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Scientific Breakthrough Increases Plant Yields By One Third (wsu.edu)
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "Plant scientists have found a way to encourage plants to better use atmospheric nitrogen, thus increasing yields by more than one third. The technique not only produces healthier plants and more seeds, it reduces the need for fertilizer, the overuse of which can be an environmental issue." From WSU News:
For years, scientists have tried to increase the rate of nitrogen [conversion] in legumes by altering...interactions that take place between the bacterioid and the root nodule cells. [Washington State University biologist Mechthild] Tegeder took a different approach: She increased the number of proteins that help move nitrogen from the rhizobia bacteria to the plant's leaves, seed-producing organs and other areas where it is needed. The additional transport proteins sped up the overall export of nitrogen from the root nodules.
This initiated a feedback loop that caused the rhizobia to start fixing more atmospheric nitrogen, which the plant then used to produce more seeds. "They are bigger, grow faster and generally look better than natural soybean plants," Tegeder said.
This initiated a feedback loop that caused the rhizobia to start fixing more atmospheric nitrogen, which the plant then used to produce more seeds. "They are bigger, grow faster and generally look better than natural soybean plants," Tegeder said.
... our new legume overlords.
This is all a sinister plot by big agriculture to poison us all with nitrogen, amirite? They're just looking for ways to stuff more nitrogen and other fillers into our food supply!
And what happens when the nitrogen levels in the atmosphere are depleted by these Genetic Horrors???
The holy balance of 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide will be disturbed, increasing our oxygen intake, and BURNING OUT OUR CELLS AS OXIDATION RATES INCREASE!!!
OMG where's my tin-foil-hat-equipped-with-supplemental-nitrogen-tank???
\_(oo)_/
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
industrial processing to make it edible and hormone-like effects abound....
Uh, you mean it has to be cooked? Edamame is a delicious dish of straight soybeans........
Also, every food you eat affects your hormones......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Wait until anti-science folks realize this is GMO.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, these are transgenic plants according to TFAbstract, so the anti-GMO crowd can still demand we not have nice things.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
People have been consuming legumes (beans, peas, chickpeas, lentils, etc) since we were hunter-gatherers, and have long formed the staple diets of numerous regions across the world. Legumes are a rich source of plant protein, fiber, carbs, and minerals.
The internet is not a series of tubes. It's more like a net. Or a network of computers. Or an internet.
Now all we have to do is increase the other plant food, CO2 and the world will plenty of food.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
Why didn't natural selection already "discover" this? Perhaps there's a big trade-off that hasn't been discovered yet.
Table-ized A.I.
Higher crop yield and less fertilizer? Maybe the prices will drop, but probably not.
That's a breakthrough. It will be interesting to see if this can stack up with induced nodule growth methods
Leave him alone with his paranoia.
Honestly having enough food is the least of the problems with too many people on the planet.
The big problem is that every calorie of food requires the input of 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy, mainly from oil and gas, which will be running out within your lifetime.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
You're good with links so please show where Trump and his supports are anti-gay? You're probably confusing Trump with Hillary who happily takes money from the leaders of countries where being gay results in the death penalty. Or maybe me who happily buys gas refined from oil purchased from countries where being gay results in the death penalty.
The big problem is the dicatorships and other oppressive regimes which cut off the supply of food aid to their constituents.
The problem isn't having enough food. The problem is getting it to the people that need it.
Perhaps there needs to be some kind of "I am kidding" tag for situations like this. Like /S... maybe I should do this:
<JustKidding> Jk! Jk! Jk! </JustKidding>
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Evolution 'seeks' local maximums. It isn't necessarily the optimum solution.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If nature basically had a means to increase plant growth rate by 1/3, then there must have been something else in nature which made it more efficient in the long run NOT to take advantage of it.
What's in it for the bacteria to fix that much extra nitrogen?
An economist is walking through the park with his son. "Look, Dad! There's a $20 under that bench!" Dad says, "Don't be absurd... if there was, someone would have picked it up."
we're gonna do this come hell or high water. It's the only way to feed everybody. With our aging population we're gonna need higher crop yields per unite of labor or we're gonna have mass starvation.
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I think he's referring to the isoflavones in soybeans which mimic estrogen and are possibly linked to multiple hormone-related health issues.
While everything you eat affects your body in some way or another, consuming isoflavones in sufficient quantities which convert into phytoestrogensis a bad idea as hormone balance is especially sensitive to such consumption... well... for men anyway. For post-menopausal women, there have been beneficial effects in studies that show it's similar to taking low-dose hormone-replacement therapies -- ie estrogen pills. There's also a theory that increased soy products have aided in increased breast sizes, early puberty, and low sperm counts... though it's far from proven.
The National Institute of Health states results from various studies are mixed and that it supports further study, yet cautions women who are at high risk of breast or cervical cancer from eating lots of soy.
https://nccih.nih.gov/health/s...
There's also a theory that increased soy products have aided in increased breast sizes, early puberty, and low sperm counts... though it's far from proven.
If that were true, wouldn't regions that eat a lot of tofu have women with generally larger breasts?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Note that to a primitive peoples, carbs are a very good thing. They're basically pure energy. They don't keep you "full" for as long as fats and protein, so they're not advisable for dieters, but in terms of giving your body energy - one of the primary tasks of any hunter-gathererer - they do the job quite well.
Fats of course are a "denser" energy source, but they're not found as abundantly in plant sources. And contrary to common perception, with most hunter-gatherer societies, the vast majority of calories tend to come from plants, not animals. It varies depending on the tribe and location (for example, in the high latitudes and altitudes animal sources of energy tend to be more dominant), and of course with the wider spread of megafauna in the past, it's logical to consume a higher portion of meat than today's hunter-gatherer societies (most of whom hunt primarily small game). But regardless, there's no question that in the big picture, plants made up a large portion of their calories, and of those calories, most would be carbs.
The internet is not a series of tubes. It's more like a net. Or a network of computers. Or an internet.
Not to mention that what is a "maximum" depends greatly on context. For example: if some animal species' primary challenge in life is to be able to bend down tree branches to get at their fruit, then its "maximum" may be to become heavy and muscular; but in a context where harvests are unpredictable and the species needs to survive long periods of shortage, then its "maximum" may be to have much less muscle mass, and thus energy consumption, to survive until the periods of abundance.
As I wrote below, I can think of a specific example where I live where nitrogen production by legumes ends up harming the species in the long run by boosting their competitors. The contexts of "growing wild in nature" and "growing in a farmer's field" are very different.
The internet is not a series of tubes. It's more like a net. Or a network of computers. Or an internet.
You don't even need to get that far. The scientist compared them to "natural" plants, saying they grow better. That means they aren't natural, so the food religion will shun them just like GMO.
But why should we want more people on Earth? We want more productive people on Earth, but the most productive societies in the world tend to have the lowest reproduction rates as their members carefully curate a few offspring rather than spawn prolifically in hopes that a few will survive and care for them in their old age. As automation increasingly eliminates jobs, we should be working on increasing the quality, not the quantity, of people on the Earth.
Plant and animal hormones share a chemical structure.
We're evolved to eat 'pseudo estrogens'. Picking a particular plant to fear, misses be basic point.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The plants basically breed them.
It's important to note that root nodules operate as a very close symbiosis - not exactly to the extent of our mitochondria in our cells, but it's more than just "bacteria that happen to be living next to the plant". The plant roots grow a carefully structured channel specifically to allow bacteria to "infect" them. The bacteria and plants work together on this - the plants produce flavinoids to let the bacteria know that they're there, and the bacteria in turn respond to flavinoids by producing nod factors, which lets the plant know that the bacteria are present and that it needs to work to encapsulate them. When an "infection" is established inside the root, the plant closes off the channel, not only trapping the bacteria, but also protecting them. The plants then nurture the bacteria, providing them nitrogen, oxygen, nutrients, and even proteins that assist in the fixation process. When the plant dies, the extensive cultures of bacteria are released and become free to colonize other plant roots
If you were asking why bacteria evolved the need to fix nitrogen in general... that's easy. Nitrogen is one of the essential components in life; they had to. It's needed for protein, DNA, RNA, etc; life as we know it can't exist without it.
The internet is not a series of tubes. It's more like a net. Or a network of computers. Or an internet.
It's electrolytes isn't it? The taste that plants crave?
Don't worry... Volkswagen was planning ahead for just such a contingency! God bless those TDI engineers.
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Neglecting the anti-soy - if increasing nitrogen transport from the nodules improves their efficiency, it seems at least plausible that doing this for other plants which naturally fix nitrogen would also help. So - mostly legumes.
More and bigger plants will also mean even faster exhaustion of micro-nutrients from the soil. Since not all the biomass produced in that soil is being recycled into it - the whole point of agriculture is our removal and use of parts of the plants - then the soil will slowly be exhausted of its non-infinite supply of those nutrients. The future results is food crops that contain less of those micro-nutrients, leaving future generations that consume them with a deficit. We've already seen this effect in the last century or less. A very deliberate effort could be made to restore what is exhausted, but this is COMMERCIAL agriculture FOR PROFIT; money is the ultimate motivation, not long-term soil health or the health of people who eat what grows from it.
wouldn't regions that eat a lot of tofu have women with generally larger breasts?
The way I have it is that the traditional fermentation process (also when soy sauce is made the old-fashioned way) diminishes those phytoestrogens considerably. In other words: traditional tofu and soy sauce not problematic, factory produced stuff as available in the West probably problematic.
(As I'm steering away from all processed foods - due to a general desire to live healthier and a particular desire to increase my quite low testosterone levels, all due to a medical condition -, and since whole soybeans are quite hard to come by in any case in my locale, I don't really care. What I do care about is that soybeans (mostly GMO these days in any case) are a cheap feedstock (together with sunflower and maize) in my locale going into milk, egg and meat production and all contribute to the unhealthily high omega 6 : omega 3 ratio. So for that reason I also try to source organic versions of such food products - and am happy to report that it works me out cheaper too.)
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
The big problem is that every calorie of food requires the input of 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy, mainly from oil and gas, which will be running out within your lifetime.
Well, people have been producing calories far longer than they have been using fossil fuels to do it. But a return to those methods may not be very compatible with the modern Agribusiness/GMO complex.
At least all those overweight people will finally be able to use up the reserves...
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
People have been consuming legumes (beans, peas, chickpeas, lentils, etc) since we were hunter-gatherers
See, that's why we call it hunting and gathering... because it didn't include activities such as consuming legumes [which require cooking to break-down toxic phytins/lectins]. This was the neolithic era; legumes did not begin to be cultivated on a large scale a few tends of thousands of years ago (early neolithic).
Typo; the 'hunter-gatherer' era was the paleolithic; the 'Taco Bell era' is the neolithic. ;)
Remember, genes are not blueprints. This means you can’t, for example, insert “the genes for an elephant’s trunk” into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There are no genes for trunks. What you can do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals. For instance, we can in theory splice the native plants’ talent for nitrogen fixation into a terran plant.
—Academician Prokhor Zakharov,
“Nonlinear Genetics”
I kind of feel like it will end up with a plant eating someone named Audrey.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It's not "the modern Agribusiness/GMO complex" that it would be incompatible with, it would be incompatible with current global human population levels.
And it's no those overweight Americans who will starve...
That's how it starts.
The next thing you know, civilization has collapsed and there are triffids prowling the countryside looking for walking nitrogen/nutrient bundles (aka humans).
-- Alastair
Well, one of the big problems is that in developed nations, the people with the lowest incomes have the most children.
The "Monsanto sued a farmer for accidental cross pollenation case" is a myth.
The internet is not a series of tubes. It's more like a net. Or a network of computers. Or an internet.
She is just increasing the levels of naturally existing proteins, and there is nothing to stop that happening in the normal course of evolution (it's not the same as developing a protein with a totally new function, which isn't as easy to evolve). If this were beneficial for soybean plants in nature, they would already have evolved these higher levels of transport proteins. So there must be a downside. For example, it might starve the roots of nitrogen and slow their growth, hurting the soybeans in drier soil or when other nutrients are limiting factors.
The
Agree with both parents.
The
Have gnu, will travel.
Maybe. But then there's that little bit in TFS that says "it reduces the need for fertilizer". Which means less petrochemical input into the food cycle. That could be a good thing.
Have gnu, will travel.
Plant and animal hormones share a chemical structure.
We're evolved to eat 'pseudo estrogens'. Picking a particular plant to fear, misses be basic point.
First: they are phytoestrogens not pseudo estrogens.
Second: different estrogen class steroids bind differently to different receptor types
Third: different receptor types have differing physiological expressions.
Your reply is like saying we share opioid structures with plants and have evolved that way so different plants and different opioids do not matter.
You have definitely missed the basic point of my post which, just to make clear, was soy estrogens do not cause breast enlargement at any humanly consumable level, but 8-Prenylnaringenin, which is converted by gut bacteria from Isoxanthohumol is far more potent and binds to the receptor which will cause breast growth.
In case anyone is wondering genestine (the phytoestrogen in soybeans), is 100 times weaker than 8-Prenylnaringenin.
"mainly from oil and gas, which will be running out within your lifetime."
I should be so lucky. I'm afraid we're going to need some even more spectacular scientific breakthroughs to make that happen :(
The "Paleo diet" concept that hunter-gatherers do not consume grains and legumes simply because they don't farm them is patently false. Indeed, if you look at the best preserved paleolthic human find, that of Ötzi the Iceman, it appears that a large portion if not a majority of his diet was grains (his second to last meal was herb bread with some red deer). Hunter-gatherers today frequently collect wild grains and legumes, and surely did so in the past as well. Legumes are typically are roasted whole or ground then fried on rocks, rather than fried in fat or boiled as is more typical for modern preparations. The many tribes of Australian aboriginees, for example, relied heavily on acacia pods (particularly in arid areas), with the seeds ground, mixed with water and made into a bread.
The internet is not a series of tubes. It's more like a net. Or a network of computers. Or an internet.
They are GMOs - the abstract specifically mentions that the plants are transgenic. How big a problem that is though depends on what exactly they did. I mean it's already almost impossible to get your hands on non-GMO soybeans in the US, and this modification manages to simultaneously boost yields, reduce fertilizer demands, and potentially improve long-term soil health. Exactly the sort of GMOs I'm actually (tentatively) in favor of.
Since it's transgenic I'm guessing they now produce additional kinds of nitrogen-transport proteins rather than just boosting the levels of the proteins they already use, which does increase the potential for health problems to emerge in those who eat them, unless they're something already found in other food crops. Even if not though, they're far less likely to cause problems than transgenic "pest-resistance" genes, which as a rule specifically code for the plant to produce anti-pest toxins. Even if those poisons aren't an obvious short-term problem for mammals, thy may present longer-term risks - after all an awful lot of our cellular biology is still shared with insects and the like.
Personally, I'd have a lot fewer problems with GMOs if we made two modifications to the law:
1) eliminate gene patents, and with them a host of the perverse incentives currently infesting the industry.
2) require all new compounds produced in modified organisms to undergo extensive independent safety testing at least on par with what the FDA (supposedly) requires for new drugs.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
What a stupid comment. Do you really think that evolution is ever "done"? If it were beneficial for soybean plants in nature, it may NOT have already evolved simply because it may be an area of their genome that is highly conserved due to the presence of other critical genes nearby, or it may be that the soybean genome is "good enough" such that being able to fix excess atmospheric nitrogen has little to no value to the soybean plant itself. Or, it may be dumb luck that this particular mutation hasn't occurred in a plant that survived for long in the wild for other reasons. Larger, more productive plants is a big deal for humans who eat the plant, but it may not be a particularly exciting or beneficial trait for the plant themselves in a state of nature.
By your argument -
If evolving cancer immunity were beneficial for humans, we'd have already evolved that immunity. I guess cancer is just fine, though.
If evolving wings were beneficial for humans, we'd have already evolved feathery fucking plumage. I guess we can walk, though.
Evolution is not a straight line, you dimwit. It is a random process of mutation, with the results of those random mutations being culled at higher or lower rates from the population based on the mutation's efficacy in helping the organism survive in its current environment.
you, insensitive clod!
Simplified, Natural selection is only about competitive advantage to reproduction and escape predator to come to reproduction age. It is not about the *most* efficient ways to get there, but sometimes simply just be a bit better than the other species. As such, it can simply stay stuck at a local minima if there is no selection pressure. In other word, there is not always a trade off. Sometimes it is simply that there is no selection pressure where this could bring something to the plant reproduction.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
The obligatory reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
No, there aren't - at least from a human perspective. Sometimes small amounts can be gained by sifting through dried manure for undigested seeds and the like ("second harvest"), but not much.
1) "Beans" are just one category of legume.
2) No, beans do not need "ridiculous amount of processing and cooking". Dried beans need to be soaked in water for a day or so, then cooked. Non-dried beans do not need to be soaked.
3) Yes, hunter-gatherer groups, to this day consume significant quantities of legumes. Usually either directly roasted or ground into a flour and made into a bread.
4) Every type of food contains at least something that can be "damaging" in some context.
5) "Some X can not be eaten at all" also applies to every type of food, regardless of your category of X. Some berries? Yep. Some leaves? Yep. meats? Yep. Shellfish? Insects? Fungi? Yep, yep, yep.
The internet is not a series of tubes. It's more like a net. Or a network of computers. Or an internet.
You are simply lying. The green revolution is the only reason we can support current population levels let alone your ludicrous number.
What's your point? Do you think the planet can support an unlimited number of people? 7 billion people who all want to live at the same level as the average first world citizen? Use a comparable amount of resources? Food isn't really a problem today other than actually getting it to starving people. However billions of cars and houses with A/C and swimming pools and all the other stuff of modern life taxes the planet's resoucrces much more than some people living in a hut alongside a river. I don't subscribe to "the sky is falling" group of climate change evangelists but certain facts are hard to deny. The current level of industry on Earth is causing heating of the planet. This will obviously continue as there will be no real change in output. It's a problem, not the end of the world but it will most likely cause a lot of strife down the road. And people will continue to breed and the population will continue to grow. People being people you can be absolutely certain that war will happen and it'll be all the worse for it having been so long since the last big one. I imagine population growth will cease to be such a huge problem after that.
We shoot Matthew McConaughey into space and that fixes everything.
Also, we get space colonies and anti-gravity plus Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain are involved in the whole thing as well.
Oh, and Matt Damon gets shot out into space out of an airlock.
It's win-win-win-win-win... win-win all the way.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
wild rice has been available in North America since the first humans migrated here. And people have a very long history of eating them, even if they weren't planting them intentionally.
And here's a video of a man planting a primitive sweet potato patch. Everything he's done in the video is available to a person from the middle paleolithic, and possibly as far back as the lower paleolithic. (building a cooking fire starts to become less common when you go back far enough)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I think every human being should be able to own 1 square mile of land.
Of course that means we only have room for 57 million people.
The Earth is about 1250% over populated by my standard.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Only if you're using your own private definition of "hunting and gathering". Are you trying to say people in hunter-gatherer societies didn't have fire, or that they didn't cook at all? When it comes to edible plants the only qualification is they didn't engage in agriculture.
Because that's the most cost efficient way to do it. When fossil fuels get more expensive food will get more expensive, but don't buy into the idea we're going to see mass starvation. Not at current population levels.
And fossil fuels will not be "running out" in our lifetime or anyone else's, though they will become too expensive to use for noncritical transportation.
Yes, there would be fewer coming to market, and that would probably be a good thing - we're playing with a science potentially far more dangerous than atomic bombs, mainly because it can so easily entirely escape our control, and we're still scarcely in the finger-painting stage of actually understanding what exactly we're tinkering with.
Those that did get released though, would likely have faced far more unbiased scrutiny, as well as being primarily developed for more altruistic purposes as rent-seeking would be far more difficult, and hopefully correspondingly more broad-mindedness about the potential long-term ecological and sociological repercussions. And what rent-seeking there would still be would tend to lean such crops to carrying Monsanto-style "terminator genes", a good idea for an only lab-tested organism being released on the world. If a transgenic wheat modification is found to cause problems after a decade or two, it would be nice if wiping it out was easy instead of having it be cross-bred into half the wild grasses in the country.
For many things I agree that low regulation is a good thing - actual medicine might well benefit from such an approach - it does invite a certain type of charlatan, as well recklessness, but the potential harm is restricted to those who voluntarily participate. An carelessly designed GMO though could rapidly become an invasive organism plaguing the entire world - just look at how "successful" they've been at eliminating ordinary rabbits from Australia...
Not to mention things like gene drives, which make it possible to ignore the normal rules of inheritance and force a modification to be inherited by 100% of their descendants, making for potentially *extremely* rapid large-scale ecological changes.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yeah, but plants that change do things like killing off life. Like when they started dumping a poisonous gas into the atmosphere.
Oxygen was deadly when they did that.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Yeah right, and wikipedia can be trusted on this kind of controversial topics.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Allow the people to prosper and the reproduction rate will go below 1.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Nutrient levels in vegetables are down sharply since the 1930s and even down since the 1980s.
https://www.scientificamerican...
A landmark study on the topic by Donald Davis and his team of researchers from the University of Texas (UT) at Austinâ(TM)s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry was published in December 2004 in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. They studied U.S. Department of Agriculture nutritional data from both 1950 and 1999 for 43 different vegetables and fruits, finding âoereliable declinesâ in the amount of protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin (vitamin B2) and vitamin C over the past half century. Davis and his colleagues chalk up this declining nutritional content to the preponderance of agricultural practices designed to improve traits (size, growth rate, pest resistance) other than nutrition.
âoeEfforts to breed new varieties of crops that provide greater yield, pest resistance and climate adaptability have allowed crops to grow bigger and more rapidly,â reported Davis, âoebut their ability to manufacture or uptake nutrients has not kept pace with their rapid growth.â There have likely been declines in other nutrients, too, he said, such as magnesium, zinc and vitamins B-6 and E, but they were not studied in 1950 and more research is needed to find out how much less we are getting of these key vitamins and minerals.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
There are links. Check them for yourself. Contrarily, present any evidence whatsoever that he was charged with accidentally planting GM seeds and had argued that it was accidental.
The internet is not a series of tubes. It's more like a net. Or a network of computers. Or an internet.
Then why would the paper discussing the effects refer to the plants being transgenic? Last I heard traditional crossbreeding isn't classified as transgenic.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Honestly, this is a good example of why we shouldn't panic about rising population levels- our farming efficiency growth exceeds our population growth.
Yeast populations face two problems as they grow: (a) running out of sugar, (b) getting poisoned by the alcohol they generate.
Do you think the planet can support an unlimited number of people?
Yes.
7 billion people who all want to live at the same level as the average first world citizen?
Yes.
The current level of industry on Earth is causing heating of the planet.
So if all those industries used solely solar, would the earth still be heating?
We have a long way to go before we are unable to produce enough food to feed everyone. And like food getting to those who need it, much of the over-consumption is about getting the niceties of life to those who are in need, not about the ability to build them sustainably.
Learn to love Alaska
This 1/3 increase would approximately cover the increase in human population since the early 1990s. As I recall, starvation was not exactly unknown in the 1980s.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I know you're joking, but...
Reducing atmospheric nitrogen does not increase the partial pressure of oxygen. Astronauts use low pressure atmospheres with roughly the same partial pressure of oxygen as seen on the earth's surface.
Smaller, more efficient internal combustion engines would be possible.
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About 50 years ago Isaac Asimov pointed out that at the then-current rate of population growth, in about 6000 years the entire mass of the universe would be people. That constitutes a hard limit on the number of people the planet can support.
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The area of the Earth is about 128 billion acres. Sufficiently aggressive use of non-"green revolution" agriculture could feed much more than the current population (where "sufficiently aggressive" includes covering the oceans with farm-barges and growing only the most productive food crops.)
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Did you have to think a great deal to write something so stupid, or was the process of thought not involved at all?
Earth does not have a brain or a nervous system. It can no more suffer than a rock, a cup of soup, or a bowl of vegetables can suffer - Sylvester the cat notwithstanding.
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The Day of the Triffids is the standard in the carnivorous plant genre, and Wyndham's novel is generally regarded as being among the best.
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There is a limit, but that limit isn't finite. Not that it means it's infinite, but there is no "hard" limit. The practical limit will be reached before a "hard" limit.
Learn to love Alaska
My point here is that the higher rate of nitrogen fixing may have been detrimental to survival of the bacteria in the wild. If a colony goes all out and another one cuts back a bit, the latter may be more numerous in the soil when all is said and done.
Chlorophyll Park.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
require all new compounds produced in modified organisms to undergo extensive independent safety testing at least on par with what the FDA (supposedly) requires for new drugs.
Given how much cost that would add, that would pretty much close the door on any new developments.
Why would it be terribly expensive? You insert a gene to produce protein X into your organism, at the very least protein X should be concentrated and subjected to the same safety tests as any other artificial drug or food additive. Doing otherwise essentially subsidizes reckless commercialization of untested GMOs.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The plants basically breed them.
Or you can deliver a highly selected set of them to the plant via whatever irrigation method you use. My father and I have been working with freeze dried bacteria that can be re-constituted and applied to any crop. Over 10,000 acres now. The 'good bacteria' we've surrounded the plant with block out other bad bacteria/disease vectors, as well as fix atmospheric nitrogen, increase carbon mass in the soil, give the roots a big head start early in the grow season, etc..
And none of this is GMO, so we avoid that 'debate'. http://www.bridgetownorganics.com/ . It isn't very well known though. Many farmers look at us skeptically when we say this little pinky finger size vial of white powder can fertilize 12 acres:), but it works.
It will be interesting to see how the combination of the these finding will work with the stuff I've mentioned above. I'm a little unclear where the additional proteins were added based on the article though. Added to the plant? Added to the bacteria in the nodules?