Slashdot Mirror
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?
Read a Budweiser label. It's made with barley and rice. Many other American beers include "select grains" as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate