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Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2014)

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61–70 of 73 posts

Re: Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2014)

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> There is enough nitrogen and other nutrients in alder that the area's where they are piled and burnt will remain significantly more fertile for many years after. 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 potassiu…

That gives me a target temp for building a regenerative bio char kiln * , Thanks!

* in a regenerative kiln, volotiles are captured and fed to a burner to provide the bulk of the heat needed to char organic materials, the chared materials can do double duty as soil amendments and long term carbon storage or as fuel for a variety of uses. Also the volotiles can be condenced as liquids that have a wide variety of other uses. What would be interesting is if there might be a way to use an enhanced combustion process to capture extra atmospheric nitrogen in the bio char materials.

Re: Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2014)

#62

Cool a science blog! But it's a rehashed article, followed by an infinite amount of random Taboola scams, arbitrage posts, clickbait articles with jarring content. Why does shit like that work better than quality contextual advertising?

Why did our fellow HN readers upvote this story at all?

Re: Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2014)

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Beeb [0], WSJ [1], Guardian [2], NPR [3], The Economist [4][5], and others are using generative AI as well. 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…

But they are not writing with AI. That's a big difference!

Re: Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2014)

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Beeb [0], WSJ [1], Guardian [2], NPR [3], The Economist [4][5], and others are using generative AI as well. 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…

But they are not writing with AI. That's a big difference!

The absolutely are copy editing, writing, and translating with AI but keeping a human in the loop to steer, edit, interview sources, and do research.

These were entire divisons that made up the majority of a newsroom. Most members of a newsroom aren't reporters - they're editors, copywriters, translators, graphic designers, narrators, etc.

If the whole point of a good journalist is to provide and synthesize context from sources, validate with experts, and do research then most of those other roles are tangential and can be reduced with human gating.

This is how newsrooms and other similar organizations are approaching and leveraging AI now.

Re: Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2014)

#65

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…

We've taken 2016 out of the title now.

Edit: nevermind, let's just swap the link altogether (more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49553719).

Re: Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2014)

#66

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've put that older yahoo.com link at the top since it seems to be the original source. Thanks!

(Submitted URL was https://scienceblog.com/b-three-schoolgirls-in-kinsale-pulle... and I think we'll ban that site.)

Re: Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2014)

#67

Is the letter 'g' designed to appear as if the bottom loop is missing, or is that a rendering error on my end?

Oh I already posted elsewhere here about this! Hah. I absolutely hate the font.

Not only is the g terrible, but the lower case a has these thin lines where the circular part meets the vertical bar, that are at odds with the way other letters look.

Re: Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2014)

#68

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…

There are also “free living” bacteria that are capable of nitrogen fixing (diazotrophic), but are not as strictly root dwelling like Rhizobia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paenibacillus

My company, Wilbur-Ellis, sells “Nutrio N-Tune” (https://www.cdms.net/ldat/ldJI1000.pdf) which contains spores of Paenibacillus Azotofixans.

Compared to the more well known legume colonizing Rhizobia bacteria, they can host on a wide variety of plant families. Our Paenibacillus Azotofixans can be applied to soil even before a crop is planted and does not need to be directly inoculate seed (though you can do so).

They also don’t seem to have their nitrogen fixing ability suppressed by nitrogen presence, so you can apply both them and fertilizer.

I’m told that under ideal conditions, their presence can behave like adding up to 0.5 pounds of nitrogen an acre per day. While they can’t certainly can’t replace fertilizer applications, that is an impressive amount, especially since it’s a constant source rather than whenever a grower can get around to putting something out.

Re: Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2014)

#70
post #6
post #2

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.

Putting aside the cultural imperialism (this happened in Ireland, which is in Europe, which is also where two of the greatest agricultural schools in the world, if not also the two greatest for this, are based), it also happened over a decade ago, so I guess everyone has tried furthering it by now.

I read the article and know the discovery was made in Ireland. This is how science is supposed to work. Is it 'cultural imperialism' if American universities build on the work of these Irish girls? Science would move a lot slower if a countries scientists all had to operate in national silos.
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