Yeah, tree breeders (or any breeders that do crops that take longer than a year to mature) really get my respect. I know bananas aren’t technically trees, but still. I like to imagine there is a transgenic solution to this problem in bananas, but given how people lose their heads about GMOs, I’m not sure it would…

Part of the reason modern bananas are so susceptible to these fungal infections is because they were selected because they have no seeds. Since they can’t reproduce with seeds, all the Cavendish bananas in the world are clones. Several of our other big food crops are produced in a similar manner - some American…

Sure, but they’d only know the languages when they were born. After 20 years, they’d be totally left behind, and because it’s hard wired, they wouldn’t be able to update.

You can’t really encode knowledge in the genome like that. It’s a recipe, not a blueprint. Even if you could, the idea of a hardwired language is rife with ethical issues. Whoever did the editing would be able to enforce physiological responses to specific words, which is one of the worst kinds of control I can think…

I think my favorite in there is paternity testing for alfalfa. It would make possibly the world’s most boring episode of daytime talk television.

So, assuming this isn’t made up on the part of the researchers (they haven’t published yet, so there’s no proof they’ve actually done anything), this is a really interesting case of GMO, if you can even really call it that. No genes were introduced, and if anything genes were removed, and there’s nothing from any…

The lab I work in just finished the genome assembly of this plant! The hope is to export the biosynthetic pathway for the anticancer compounds to yeast, since right now you have to grind up hundreds of pounds of plants to get milligrams of drug.

The only situation where it would truly be impossible would be something supermassive like a black hole. Even a big planet like Jupiter only has an escape velocity ~5x that of Earth’s, and given the lack of solid material to build rockets there it would be a tricky proposition at best.

I guess so, but in the fields where I work folks have been using it to good effect, even on annual crops like corn and soybean, so it’s certainly doable.

Drip irrigation does this when installed correctly, though without the robot.

It depends what you mean by “a lot” but electrolysis isn’t free, no.

I’m...not sure what you are asking.

It would require a lot of energy, and once you made the dry ice, then what do you do with it? It’s still lying around, waiting to sublimate. Given the amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere every year, you’d never be able to keep up.

I actually kind of wish I was more of a botanist. I know way more about the inner workings of plants than I do the big scale stuff, so I’m pretty useless with actually growing anything exotic.

No, you can use them through traditional breeding. I’m not talking about thousands of different species, I’m talking about thousands of plants in one species.

My guess is because people don’t want them looking at you with those freaky big eyes while you dice them.

I work on plant genomics, therefore I must be inserting frog DNA into tomatoes and making self-destructing soybeans.

It’s worth noting that in the case of science articles, the things being linked to often aren’t other articles, but are databases and similar resources. The URLs for these things aren’t permanent, but there’s no way to feasibly host the huge amount of information you are linking to, either.

That might work for cases where the link is to an article or similar, but (at least in biology) links are often to a resource that is far too large to host anywhere. A link to the version of the human genome used in a paper might rot after a while, but you can’t really host that kind of data anywhere every time you…

So I read the article, and I’m afraid I have to disagree that this is a problem with science. Is it a problem with societies in general? Yeah, I’d agree with that. A lot of the things that we have today used to belong to someone else, and probably something terrible happened that resulted in us having them now. Saying…