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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.
This is huge... although we already make enough food to feed 12B people; we throw away a lot of it. Still, efficiency!
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
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.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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.
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.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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.
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.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
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 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.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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?
The problem is not production. The problem is distribution.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
Read a Budweiser label. It's made with barley and rice. Many other American beers include "select grains" as well.
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.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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.
Fucking makes problems better. Fucking without contraceptives makes things worse.
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.
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!
It is just doing one tiny part of what soil fungus would be doing naturally if they did not spray fungicide?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I really hope it's real 3D this time, not just some stereoscopic trickery where you need special glasses to eat your hamburger.
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.
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.
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.
Does the method scales in time (multi-year usage) and space (large fields)?
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