41–50 of 73 posts
". Émer, then in her early teens, did the thing that separates a science story from a compost story: " this reads so AI / LLMish.. it's like the same feeling if you had to eat the same food again and again, not quite sickness but something about the repetition.
That's a qreat discovery by these three qirls. But what IS it with websites that use a font with utterly weird g's? Do they think they need it to stand apart?
Using nitrogen-fixing bacteria is not a new concept and it's the life's work of Dr Mariangela Hungria, who recently received the 2025 World Food Prize for her achievements in the field: https://www.worldfoodprize.org/en/laureates/20202026_laureat...
I read that they're trying to cross breed modern corn with one from Oaxaca that has this relationship: https://news.wisc.edu/corn-that-acquires-its-own-nitrogen-id...
Rhizobacteria are not known to colonize the roots of cereal crops, typically only only legumes. You would think that scientists would spend more effort trying to create "super" rhizobacteria that can colonize even more aggressively and also fix many times more nitrogen than ordinary ones. I cannot say this one below has independent reviews by well published agroscientists, but it's a step in the right direction: http…
I think the problem with that idea is that the rhizobacteria needs energy to break the nitrogen tripple bond. A lot of energy. It gets that energy by getting carbohydrates from the host plant - which in turn are not available to the plant to grow.
I'm sure there's plants where not fertilizing with nitrogen at all would make the trade-off worth it, but the vast majority of our optimized crops can't spare double-digit percentage points of their total yield to feed bacteria. You're much better of just using natural gas (or green hydrogen) to fix the nitrogen.
Refreshing to see there are other outcomes than asking AI what it is these days.
This content is from 2014-15; perhaps they AI-rehashed the Yahoo! News story about them? https://www.yahoo.com/news/16-old-girls-win-google-science-f... They posted a video summarizing their efforts in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL9N7O0uJoU Vice did an interview in 2016: https://www.vice.com/en/article/these-teenagers-science-proj... Ciara Judge went on to join the research effort to stop Covid in 2021: ht…
I went into the article with the HN submissions’s “(2016)” in my head and was shocked that it kept triggering my AI detector senses. It even checks all of the boxes for the phrases like “One honest footnote”. Had me questioning my ability to detect AI writing.
Then I scrolled up and saw that the article linked to was published in 2026. So yes, I’d agree this is an AI rehash and republish of an old story. An interesting story, but the older articles you linked to are so much better to read and more informative than this AI rehash.
This content is from 2014-15; perhaps they AI-rehashed the Yahoo! News story about them? https://www.yahoo.com/news/16-old-girls-win-google-science-f... They posted a video summarizing their efforts in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL9N7O0uJoU Vice did an interview in 2016: https://www.vice.com/en/article/these-teenagers-science-proj... Ciara Judge went on to join the research effort to stop Covid in 2021: ht…
From their about page https://scienceblog.com/about-us/ "Every published piece is editorially directed and reviewed before it goes live. We use AI tools in research, drafting, and editing. Editors decide what claims, framing, and pieces make it to publish."
Definitely AI written, though it got the point across and it wasn't terrible to read and it was new information to me so I was glad to read it. At this point what news site isn't AI written? Except for the few remaining human blogs (which are a delight and a pleasure). Why I detected AI: it said "The honest footnote.." at the end. That's how Claude always ends our long-rambling discussions.
> At this point what news site isn't AI written? The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Atlantic, NPR, BBC, The Verge, The Economist. That's just off the top of my head. Basically none of the reputable papers will touch AI. (I guess I have to add an "as far as we know" footnote but I'd be truly shocked if The New York Times was secretly using AI.)
Definitely AI written, though it got the point across and it wasn't terrible to read and it was new information to me so I was glad to read it. At this point what news site isn't AI written? Except for the few remaining human blogs (which are a delight and a pleasure). Why I detected AI: it said "The honest footnote.." at the end. That's how Claude always ends our long-rambling discussions.
The mainstream ones that pay journalists, for the most part.
These little internet blogs love AI because they’re usually content farms. They want maximum traffic for minimum effort invested.