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I’m going to be that guy about GMO crops. If we were modifying them to be drought resistant or need less water, I’d be all for it. Instead, what we modify them for is to be “roundup ready” meaning that glyphosate can be sprayed liberally on it without killing it making weeding the field much easier. I am not concerned about the GMO crop, but I am concerned with all my food being covered in Roundup.
Unfortunately you don’t really have a choice. Organic and GMO free doesn’t mean herbicide free, and plants with natural tolerance to herbicides either have genes to detoxify or sequester them in their cell walls. If the sequester them, then you get to eat nice bioaccumulation of herbicide. Glyphosate itself is pretty safe mechanistically, however everyone forgets about the adjuvants its formulation.
As someone who’s graduating in biotechnology, we want and we do, but there are a few things that make this not reach the market.
Round-up ready plants are incredibly easy to make, you insert only one gene (effectively, there are some little extra things but details) and now your plant can resist glyphosate, which means you can make many different species resistant to it much more easily, or make all of the different lines of whatever crop you sell also be restaurant to it.
For making drought resistant plants, there isn’t exactly one gene that makes the plant resistant. Just one example would be root length. If a plant has longer roots it can access moist soil for longer periods of time and thus making it more resilient against droughts, but to make the roots grow longer you have several genes that interact and changing one might not result in deeper roots in a drought environment since that gene is activated by a phytohormone that is upregulated during long days (summer time) but this location only encounters droughts during early spring when the days are still short, and for you to regulate that gene to change when the phytohormone is upregulated you’d need to change a BUNCH of other things on the plant that would result in a complete mess of how the plant develops as now it acts like summer during spring but only for the roots and the roots send signals that the leafs must ignore until the correct time of the year and that changes when the seeds are going to be released because the plant is now blooming at a completely different time and oh fuck we’ve developed the equivalent of ancient Egyptian inbreed pharaohs but for plants, which is horrible but incredibly impressive given that most plants can self fertilize… This is one route of trying to just make longer roots, if we go through giving the root growth gene sensibility to another phytohormone that is upregulated on short days, the roots now will release other phytohormones in higher levels than the plant is used to (more length = more roots = more cells making said phytohormones) and since plants develop through gradients of hormones and the proportion of one vs another, the amount of work to make it so that the plant actually develops correctly will also be huge! And this is just for one single characteristic that we think would help in many cases but wouldn’t actually make plants fully resistant to droughts, just able to get a few extra days of water, unlike how roundup ready is still just add this gene that allows the plant to break down glyphosate fast enough that it doesn’t die.
Now the other side of the issue is funding. Yeah, droughts are a really bad problem for farms, but the BUG farms are either in places that they don’t suffer from droughts that much, in places that they can buy a lot of water cheaply (government subsidies) or can produce a lot of crops even when there’s a drought vs what they’d loose against weeds competing with their crops for water, nutrients and diseases spread by those weeds
In the end, we have the same reasons that tuberculosis and malaria are not funded and researched flash much as they should, it just doesn’t make sense (commercially) to do so for big corporations like monsanto/bayer and the subject is complex enough that several universities having small teams researching it will tackle it from so many different angles and have such a difficult time with it that progress is really slow. The researchers want to work on cures for malaria, tuberculosis and to make plants resistant to droughts, soil acidification, nutrient content of the final produce and much much more, but we’re fighting against capitalism and spaghetti code with no annotations written by thousands of not millions of different coders that didn’t talk with each other through the millions of years of development of said code
Also all of the insects covered in Roundup, making ecosystems collapse
And somebody’s gotta spray that RoundUp… hasn’t there been numerous class actions about the effects of that stuff on people who had to use it? 😬
You’re absolutely not alone with GMO concerns.
Celiac enters the chat.Does that mean that the people who got an A in biology are more right than people who got a B in biology?
fucking this. fuck the person commenting TINA: there is no alternative. because permaculture crops grown locally over years are far more resilient than GMO and without the fertilizer needed. no vendor-fucking-lock-in on crops.
when shit hits the fan GMO crops are another vector of extortion onto independent family homesteads. simple fact of history, look up what Haiti did to “gifts” of GMO crops from american GMO producers. how’s that for real-world research into politics of GMO
I think equally important as teaching these things to begin with is letting students know when they’re being taught a simplified model, and that serious academic discourse of the subject is still evolving and/or involves much more nuance (which is pretty much always). some people who do pay attention in science classes nonetheless think that what they learned is gospel and never re-examine it, or stubbornly refuse to acknowledge when said nuance is relevant because it seems to contradict the simplified model they’ve cemented in their brain as the whole truth. the kind of people who say things like “I know there’s two genders because I learned it in high school biology” and apparently never considered why there would be collegiate and post-graduate studies on biology and gender (or why those are two entirely different fields of study) if we all already learned everything there is to know in high school.
I think chemistry is APPALLINGLY bad at this to be honest.
The sad thing is those people did take those classes.
‘Leave no child behind’ was/is a bad policy. You can’t call yourself a major league player when you’re still hitting from the tee.
Real talk: those “boring” science classes aren’t about memorizing facts — they teach you how to spot bad claims and check sources. That skill pays off forever.
that’s the same people who later get to helm companies and say “who the fuck needs market research when you have the force of will”
AI is a great idea and everyone in our company must use it!
It’s fun in my organisation. We get “Use AI, it’s the future, your manager will assess your use of AI” alongside “only use the AI tools on this list” with a list of tools completely useless to my, or my team’s possible needs, along with “don’t give AI any sensitive information” where everything my team works on is IT systems which makes everything too sensitive to be given to copilot
it’s a great idea if all you need to do is to compile the research you already did into variety of content types. my current fave is notebookLM because i’m uploading all the reports from other companies and sift through them somewhat faster. other than that - it is basically a linkedin post generator.
I hated chemistry in school, because it was teaching us irrelevant shit like the electron structure of atoms. But when I’m interested in something, I’ll look it up, and may get lost in a Wikipedia wormhole for hours about the most random topics. (some recent ones were: image file formats, the history of feminism, Serengeti National Park)
Imho the difference all lies in when knowledge is shoved down our throats vs exploring it out of curiosity.
It’s funny how as adults we become interested in elements of stuff we were taught and found boring before. But I’m not sure how you’d teach science without “shoving it down people’s throats” because most teenagers simply don’t give a shit about any of it, so pretty much anything you teach will be shoving it down someone’s throat. The better solution would be explaining why electron structure is important foundational stuff. About 98% of the time, in HS, they didn’t explain why we needed to know it, how it would be contextualized in later life - it was simply “learn this so you can pass next week’s test.” And for me, knowing why is crucial to me caring enough to learn.
I hated chemistry in school, because it was teaching us irrelevant shit like the electron structure of atoms.
It’s only unimportant because you don’t care. Reading random facts on Wikipedia isn’t learning, it’s just reading. You can read the Wikipedia page on juggling, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggling) but I wouldn’t expect you to understand (much less, perform) a 3 ball cascade, reverse cascade and waterfall after just reading the page. Those are very basic juggling patterns and fundamentals to more advanced patterns, such as juggler’s tennis, mills mess, boston mess etc… and that’s the difference between learning, and reading.
Not ripping on going on a Wikipedia dive here, it’s one of my favorite things to do, but recognize that it’s not the same as learning
I feel like you’re nitpicking. For physical activities personal experience is obviously best, but for most topics, reading about them is the same as learning about them. Except for PE and art, nothing I learnt in school was through direct experience. Also how is anyone supposed to learn about stuff that cannot be experienced personally, like history or space?
Reading can be part of learning, but just reading Wikipedia is not. If you want to learn something, you need to invest the time in it to understand not just the words, but the context of that information, you need to be able to apply what you have read, and make use of it, even if that use is purely academic.
For instance, you can read about the American civil war on Wikipedia, but a history teacher would not say that you learned the history of the American civil war. You would need to read multiple books on the situation before the war, during the war, and after the war, along with exploring the relevant technologies available at the time. You’d also want to look into primary sources like the diaries of some of the major leadership on both sides of the conflict, and review maps of battle sites and troop movements with time and dates, maybe even go visit some of the major battle sites, and at that point, you could say you’ve learned the history of the American civil war.
Same thing for space. You can read the Wikipedia article on space, but you can’t claim that you learned about space from that. You’d need to look at other sources, rely on previous education you’ve had in school, maybe make some observations of space on your own, watch interviews of astronauts and astronomers, and then you can start to say that you’re learning about space.
Learning takes an investment from you. Simply reading the material is not learning, you need to interact with it.
Sorry, your reasoning sounds ridiculously arbitrary and elitist. Yes, reading a single wiki page won’t give the same depth of knowledge as studying the topic for years, but it’s still increased knowledge compared to what the reader had before. By your reasoning nobody learns anything before they go to university? Because in what other educational environment you would read multiple books’ worth of information about a single subject…
By your reasoning nobody learns anything before they go to university?
Absolutely not what I said. Please re-read my comment.
Because in what other educational environment you would read multiple books’ worth of information about a single subject…
Yeah… You definitely did not understand what I wrote. Read it again and see if you still feel the same way.
I used to think like this until I found out you can explain a lot of chemical interactions by just knowing how the electron structure of atoms lead to those reactions. Helpful when you try to wonder if anything could be toxic.
As a kid I always thought a lot of stuff taught was like, duh, so obvious. It took being thrown in the adult world to see hmm… I guess… not obvious enough???
Naw. High School Science does jack shit to prevent this, unless it actually teaches scientific theory and also explains how modern science is organized. I unfortunately mever encountered epistemology or the like in my high school science classes.
Tbf this does kind of imply we are doing something wrong. Maybe instead we should teach people to learn and judge information, rather than train them to take information presented to them at face value.
There are as many irrational science fanatics as there are religious fanatics.
There are as many irrational science fanatics as there are religious fanatics.
I really doubt that.
Also, how are they to judge information presented to them if there is no agreed upon valid source?
I agree (e.g. think how many billions were thrown at string theory). Critical Thinking is an essential skill and must be included and encouraged from an early age.
Maybe many students are just trying trying to pass am exam or get a degree. There’s far too much to know about too many things to expect everyone to have even a basic understanding of everything. Knowing how to spot bullshit (aka critical thinking) is a lot easier than becoming an expert in every subject.
Loooooool
Vaccines could cause autism since they contain immune system steroids, and should probably not be given to people who haven’t reached adulthood. Anyone who is a decent mother has probably thought about this. GMOs can also be dangerous although not likely, outside of fats, your bodies tends to break down other things. Flat earth is a troll. Climate change is real but the solutions people have for dealing with it are stupid, annoying, intrusive, and impractical. Cars get shittier year after year because of the stupid laws, meanwhile the human population is exploding.
Also don’t tell me I don’t understand the science because I do. I just figure out things myself instead of trusting corporations and social media companies. People who unironicly think that vaccines are safe did not form that conclusion by, “understanding the science”. They came to that conclusion because some other liberal corporatists told them too. It is true vaccines will cause the cow herd to be a bit more resilient, but also if that comes at the cost of the brain and mental health, then no that’s fucking stupid. Sure to corporations having bodies is probably the best thing for them. They need as many workers as possible, but from a human standpoint, there is nothing more valuable than your mind. Don’t waste your children’s minds to make cattle for corporations.
There is some evidence that autism is a combination of hereditary natural variation and diet
The evidence of diet is many anecdotes that some ancient food diets make autistic children less autistic (moves them closer to neurotypical)
Vaccines could cause autism since they contain immune system steroids…
Source, LIAR?
Removed by mod
I am a researcher…
So am I! Except I’m not full of shit!
lol, no source! What a maroon.
Prime example of lying liars continuing to lie. Wonder why measles is making a comeback? Look no further!
What world do you live in. How do you even come up with this stuff
Use that creativity for writing stories and shit, not lying on the Internet
Thank you for all your misinfo!
no.
steroids are a specific thing, and are not used in vaccines. steroids can’t cause autism even if that was the case. vaccines can not cause autism at all. vaccines work by incapacitating a viral or bacterial agent, sprinkling some red flags on it and dumping it in your system for the immune system to stumble across
autism is a developmental issue, either selected genes at conception mess with developmental plans, or something interrupts development before birth. vaccines do not have a chance to be administered before that period is over.
also!
GMO’s are a meaningless designation to determine harm in any regard. all it dictates is whether humans have in any fashion altered the organism. you might as well have said “red foods can also be dangerous although not likely”
also,
there are people who do believe in flat earth, because otherwise their religion is false.
rong? like the estonian word for train?
This whole thread is a box of rocks.
Does that mean that the people who got an A in biology are more right than people who got a B in biology?
Stay curious‼️ 🤔
Real. Curiosity is such a desirable trait in folks.
But not in cats.
“akshully”
That’s why my friends call me Whiskers
