Irish Girls Win Google Science Fair With Astonishing Crop Yield Breakthrough 308
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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Increase C02 sequestration by reduced farmland size? Apply it to forest growth?
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Re:This is huge (Score:5, Informative)
Rainforests 28%, oceans 70%, other 2%.
http://education.nationalgeogr... [nationalgeographic.com]
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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.
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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?
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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 warm
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Re:How about the "bio-fuels" ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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:This is huge (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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... [wikipedia.org]
PS. fuck you slashdot for cutting off all the links.... site is getting more useless everyday...
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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.
I just want to say one word to you (Score:2, Funny)
OK. Three words.
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I really hope it's real 3D this time, not just some stereoscopic trickery where you need special glasses to eat your hamburger.
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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,
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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they could also do a crop rotation with nitrogen fixing crops, such as peanuts. Grows well in Africa already.
Re:This is huge (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Gotcha, thanks for pointing that out.
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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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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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 rh
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"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-... [wfp.org]
Re: This is huge (Score:2)
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.
Next step - beer! (Score:2)
Next step - beer.
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Ahh.... Beer is made from barley...
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And sometimes oats. And wheat. Hmm, I wonder if there's any grain that somebody *doesn't* make beer out of.
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Re:Next step - beer! (Score:5, Informative)
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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!
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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)
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So is whiskey, and they're Irish...
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yea no... Pot
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I believe they call it Guinness.
Wager (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wager (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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The Global Food Crisis is not a science problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Considering these girls are from Ireland, this should solve their potato problems quite well.
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But you do know that Hitler died 1945? ...
Just wondering
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Considering they are from Ireland, this should solve their sobriety problem
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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 g
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Your spending is also inelastic when you have nothing to spend.
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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).
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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.
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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
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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.
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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 bec
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Fucking makes problems better. Fucking without contraceptives makes things worse.
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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.
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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?
The kind of science fair my school used to have? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Very possible, but you shouldn't just assume it to be true without meeting these girls.
Re:The kind of science fair my school used to have (Score:5, Informative)
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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).
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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:The kind of science fair my school used to have (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Terrific counter to Monsanto's herbicide message (Score:4, Insightful)
The Permaculture [wikipedia.org] community and advocates of companion [gardensimply.com] planting [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:Terrific counter to Monsanto's herbicide messag (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Terrific counter to Monsanto's herbicide messag (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Another side effect (Score:2)
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.
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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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
have they filed a patent? (Score:2)
eom
You'll never hear from these girls again (Score:2)
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.
I feel like I've heard this before... (Score:2)
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?
Nibbling at the problem (Score:2)
1. Too many people
2. Not enough fresh water
3. Not enough food
3 is a distant third.
Population issue? (Score:2)
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.
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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 (
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So basicaly (Score:4, Funny)
Does it scales? (Score:3)
Re:Which bacteria? (Score:5, Informative)
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It's helpful if you read the fucking article
Who let you in here?
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I call Sean Hannigan, so I do. (Score:2)
Well since you brought it up, it's rather odd that none of them is a ginger.
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It can be argued that 1, like all other odd numbers, is a prime.
Your point was what?
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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.
Aaaah... shit... There's more. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Whi
Re:Aaaah... shit... There's more. (Score:5, Insightful)