1

Next step - beer!

[ugen]

Next step - beer.

Re:Next step - beer!

[blueshift_1]

Not just beer.... lots of beer!

Re:Next step - beer!

[Bodhammer]

" such as barley and oats."

Ahh.... Beer is made from barley...

Re:Next step - beer!

[Immerman]

And sometimes oats. And wheat. Hmm, I wonder if there's any grain that somebody *doesn't* make beer out of.

Re:Next step - beer!

[jandrese]

I don't know of any rice beers, only rice wine. I'm sure someone is about to come out of the woodwork and correct me however.

Re:Next step - beer!

[viperidaenz]

So is whiskey, and they're Irish...

Re:Next step - beer!

[viperidaenz]

I believe they call it Guinness.

Re:Next step - beer!

[dedmorris]

Read a Budweiser label. It's made with barley and rice. Many other American beers include "select grains" as well.

Re:Next step - beer!

[Gr33nJ3ll0]

Budweiser. Not strictly a "rice" beer, but it's definitely one of the adjuncts.

Re:Next step - beer!

[angel'o'sphere]

There are plenty of rice beers in asia (e.g. Tsingtao). And rice wine is strictly speaking a liqueur and not wine (but yes, we call it that, also in Germany e.g)

Re:Next step - beer!

[PRMan]

They're Irish, so of course they were raising barley...

Re:Next step - beer!

[Charliemopps]

yea no... Pot

Re:Next step - beer!

[jdschulteis]

Read a Budweiser label. It's made with barley and rice. Many other American beers include "select grains" as well.

They "select" whatever is cheapest--truth in labeling!

Re:Next step - beer!

[QRDeNameland]

Nope. Google 'spelt beer'...there are a few commercial ones and many homebrew recipes.

There are even einkorn beers out there. Outside of experimental GMO grains or truly extinct species, I'd guess that...no, there's no grain known to man that someone has not tried to add in some quantity to their mash.

Re:Next step - beer!

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a bit of a stretch to call it beer.

Re:Next step - beer!

[Barsteward]

wood... there's plenty of horrible tasting grain in wood

Not exactly a science fair then innit?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's World Food Prize territory.

Wager

[kheldan]

Five bucks says that before the end of the month, Monsantos' legal department sends them a cease-and-desist order and claims prior art on their accomplishment.

Re:Wager

[cdrudge]

I thought Monsanto owned the rights to Nitrogen as well as the complete genome of oats and barley. This should be a slam dunk case for their lawyers.

Re:Wager

[alphatel]

Five bucks says that before the end of the month, Monsantos' legal department sends them a cease-and-desist order and claims prior art on their accomplishment.

Monsanto Letter to USPTO ...infringing on our mark [see attached]...
Patent "Employee" (working from unknown location on Sept 30th at 11:59 PM): Opens prior art. Enclosed is ASCII drawing of a farmer.
USPTO Response to Monsanto: Seems Legit.

Re:Wager

[zeroryoko1974]

Roundup ready Nitrogen, now with special bacteria.

Re:Wager

[dow]

Surely it would be in agri-technology firms interests to nurture these young scientists and offer to help them through university and develop their ideas? This is Slashdot, not Natural News.

Re:Wager

[superwiz]

You don't have to debunk them. People who demonize Monsanto classify themselves as ass holes on their own. They don't have enough credibility to need debunking.

Re:Wager

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here. Welcome to Earth!
Here the intelligent, creative, and driven are ostracized by highly malevolent and unproductive individuals and their minions until they die. Then the survivors take the accomplishments and celebrate their own use of them. See: Looting.

Note: This statement may result in cross-references with a fictional novel. Don't take that novel too seriously.

Re:Wager

[kheldan]

What Bizzarro version of Earth are you living in that Monsanto is not a bunch of evil assholes destroying the biosphere of the planet in the name of profit? Do you work for them or something?

The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[kruach aum]

It's a resource allocation problem. There is enough food on earth right now to sustainably feed everyone, the problem lies with the people on the path from the food to the hungry mouths. Increasing food production increases the wealth of the people in the middle, who now have more resources to allocate, but does not necessarily reduce the number of hungry people.

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[Theaetetus]

It's a resource allocation problem. There is enough food on earth right now to sustainably feed everyone, the problem lies with the people on the path from the food to the hungry mouths. Increasing food production increases the wealth of the people in the middle, who now have more resources to allocate, but does not necessarily reduce the number of hungry people.

This also would help the hungry mouths grow their own food, faster, with less space, in damp areas that were previously prone to rot (one of the things discussed in the video is that through faster germination, less of the crop rots before harvest). This doesn't change increase the wealth of the people in the middle, but opens new areas to farming by hungry people.

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[Spy Handler]

Considering these girls are from Ireland, this should solve their potato problems quite well.

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[diamondmagic]

Let's backtrack to Econ 101: This is a change in supply, i.e. a movement of the supply curve on a plot of supply and demand, specifically, a movement to the right.

This causes the market price of the good (food, here) to fall.

It's possible to do quite a lot of things that we don't do, the question the economist faces is at what cost?

The demand curve for food by most people in the middle class and above is somewhat inelastic. I think it's fair to say the extra food production, to the extent there is any, is going to make for fewer hungry people, whose lower income makes their spending on food more elastic.

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[kruach aum]

Your spending is also inelastic when you have nothing to spend.

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[pz]

So, please explain how producing more food where it's needed -- like through crops that are higher yield without fertilizers, like these students demonstrated -- isn't addressing the problem.

There will always, always be a resource inequity. We have between 6,000 and 10,000 years of human history to demonstrate this observation. No magic wand is going to evenly distribute resources, and there are plenty of people who would say it's an ill-formed idea in any case.

So if, for the sake of argument, you accept that there will be resource inequity, transporting food is a really bad idea as it spoils quickly, moreover, the costs of transportation to locations where it is needed roughly increases with the amount of need, as such areas are typically away from infrastructure.

If you can't transport food, and there isn't a magic wand to even out everyone's access to resources, why, exactly, is producing more food locally not a good idea?

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[kruach aum]

I am not saying that producing food locally is not a good idea, I am saying that no matter what science does, there will always be hunger, because of human nature.

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[diamondmagic]

If you have literally nothing to spend, then your elasticity of demand is undefined. It's a division by zero error.

However in general, the law of diminishing marginal utility necessarily implies that as your income shrinks, your elasticity of demand becomes perfectly elastic (i.e. -infinity).

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[angel'o'sphere]

But you do know that Hitler died 1945?
Just wondering ...

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[CrashNBrn]

Exactly. Why do anything..cuz you know human nature.

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[bunratty]

Increasing food production increases the girth of the people in the middle. FTFY

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[SuiteSisterMary]

I think the point he's trying to make is 'we can solve this problem, today. We, as a species, apparently choose not to. So why assume a new solution will be better implemented than the existing ones?'

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[rubycodez]

Considering they are from Ireland, this should solve their sobriety problem

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[Charliemopps]

It's a resource allocation problem. There is enough food on earth right now to sustainably feed everyone, the problem lies with the people on the path from the food to the hungry mouths. Increasing food production increases the wealth of the people in the middle, who now have more resources to allocate, but does not necessarily reduce the number of hungry people.

You're clearly not a person that's been to a 3rd world country. I have been, and its a fuck of a lot more complicated than that.
How does someone who has no money, no home, and no familly grow food? At all? Why would the farmer down the road that has 2 acres and can barely grow enough to feed his family further impoverish himself by feeding that person? Now increase that farmers yield by 74%...

And you'll say... well we could just give them food! A noble idea... until you drive that farmer into bankruptcy because everyone now gets free food and is livelihood is worthless. Like I said, it's complicated. There is no easy solution that involves some big evil corporate overlord.

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[Skidborg]

It'll work until they actually run out of land that can be converted to food production, a limitation that Ethiopia is nowhere near.

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[vux984]

Let's backtrack to Econ 101:

That usually results in oversimplifying the problem.

This causes the market price of the good (food, here) to fall.

The dominant cost is already transportation. Literally tons of food is ALREADY being wasted / thrown out / and left to rot. Its not because it isn't cheap enough to produce, but because transporting it isn't cheap enough to get it to where its needed.

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[currently_awake]

Ethiopia exports food. It's one of their leading exports, and has been for the entire history of that country. Production of food has never been an issue in Ethiopia, it was always a distribution problem (mostly the government selling food to buy guns and bullets to fight their civil war).

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[turp182]

Correct on the amount of food. The situation is actually an energy problem, the cost of transporting foods can be prohibitive.

Especially so if they have a short time frame to be consumed (healthy stuff like fruits and vegetables). And those food types are prized by first world consumers, so, from an economic perspective, those who can provide the best profit get the food.

America turns corn into energy. South America turns sugar into energy. How would you suggest minimizing that and also pay to move the food around the globe?

The market wins, not those who need food.

Check out Darwin's Nightmare. Terrible documentary about food distribution (great documentary, the content is of a terrible nature).

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[ChrisMaple]

Hungry is a sensation that does not equal undernourished, malnourished, or starving. Stop using "hungry" when referring to the effects of inadequate food supplies. It makes you seem even stupider.

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[kruach aum]

No, "hunger" is perfectly fine to describe all those things. Just like "frozen" can describe water at 0 degrees and water at -273 degrees.

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[Seumas]

Was I the only one who, upon seeing the title, immediately opened all the links and did a CTRL+F for "potato"?

Re:The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem

[Intrepid imaginaut]

You should look up "the assize of bread", circa 13th century.

The kind of science fair my school used to have?

[NotDrWho]

If it's anything like the science fairs we used to have at my high school, then it will turn out dad is a plant biologist (who swears the girls did it all on their own) and the girls will be curiously vague when asked about the methodology.

Re:The kind of science fair my school used to have

[Khashishi]

Very possible, but you shouldn't just assume it to be true without meeting these girls.

Re:Which bacteria?

[DogDude]

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)."

Terrific counter to Monsanto's herbicide message

[Morgaine]

The Permaculture community and advocates of companion planting have been around for decades preaching this same message, that plants grow better in messy complimentary families instead of in tidy rows of monoculture in which everything else is considered "weeds" and exterminated.

It's great to see youngsters getting rewards for bringing this message to the public eye, countering Monsanto's advocacy for broad-spectrum herbicides that are effectively killing off the biosphere with each passing year. Nature is amazingly productive when allowed to do her thing, instead of undermined by highly destructive profit-led myopia.

Frankenfood

[CWCheese]

Just waiting for the EU food activists to decry these girls creating Frankenfood and hound them for their evil work

Re:Frankenfood

[qbast]

They are replicating completely natural process, so I doubt it.

Re:Frankenfood

[operagost]

It can be argued that GMO replicates a completely natural process-- evolution. Doesn't stop the crazies.

Re:Frankenfood

[Hognoxious]

It can be argued that GMO replicates a completely natural process-- evolution.

It can be argued that 1, like all other odd numbers, is a prime.

Your point was what?

Re:Frankenfood

[Sique]

Actually, GMO uses a completely natural process, that's called "retro viral infection", and it's often deadly (HIV for instance is a retro virus). In GMO it's called "DNA shuttle". A retro virus puts its own DNA into the host's DNA causing the host to produce copies of the retro virus. For GMO, the retro virus first gets some additional DNA (mostly from a completely unrelated species) to produce the desired proteins, which it then carries into the host and which (hopefully) will integrate into the host's DNA, thus the name DNA shuttle. If the GMO designer is lucky, the host will battle the retro viral DNA and keep the additional DNA.

It has nothing to do with evolution, though the human DNA shows the remainings of several retro virus infections that were kept in the genome, but seems mostly unfunctional right now.

Re:Frankenfood

[ChrisMaple]

"transferring genes between species that could never procreate together isn't even remotely like evolution." -- never heard of viral DNA insertion in nature, have you?

Re:Frankenfood

[Stuarticus]

A retro virus? Like spanish flu? Or a retrovirus?

Re:Frankenfood

[H725_IT]

It can be argued that 1, like all other odd numbers, is a prime.

Your point was what?

What about 15?

Re:The kind of science fair my school used to have

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The kind of science fair my school used to have

[HornWumpus]

This is not new. The problem has always been one of getting the nitrogen fixing bacteria to stay on the seed when handled in a commercial/industrial manner.

The real holy grail is getting the bacteria to just follow the plants life cycle, like in beans.

Re:The kind of science fair my school used to have

[Alopex]

I'd be willing to bet money on it. I'm all for high school science fairs, but the way the media (and, in turn, Slashdot) sensationalize results like this is incredibly depressing. Real science is real hard.

Re:Terrific counter to Monsanto's herbicide messag

[Anonymous Coward]

Nature is amazingly productive when allowed to do her thing, instead of undermined by highly destructive profit-led myopia.

Is that why our modern crop yields are so much greater than those of our ancestors?

Re:Irish & Potatoes

[Anonymous Coward]

The potato famine was more due to Ireland exporting large amounts of its food.

I just want to say one word to you

[Lucas123]

Just one word. 3D food printing.

OK. Three words.

Re: I just want to say one word to you

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing beats 4D food printing: you're never hungry in the present, future or past.

Re:I just want to say one word to you

[RaccoonBandit]

They call it, "replicator".

Re:I just want to say one word to you

[aix tom]

I really hope it's real 3D this time, not just some stereoscopic trickery where you need special glasses to eat your hamburger.

Re:I just want to say one word to you

[jd2112]

I really hope it's real 3D this time, not just some stereoscopic trickery where you need special glasses to eat your hamburger.

Oh No! That french fry is coming right at me!

Re:I just want to say one word to you

[mjwx]

Just one word. 3D food printing.

OK. Three words.

Four words:
Three Dimensional Food Printing.

Re:I just want to say one word to you

[ConceptJunkie]

> I really hope it's real 3D this time, not just some stereoscopic trickery where you need special glasses to eat your hamburger.

Yeah, I hate when it's just pink slime on one side of the burger and blue slime on the other.

Re:Slashdot grew up?

[Minwee]

No, yours was the first.

Another side effect

[portwojc]

This is a no brainer. Add nitrogen and increase production. Good job doing this with bacteria. Maybe then we could cut using anhydrous ammonia and make an ingredient for meth harder to come by.

Re:Another side effect

[qbast]

To hell with meth ingredients, even reducing amount of fertilizers washed into groundwater would be great thing.

Re:Another side effect

[Charliemopps]

This is a no brainer. Add nitrogen and increase production. Good job doing this with bacteria. Maybe then we could cut using anhydrous ammonia and make an ingredient for meth harder to come by.

You dont understand nitrogen fixing bacteria....
The plants uptake is limited, and if you put too much in the soil it's actually poisonous to the plant and you get runoff. These sorts of bacteria help the plant uptake more than it would naturally.

This will not solve anything

[houghi]

The problem is not production. The problem is distribution.

Re:This will not solve anything

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh.

First of all you completely missed the fact that this was a pretty cool Science Fair project.

Second of all you are wrong based upon the historical facts in evidence. The Green Revolution of the 1960's actually did benefit many poor regions and poor farmers. This can be seen to build upon Green Revolution achievements.

Third you are wrong because, if local farmers are growing increased amounts of food then the distribution problem is greatly lessened or even eliminated. You are growing at or near the source of need. Massive distribution networks are no longer needed.

Fourth you are wrong to categorized current constraints as a mere "distribution" problem. Distribution sounds like, if only we had better transportation, the issue would go away. Eliminate hunger with more trains and better ships! In fact the current food problems have important issues of money, power, corruption, conflict and access.

Fifth, you are wrong because a distribution diagnosis presumes a world where specialization is high and uniformly acceptable. Most areas where hunger is prevalent are not industrialized. That means agricultural or even pre agricultural systems of organization. Generalist lifestyles are the norm and people routinely grow what they eat because that is the way things are done. If you suddenly start to "distribute" more efficiently you aren't just feeding hungry people! You are changing a whole economy, lifestyle and society. You've undermined what market economy they do have, required high levels of cash flows which they aren't ready for, and invalidated the skills sets of millions. And you've not educated them for the industrial world you presume.

Re:Hardly a breakthrough

[qbast]

But not for barley or oats. Using process that worked for one thing to improve another is a progress. If they found new commercially viable (or at least promising) process, then it is potentially a breakthrough.

Re:The kind of science fair my school used to have

[slew]

If it's anything like the science fairs we used to have at my high school, then it will turn out dad is a plant biologist (who swears the girls did it all on their own) and the girls will be curiously vague when asked about the methodology.

Or the science teachers (apparently the kinsale community school they attend has a history of producing regional, national, and international science fair winners).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:The only consequence of this is more people

[qbast]

Spoken like a person who never had to go on empty stomach.

Re:Terrific counter to Monsanto's herbicide messag

[operagost]

I don't see anything in their study that said you shouldn't remove weeds. It involved specific strains of bacteria... BACTERIA. I'm going to keep pulling weeds... thanks.

Famine will be with us until culture changes ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Its also a cultural problem. For example more sons means more prestige. Until some cultures adopt a more modern smaller family lifestyle famine will still be with us. All scientific breakthroughs really do is increase the number of people living in famine in the long term. In the short term they absolutely help but then the population increases, due to culture, to match the new level of food availability. Its been this way for millennia. Population adjusts to the new supply level, any disruption in supply (war, weather, etc) results in famine.

Re:My Guess

[narcc]

You've got that backward.

have they filed a patent?

[BradMajors]

eom

You'll never hear from these girls again

[PopeRatzo]

Monsanto is sending "security consultants" out right now to make sure these girls are disappeared. And Neil DeGrasse Tyson is working on a youtube video where he announces that it's "anti-science" to increase crop yields without using GMOs.

Re:Terrific counter to Monsanto's herbicide messag

[nedlohs]

No that's because use huge amounts of natural gas (half a billion tonnes or so a year) to create nitrogen fertilizers. And even more pesticides.

Which don't get me wrong, I'm all for. But modern farming sacrifices some land productivity in exchange for much higher labor productivity.

We use tidy rows of monoculture because it allows extremely efficient harvesting, not because it has better yields.

I feel like I've heard this before...

[wonkey_monkey]

Isn't it usually the case, when some kid is touted as having done something amazing at a science fair, that it turns out to a) already be standard procedure in the field in question or b) is actually woefully impractical on anything but science fair scale?

I mean, we could probably (okay, probably not, just an example) make crops grow twice as fast by bathing them in artifical sunlight 24/7, but that's probably not very practical.

the girls found their test crops germinated in half the time and had a drymass yield up to 74 percent greater than usual.

What's meant by "greater than usual" here?

Re:I feel like I've heard this before...

[Stuarticus]

I expect in accordance with scientific practice it means compared to an untreated control group.

Re:it is a contraceptive problem

[ceoyoyo]

Fucking makes problems better. Fucking without contraceptives makes things worse.

Re:The only consequence of this is more people

[ceoyoyo]

The slowest population growth (it's negative) is in the first world, among populations that have plenty of food. Your assertion simply isn't supported by reality.

An abundance of food creates leisure time, which allows people, especially women, to do things like go to school. Educated people, especially women, have fewer babies. As has been shown over and over and over, the solution to population growth problems is secure basic needs followed by education. The only problem is that it works too well.

how is this new?

[rewindustry]

is this not the same thing as using "guilds" in permaculture?

I call Sean Hannigan, so I do.

[Hognoxious]

Well since you brought it up, it's rather odd that none of them is a ginger.

Nibbling at the problem

[paiute]

The major problems are going to be:
1. Too many people
2. Not enough fresh water
3. Not enough food

3 is a distant third.

Re:Nibbling at the problem

[ChrisMaple]

"Too many people" based on what standard? Causing what problem -- food shortages?

"Not enough fresh water". Water for direct human consumption is dwarfed by water used for agriculture, also by water used by industry.

These things are interrelated. Trying to configure them as separate problems is foolish and futile.

Re:Nibbling at the problem

[paiute]

Where did I specify that they were not related?

Population issue?

[Sperbels]

Combating the Global Food Crisis

So we enable everyone to have more offspring...and then they need an even greater amount of food. Then we just end up back where we were. How long can we keep ignoring the fact that population is the problem. Global warming, peak oil, antibiotic resistant diseases, ozone hole, etc. All of it will just keep getting worse if we don't do something about our population.

Re:Population issue?

[Spy Handler]

So we enable everyone to have more offspring...and then they need an even greater amount of food. Then we just end up back where we were. How long can we keep ignoring the fact that population is the problem. Global warming, peak oil, antibiotic resistant diseases, ozone hole, etc. All of it will just keep getting worse if we don't do something about our population.

What you say is logical and seems quite obvious when you think about it.

Problem is what you *didn't* say. You didn't mention that every wealthy country has a stagnating population, actually declining in many cases. You didn't mention that the countries with exploding populations are all in Africa, South America, Middle East, and South Asia. As in, black and brown people.

Since the white people countries and lighter-yellow skinned East Asian countries are not growing in population, no action is needed there (obviously). Any population control measures must be applied to black and brown countries. And therein lies the problem. Progressives oppose it because this flies smack in the face of liberal ideology, which states that black and brown people are a gift from Gaea, to be treasured and nurtured. Conservatives oppose it because Jeebus forbids contraception and preventing any birth is a sin.

Any effort to help Africa with its population problem will be instantly attacked with charges of racism and genocide. By parties on all sides of the political aisle.

Re:Population issue?

[Sperbels]

Well, the first step is at least bringing attention to the problem. Whenever I mention it, people dismiss me as a neo-Malthusian (as if invoking the name dismisses everything I say), or just say something to the effect that prosperous societies self regulate their population by having fewer children (as if that global prosperity could ever be achieved).

Re:Population issue?

[ChrisMaple]

What do you see as the insurmountable barrier to global prosperity?

Re:Population issue?

[Sperbels]

Human nature: Religious differences, racial differences, ideological differences, cultural differences and greed.

So basicaly

[wisnoskij]

It is just doing one tiny part of what soil fungus would be doing naturally if they did not spray fungicide?

Re:Famine will be with us until culture changes ..

[kaatochacha]

If we buy this argument, then shouldn't we simply stop making as much food, and bring the number down through mass deaths? I mean, why work so hard?

How about the "bio-fuels" ?

[Taco Cowboy]

... every food calorie requiring 10 calories of fossil fuel input ...

Does the above formula apply to the "bio-fuels" ?

If it does, then the whole "ethanol-fuel" and the "bio-diesel" thing are nothing but filthy lies ??

Re:How about the "bio-fuels" ?

[cduffy]

Corn ethanol is ridiculously inefficient. Sugar-based biofuels, by contrast, can have a quite good return and are actively used by developing countries in South America that don't have money to waste on things that don't make economic sense (but aren't used in the US because we have relatively little land able to grow sugarcane).

In short, it's more complex than either "all bio-fuels are good" or "all bio-fuels are evil". This shouldn't be a surprise -- few things are so simple.

Re:The kind of science fair my school used to have

[m00sh]

If it's anything like the science fairs we used to have at my high school, then it will turn out dad is a plant biologist (who swears the girls did it all on their own) and the girls will be curiously vague when asked about the methodology.

The greatest challenge is not knowing how to do something but knowing all the ways on not how to do it.

There is always someone who shows the exact way of doing something and the kids follow the step and sometimes produce great results.

Even great university research has someone vastly experienced guiding it.

Re:Which bacteria?

[hawkfish]

It's helpful if you read the fucking article

Who let you in here?

Re:TO THE ASS HOLE EDITORS:

[superwiz]

If the headline goes from least personal info to most personal, it dehumanizes those described. If goes from most personal to least personal, it humanizes them. This is not a singular occurrence. This is a general communication principle. The headline was 3 Irish girls (notices least personal, the country of origin, was listed first).

Re:TO THE ASS HOLE EDITORS:

[superwiz]

No one was even discussing whether it was accurate or not. It's just not the topic of the conversation. The topic that I set was the dehumanization of scientists by the way the headlines which describe their accomplishments are structured in pop media.

Re:Terrific counter to Monsanto's herbicide messag

[bmo]

In contrast, companion planting is mixing your crop (e.g. beans + carrots together) so that they work together.

That's not Kosher according to Leviticus 19:19.

Why aren't there "conservative" christians whining about this?

--
BMO

Cheap food kills

[currently_awake]

Lowering the cost of food makes more people starve to death, not less. Poor people tend to make their money from selling food to the middle class. Lower the cost (as happens due to massive American agricultural subsidies) and the poor third world farmers starve because they can't afford to buy the cheap food. The best thing we could do for the third world is raise food prices.

Re:Cheap food kills

[diamondmagic]

You can't say that because we're assuming ceteris paribus and we've already defined our control as the productivity of food on a given plot of land.

Our food production per plot of land has gone up; or, our required size of land to produce the same amount of food has gone down.

We can't say for sure if one person's profits will go up or down, at least not without additional information about the particularities and price elasticity stats of the market, because both their costs and their revenue have changed. But markets change all the time, people (and farmers especially) know they have to change produce from time to time, depending on what's profitable. Overall, though, lower costs are a good thing. Always. That's exactly what's happening here.

Societies where most people are in agriculture tend to be societies where most people are poor, and this is a causal effect: Their costs are so high for farming they can't afford to have industry elsewhere. Reducing costs means fewer people have to be in agriculture, and this is good.

This isn't even a feedback loop, although sometimes people will make a similar argument around other phenomenon assuming all feedback loops must be a positive feedback loop that never decays, incorrectly reaching the conclusion the economy will eventually collapse. (E.g. "Prices went up, therefore the cost of producing/refining oil/gas will go up, therefore the cost of producing many products will go up, until all products cost infinity!")

TO ASSHOLE IMAGINARY RULEMAKERS of "PC" THINGS

[iggymanz]

Who made up your bullshit "rules" and why should anyone follow them? Maybe the problem is only between your ears. You are wrong, any order is fine.

Re: The Global Food Crisis is not a science probl

[j-beda]

Perhaps by having more biofuel at no significant additional cost?

"More food for the same price" can hardly be a bad thing.

Well, if the local farmers cannot compete with the pricing of the imported stuff, then they go out of business and eventually all of the local money gets spent outside of the community on imported food. If there is insufficient local production of something for export, eventually all of the local money is gone, then everyone locally is screwed.

I"m not saying this type of thing is guaranteed to happen, but sometimes when the buggy whip makers go out of business, the knock on effects are wider than one might think.

Read the discussion about Ebola on slashdot

[PeterM from Berkeley]

What the people on there have said will halfway convince you that Ebola is going to fix our population problem for us.

Aaaah... shit... There's more.

[denzacar]

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....

The optimum concentration of r.japonicum for the germination of barley seeds was found to be 2x107CFU/ml (13% reduction; ANOVA p<0.0264).
R.leguminosarum had a positive effect on the germination of Barley and reduced germination time by approximately 40% at 25oc (ANOVA p<0.0001).
For Oats, an optimum concentration of 4x106 CFU/ml of r.japonicum was observed to be most efficient and resulted in a reduction in germination by 22 hours (28% Reduction; ANOVA p<0.0001).
Lower concentrations of r.leguminosarium were most effective on oat germination. A concentration of 16x104 CFU/ml reduced germination times from 86 to 66 hours (23% reduction; Dunnett test p<0.0001).

13%, 40%, 28% and 23% reduction in germination time for various crops. Reported as 50%.

Small Scale Agricultural Tests

R.japonicum was seen to have a positive effect on the length and dry mass of barley crops. (+10.4% length increase:+13% dry mass; p<0.0328), the effect was more notable at higher concentrations.
It was observed that Oats treated with a higher concentration of r.japonicum (4x106 CFU/ml) produced a greater dry mass (p=0.0248) and longer length (p=0.0043) than water treated seeds.

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.

Large Scale Agricultural Tests

Lower concentrations of r.japonicum (3x109 CFU/ml) with peat as a carrier were the most successful treatments (ANOVA p<.0001) and resulted in an average increase in plant dry mass of 0.284g/5 seedlings (74%).
Spraying the seeds with aqueous culture post planting increased dry mass by a mean of 44% (Dunn p<0.0001)

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

Re:Aaaah... shit... There's more.

[ChrisMaple]

An increase of germination speed by 50% is a decrease in germination time by 33%. In your effort to denigrate their efforts and results, you display not only a sour attitude but poor math skills.

Re:Aaaah... shit... There's more.

[Stuarticus]

Have you met many teenage boys?

Re:Aaaah... shit... There's more.

[denzacar]

germination speed by 50% is a decrease in germination time by 33%

Except, there is no reported decrease in germination time by 33%.

What they do report is:

In all test groups seeds treated with r.japonicum and r.leguminosarum germinated faster by approx 50% (p<0.001).

and

Based on our extensive experimental results we succeeded in showing statistically that two strains of Rhizobium bacteria can significantly accelerate the rate of crop germination (+40% for r.leguminosarum and 28% for r.japonicum; (p<0.0001).

While showing 13%, 40%, 28% and 23% reduced germination time.
So, not "all test groups".
Three of which are below your 33%. So, it is not a trend, or median, or average. Making that "approx" a weasel word.

How they got that number?
By taking the highest result for r.leguminosarum bacteria and barley (40% reduced germination time) and r.japonicum and oats (28%), adding them up and getting from that the average of 34%.
Does that sound like all test groups?

Or closer something to like saying that fertilizer A used on apples increases crop yield by 40%, and fertilizer B used on oranges increases the crop yield by 28%.
Which makes ALL FRUIT crop increase by 34% by using both fertilizers A and B.
Except it's NOT ALL fruit, NOR is it BOTH fertilizers, but SOME SPECIFIC fruit and SOME SPECIFIC fertilizers and MOST of them significantly LESS than the reported 34%.

That's weasel-wording to hide conflation of results and to get bigger and sexier numbers.
After getting their numbers through cherry picking.
Throw that outlier of r.leguminosarum bacteria and barley out and the average goes down to 21.3% reduction in germination time.
Instead, they threw out to lowest results and then averaged the highest ones.

Which allowed them to take the 26% average reduction of germination time for various combinations of plants and bacteria... ...or 26.5% for average for barley and 25.5% for oats. ...or 20.5% for r.japonicum and 31.5% for r.leguminosarum. ...and misreport it as 34% reduction in germination time for bacteria A and B in ALL cases. Averaging out apples and oranges.

And then present it as much sexier 50% increase in speed across the board.
Which is like treating reduction in some prices somewhere as an increase in all paychecks everywhere.

Also, note that they report their p-value as under 0.001 for ALL cases.
However, their "optimum concentration" result for barley has a significantly higher p-value of 0.0264.
Which they've reported as 0.001 in their graphs by knocking down their n to n=336 and thus reporting it as "1 day less".
While all their other reported cases had n=672.
That's p-hacking. Adjusting the experiment conditions to match the desired result.

So umm...

you display not only a sour attitude but poor math skills.

But thanks for pointing out that they didn't just misreport by accident - they purposefully cheated.

Re:Aaaah... shit... There's more.

[denzacar]

What? Like the minority ones mentioned above?

It ain't about boys or girls.
It's about Google picking the kids who will make them appear most "helping" in the photos.
Emphasis on appear. As in advertising.

Re:Aaaah... shit... There's more.

[Stuarticus]

You seem to think it's about sex and race. Why do YOU think that helps them the most?

Re:Aaaah... shit... There's more.

[denzacar]

You seem to think it's about sex and race.

Not sex and race.
Exploitation of perceived image which goes with certain sex, race, ethnicity...

Why do YOU think that helps them the most?

Because if you are a "first world" multibillion dollar behemoth, it is good for your image to offset some of the connotations that come with that territory, making you look like a big brotherish soulless corporation.
By presenting yourself as aligned with those on the opposite part of that spectrum.
I.e. The poor, the powerless, the weak... through exploitation of well known tropes.

Weaker sex.
Poor minority.
Multiculturalism.
"Do no evil." Scout's honor.

Here's one for you.
Why is this photo of kids winning a science fair, "better" than both this one and this one?
And I'm not talking about technical details like resolution or a nicer stage someone threw more money on.
I'm talking about kids.

What is it about them that makes them more appealing?
Here's a hint.
It has to do with the image of both the army and corporations in general and while it is a part of the two not-Google-fair images it is utterly obliterated from the Google's photo of kids.

Another hint - it's not the gender or the race of those kids. Some or all of those elements are in all the photos.

Re:Aaaah... shit... There's more.

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Seriously you're living in your own world if you think Irish people are a "poor minority" in the social justice warrior sense. The average industrial wage here is ~€40,000 or so, it's a wealthy modern western democracy.

Re:Aaaah... shit... There's more.

[denzacar]

Seriously you're living in your own world if you think Irish people are a "poor minority" in the social justice warrior sense.

What kind of a world do you live in when out of 4 distinct tropes you pick one as if it is the only one?

Weaker sex.
Poor minority.
Multiculturalism.
"Do no evil." Scout's honor.

And who mentioned anything about social justice warriors?
I'm not saying that Google is promoting any brand of "social justice". Whatever that may mean, as from my experience so far it means so many different things to so many people.

I'm saying that they are exploiting people's preconceived notions about what constitutes "Doing no evil", for the purposes of self-promotion as a "Do no evil" company.
Which they are, in this case, achieving by exploiting children for their various superficial and preconceived racial/gender/ethnic/economic_status/etc attributes and connotations attached to said attributes.
Instead of awarding them according to the merits of their projects.

Re:Terrific counter to Monsanto's herbicide messag

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Does it scales?

[manu0601]

Does the method scales in time (multi-year usage) and space (large fields)?

Re:it is a contraceptive problem

[ChrisMaple]

Fucking makes problems better.

Problems like syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, HPV, chlamydia, "crabs", scabies, hepatitis A and B, HIV, trichomoniasis, amebiasis, giardiasis, cryptosporidiosis, shigellosis, candidiasis, MCV, ebola and Marburg virus.

Re:Irish & Potatoes

[ChrisMaple]

From the article you cited,

The proximate cause of famine was a potato disease commonly known as potato blight

So, bad power politics combined with a disease striking a monoculture crop.

Replication?

[ka9dgx]

Who is going to replicate these experiments? It's not science until someone can do it, and then someone else... and then someone else...

Re:The kind of science fair my school used to have

[ChrisMaple]

Your science fiction imagination is sadly inadequate. Also on the horizon are the creation of new humans without the use of the bodies of either men or women, the creation non-human intelligent beings, and the creation of intelligent beings not based on life-as-we-know-it.

Why do you write "Fuck you", then write "can't wait till we figure out how to get pregnant without men" which indicates that you don't want him to fuck?

By the way, the word missing from your vocabulary is misogynist.

Re:Terrific counter to Monsanto's herbicide messag

[ChrisMaple]

There are a great number of plants that produce no value for humans or that make significant problems when intermixed with food plants. Consider milk thistle or poison ivy or hundreds of other thorny or poisonous plants growing alongside strawberries, which grow close to the ground and must be hand picked.

Re:The only consequence of this is more people

[mjwx]

The slowest population growth (it's negative) is in the first world, among populations that have plenty of food. Your assertion simply isn't supported by reality.

Correlation does not equal causation.

You'll find that the nations with the slowest rates of birth (excluding the Vatican) are ones that have the best old age pension/retirement plans, it just happens to be that these countries also have the safest food supplies. The reason why a lot of poorer nations tend to have large family sizes is that the parents depend on the children to take care of them in old age. As there are no old age pensions, nor can they save enough to live off in their working lives so having more kids is a way of hedging your bets if one turns out to be a failure or die.

Re:it is a contraceptive problem

[ceoyoyo]

Since the OP is referring to a population problem.

Re:The only consequence of this is more people

[ChrisMaple]

The explosive population growth in today's world is in Asia (China and India), and in the future it will be Africa, according to the WIRED article you cite. Think, and you'll see that this supports ceoyoyo's assertion. China and India are both working hard to educate their populations (limited by the deep corruption of their political systems.) I see no such hope for most of Africa.

The anomaly here is South America; why is the population not growing there also?

The really genius girl

[lukeskywalker9m]

Excellent ideal. But we need further study for impacts of it to environment & ecological.

Re:The only consequence of this is more people

[ceoyoyo]

My statement is not based on observational evidence alone. Several countries have done the experiment. See the various things Bangladesh has done, for example. There's even a great TED talk on it.

Educating women is by far the most effective means of reducing population growth, and various agencies from national governments to the UN have discovered that it's extremely difficult to do that until people have enough to eat. Otherwise the kids go to work growing food instead of going to school. That's also a contributing factor to poor families having lots of kids - cheap labour to help out growing food or running the business. "Who's going to take care of me when I'm old" seems to be less than a primary concern when you don't have enough to eat.

Huh?

[s.petry]

Cutting off the links for raw links probably makes sense assuming that length is the limiting factor, not just reducing the tail (often the most descriptive and important, don't want those accidental goatse pics). I'm assuming anchored tags still work? We can check with your link here.

Re:TO THE ASS HOLE EDITORS:

[ChrisMaple]

Although the names would be nice, even if they were put first they would soon be forgotten. I mean no denigration of the girls involved, but for an article like this the primary interest is the technology, followed by the nation and gender of the inventors. Those are the things that will be remembered, the names are just noise for the general reader.

What's more important: the cotton gin or the name Eli Whitney?

Re:My Guess

[colinjl]

Backward? Do you mean it should be "kills this discovery and buys these girls out", or "buys this discovery and kills these girls"?

Re:The kind of science fair my school used to have

[Stuarticus]

The word your vocabulary seems to be missing is troll, the advice: "Do not feed...".

Just one more step

[ThatsNotPudding]

Coming soon: Roundup-ready bacteria!!

Re:The kind of science fair my school used to have

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you probably wouldn't of missed when it was done as Westinghouse it was a corrupt, political mess and the innovation standards were real low. I remember as a kid getting disqualified because the judge didn't a kid who built a PWM controller in the days when IC's just barely came on the scene. The judge happened to be close friends with the dad who built the 6' Tesla for his daughter. I was heartened that Intel took it over and really pushed up the standards that some amazing work is coming out of it.

I don't know, man, you could have also gotten disqualified because you some words and just typing, to the point where I your stuff several times and it still doesn't sense.

Re:TO THE ASS HOLE EDITORS:

[superwiz]

What's more important: the cotton gin or the name Eli Whitney?

What's more important is that you remember the name Eli Whitney. Although you are clearly trying to change the topic by bringing up one of the few times when technology reduced the quality of human condition. Why not mention Norman Borlaug instead? Especially, in the context of this article. Do people think that discovering photo-electric effect was a genius or do they call every genius an "Einstein"?

The fact that their names are already forgotten is not just an injustice to Ciara Judge, Émer Hickey and Sophie Healy-Thow. It is, once again, an attempt to put the political context (their nationality and gender) above the actual achievement. Just try for a second doing the same thing with a headline about a movie actor. As in "... a famous California performer was sentenced to rehab today..." Does it seem like you are telling the full story there? Of course, not.

Science is first and foremost a human endeavor. And any attempt to dehumanize it denigrates it. I have always maintained that every scientist and every mathematician must have it stipulated in writtng that their name appear first in any headline of any article about them if they agree to an interview on which the article is to be based. And if you really don't think people care, then tell me why the names of the actors who play parts in science fiction are known while the names of actual scientists who make discoveries are not known?

Just so you understand, this is only the case in the US. It is very much the result of how the press reports on science. It is not the result of some general trend in human thought about science. It is also fairly new. You yourself mentioned Eli Whitney. Einstein's name is a household item. This is all a result of how scientists were genuinely liked years ago. We went through a cultural period of thinking of scientists as "mad scientists" if they were good at what they did.

And it's not as if science itself was such a boring topic. People will memorize and talk about sports statistics (which are of no consequence) and talk about athletes as if they new them even if they never met them. But the same is not true of science and scientists. Why? Exclusively because of the press. Slashdot editors should know better.

Re:The only consequence of this is more people

[Ogi_UnixNut]

The anomaly here is South America; why is the population not growing there also?

Hmm, looking here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It would seem that South America is growing, just not particularly fast. Roughly the same speed as China. Africa and India you are correct on.

Re:Terrific counter to Monsanto's herbicide messag

[operagost]

Because of Acts 15.

Re:Terrific counter to Monsanto's herbicide messag

[samwichse]

Yes, so wrong you say. Knee! Jerk!

"Professor Jane Mt. Pleasant of Cornell University studied the polyculture of corn, pole beans, and squash. She found that these plots grown in the traditional Iroquois way yielded about 25-40 bushels of corn per acre. This compares poorly to the 100-bushels per acre average for modern New York State famers. Then she added the value of the beans and squash from the same plots. The total yield of the three sisters system was 4.02 million calories per acre compared to the 3.44 million calories per acre."

We plant crops the way we do to make them labor unintensive to harvest. If you knew anything about ecology you would grasp that a monoculture is pretty much never going to take full advantage of a site like polyculture.

Twilight Zone predicted this incognito...

[merlynx]

In "To Serve Man" one of the highlighted demonstrations of the Alien (ahem) benefactors* was a nitrogen-based tech for growing crops... (*I suppose as we would be considered benefactors to our livestock). :-)

Re:Terrific counter to Monsanto's herbicide messag

[ToddInSF]

Short-term, sure, so long as you have cheap petro-chemical derivatives and a massive distribution system for it to dump into the soil chemical fertilizers.

But what happens when you destroy the microbial diversity of the soil, and what happens when you manage to loose the topsoil over time ? And what happens as the petrochemical derivatives become increasingly prohibitively inevitably expensive ?

You're seriously going to compare industrial-scale agriculture with automation and technologies with our ancestors using manual labor and animals ?

That's a classic fallacy for sure.

Good golly

[Robb Swanson]

Jeepers creepers... These high school girls come up with a rather novel and ingenious idea that might have worldwide implications on food productions, and all everyone here wants to do is rehash all of the stale climate change debates. Let's talk about the education system in Ireland, or the social implications of increase in food production, or *ANYTHING* other than another debate on climate change. Thank you, and have a good night.

Overpopulation

[jcarr]

I find it frustrating and disturbing that there isn't any discussion of overpopulation here.

The core issue is our lack of predators. If we don't use our intellects as the predator to control our growth, catastrophe and tragedy will take it's place.

Re:The kind of science fair my school used to have

[jwhitener]

This is not new. The problem has always been one of getting the nitrogen fixing bacteria to stay on the seed when handled in a commercial/industrial manner.

The real holy grail is getting the bacteria to just follow the plants life cycle, like in beans.

Or by directly applying previously freeze dried bacteria through drip lines, sprinklers, sprayers, etc.. http://www.bridgetownorganics.com/ and letting it colonize around the root mass each season.

We have thousands of acres using it in Washington State, and several trials ongoing in Oregon State. Elsewhere, like Australia where the product is made, it has been used for... I forget.. about 5-6 years maybe?