Part of the reason for the rapid spread of this disease recently has been because private citizens won’t let government agents cut down their orange trees that are infected with the disease. This makes it impossible to quarantine and provides reservoirs for re-infection after orange groves have been cut down and…

Well, legacy test farm fields are a real thing, if you take a few liberties with the translation. It’s where companies/universities cross exotic plant germplasm into established breeding lines, and then try to breed out all but the useful traits. I’m assuming the DNA codes he is talking about are genetic markers,…

Seems like an interesting read, but the somewhat shaky grasp of biology in the first paragraph from the book author makes me a little nervous. Maybe it’s a language issue? Actual biology (especially plant biology) doesn’t get a whole lot of love in SF, so it’d be interesting to see something with that topic at the…

I think the amount that it cost should be $9.5 million, not billion. Otherwise they were paying over $200,000 /panel.

It’s a shame, I really liked Rdio, and they had a far better selection than Pandora. Luckily there is a Chrome extension so anyone else who has spent a lot of time making playlists and such on there can export their lists to add to the next online music vendor they go with.

I think the Best Buy Xbox One deal might not be live yet. The text on the page says the free game is valid from 11/06 - 11/08, and when I add it, it still costs.

I think the Best Buy Xbox One deal might not be live yet. The text on the page says the free game is valid from…

I’m curious how they’ll keep the bugs out once it’s open to the public. That much diversity in plants will help keep it low, but there are always opportunistic species. Hopefully it won’t end up smelling like pesticide all the time like a lot of indoor gardens do.

Droughtgard corn has a bacterial cold-resistance gene in it, but this gene is involved in plant chloroplast development. I imagine the goal is similar, but they function through very different mechanisms.

Sure, though they specifically mention using it for crops, so I think the point stands. They’d also probably have better luck using genes from other grasses if they want drought-tolerant grass, since Arabidopsis genes are much further diverged.

This gene functions by limiting import of photosynthetic machinery into the chloroplasts during stress. This means (among other things) that when the plant is stressed, it doesn’t photosynthesize at the same rate, so these plants won’t really resist stress so much as wait for it to go away. Limiting photosynthesis is…

It does seem like an odd claim, especially since bonding between water molecules is transient as it is, and like you said they hopefully aren’t saturating the water with anything. A lot of the other claims have that sort of buzzword woo smell about them, even if the idea as a whole seems slightly reasonable.

I’m curious what exactly he means by “polarized water” being able to hold on to more nutrients and being antimicrobial. I assume he’s talking about ionizing the water? I tried looking it up and nearly all the google hits were from quack medicine and unlimited energy sites, which is never a good sign.

I think there might also be an element of “most (white/American/European/etc) people have never even thought of farms except as those green squares they fly over on vacation.” This sort of article is probably intended for folks who live in apartments and aren’t familiar with agriculture as it stands.

Some legumes can also cause lathyrism! It can be irreversible, causing lower limb paralysis and atrophy of the gluteal muscles (It makes your butt fall off). Grass pea can also cause osteolathyrism, which can cause serious bone damage.

There’s no reason you’d need the DNA to be double stranded for this either, except for structural purposes. Single stranded RNA isn’t present as just long strands floating around, it folds up into complicated secondary structures, which would be much harder to to anything with than a regular double helix.

I’m not sure what you mean that RNA is “less complex.” RNA and DNA are only different by the 2’ hydroxyl group on the sugar molecule, and using uracil instead of thymine.

RNA is massively less stable than DNA, though. Even ignoring the huge numbers of RNAses present in the environment, the 2’ hydroxyl group can cause autocatalytic activity, which isn’t great for a long term storage medium.

Adenine is used for a ton of things in the body, like ATP. Guanine can be converted to guanidine, which is useful for all sorts of things. Cytosine will spontaneously de-aminate into uracil, which is going to cause real trouble if they want to use this for long term storage.

Tall plants with thin stems are classic signs of shade avoidance, so they probably just aren’t getting enough light, or are getting the wrong wavelengths of light.

No, it actually has nothing to do with that in these cases. The free market actually demanded seedless bananas - the ones with seeds were commercial failures. The same is true with the potatoes. Consumers demand that all their potatoes look exactly the same, and “weird looking” potatoes never took off, so farmers used…