Wheat isn’t currently a crop with much in the way of GMO going on commercially, so any gluten from wheat is there the old fashioned way. If anything, I’d expect GMO wheat to try and cut out the part of gluten that people react to, not add more.

So much of the alfalfa is shipped overseas as well, it’s really a huge water waste. I can’t really take issue with almonds and whatnot, but alfalfa in particular is troubling.

No, you don’t. You know what the plant is (generally) but you have no idea what kind of pesticides the organic farmers used (oh yes, they use pesticides too) or what kind of pesticides the plant itself is making. The argument you are making against GMOs is specious, and if your only purpose is to pontificate about…

But...it doesn’t matter. The consumers don’t get labels for what pesticides are on them anyway. Putting a GMO sticker on something would be even more pointless.

No, it isn’t. The resistance evolved because the trait was overused, just like any other form of pest control. If there was a ludicrously effective pesticide that farmers sprayed constantly on everything, then pests would have evolved resistance quickly to that, too. The fact that it was GMO this time instead of…

Being GMO has nothing to do with the amount of pesticides the farmers are spraying on it, except as it would reduce that amount. I really have no idea what point you are trying to make here except that pesticides are overused? Which doesn’t really have anything to do with GMOs.

Which had...nothing to do with the comment I was making? It would have happened in the wild just the same with farmers using live bacteria as a pest control agent. Preventing this would be a change in farming practices, which doesn’t have anything to do with GMO technology.

One possible benefit from this is that aspartame contains phenylalanine, while acesulfame potassium and sucralose do not, so people with phenylketonuria can drink this new version.

Organic farmers are allowed to spray Bacillus thuringiensis bacteria directly onto their crops to kill insects. The protein in BT crops comes from the exact same bacteria, and neither source of it can hurt you, but the organic version comes with all the other baggage from the bacteria, while the GMO version is just…

The whole point of GMO crops is that you don’t have to use pesticides. The anti-insect proteins are built in, and you don’t need to use any pesticides. If you mean herbicides, then maybe, even though glyphosate has never been shown to be remotely bad for your health.

That looks a lot like a camera artifact. The yellow stuff too, since it appears whenever the light shines on it and disappears after. Maybe the max intensity for whatever kind of light the camera is using is green, and the actual images are false-color?

If you are willing to commit to a whole liter at a go, a Mastrad Purefizz will carbonate anything you put into it. Orange juice, milk, wine, coffee, whatever. And they stay fizzy much longer than the sodastream ones do, at least in my experience.

Yeah, the somewhat metaphysical nature of the threat in the second Commonwealth Trilogy wasn't quite as exciting as the Primes (IMO at least), but it was still a fun story. I was a bit ambivalent about the new book since it takes place in a low-tech setting, but the characters and general weirdness actually make it…

They share a goodly number of characters despite being centuries apart, so you'll have a leg up on remembering the huge numbers of names involved. On the other hand, that would be 5 Hamilton Doorstoppers(tm) in a row, which is an awful lot of Hamilton. He's also writing another set of books in the Commonwealth…

Sadly this method only works for material between 0.2-4 million years (assuming I read the method correctly) so it won’t function for samples that old.

The article didn't touch on it, but this thing also makes some pretty amazing vegetables. You have to set the heat higher (~184F for things like carrots and beets) for vegetables to break down the pectin, but after an hour they come out with the most amazing fork perfect texture you can imagine. Carrots with a bit…

I actually came here to post this, so thanks for putting it so eloquently. If people can futz with their own DNA for fun and profit, I don't really have a problem with it, but as you said, this isn't changing YOUR DNA. With the development of MCR technologies, you could be taking the choice out of the hands of their…

There's also the near certainty that bacterial DNA from contamination has been incorrectly placed into the genomes of other organisms. If you look through any published genome, you'll find bits and pieces of virus and microbial DNA that don't belong to that organism, but are instead from the bacteria that were on the…

Not that I think these are exactly reasonable buildings, but the article did mention that they are aeroponics based. So no soil.

You don't actually need to any more - Windows will make the install media for you on a USB key or whatnot, and you can install it yourself pretty easily.