51–60 of 73 posts
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...
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…
> This content is from 2014-15; perhaps they AI-rehashed the Yahoo! News story about them? 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…
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…
> 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 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…
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...
"Hungria" cant have a better name for food research. Nitrogen fixing is one of the more frustrating things to work on as there is such a massive ready supply of unfixed nitrogen to work with everywhere on our planet and all in all we need such a tiny proportion to dramiticly improve agriculture.The whole thing is so finly balanced that herbivors can likely smell the diference in plants that have been given nitrogen f…
My experience with burn areas is that the potash alone will do this. Are you sure that the nitrogen is what's surviving? It could be - sodium nitrate has a fairly high combustion temp of ~300C - but even then it's being boosted by the concentrated potassium left over.
It also shows the importance of questioning expert consensus. Its when you find the current consensus is wrong that you find something new.
Refreshing to see there are other outcomes than asking AI what it is these days.
> Refreshing to see there are other outcomes than asking AI what it is these days. In science, that's the only way to obtain results: do experiments, gather data. It's also what sets scientists apart from other people: curiosity. "Hey that's odd, I wonder...". Non-scientists (read: most people) just care about quick answers & how to apply knowledge to their situation. Note that knowledge in a field, intelligence, 'pr…
For years the holy grail has been for corn to produce its own nitrogen. This could be a small step in the right direction. Interested to see what happens when some of the great American agricultural schools further this experiment.
"Thank God the USA finally sent some scientists to understand things for us!" - the rest of the world. In your head.
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.)
The reality is that everyone is using it, and has been using forms of AI and ML for news writing and copywriting for decades. For example, I remember hearing how Reuters used to use statistical models to auto-generate articles from notes taken by journalists 20 years ago that would then be copy edited.
The reality is that Generative AI is here to stay just like the Internet, but there are ways to use it responsibly (also like the Internet).
[0] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/policies/what-were...
[1] - https://www.wsj.com/news/author/wsj-artificialintelligenceto...
[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2023/jun/16/...
[3] - https://www.npr.org/about-npr/1205385162/special-section-gen...
[4] - https://myaccount.economist.com/s/article/How-we-handle-AI-g...
[5] - https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/05/the-economist-launches-a-d...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
That’s a weasely way of saying it’s AI written but a human kind of looked at it.