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- Hacker News
- I hate those g'sby daRealDodo
- I thought this was going to be an eats, shoots, and leaves style discussion.
A wart-covered pea plant is what they refer to (near Cork, Ireland)
by CalRobert - Unbelievably I read this news while visiting Cork. Went to Kinsale yesterday. Never been to Ireland before. What a coincidence!by gignico
- 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?
by spiderfarmer - Why did our fellow HN readers upvote this story at all?by mrguyorama
- Agreed, it's an article with an interesting topic for once, and it's completely ruined by the way it's presented.by classified
- Is the letter 'g' designed to appear as if the bottom loop is missing, or is that a rendering error on my end?by GaryBluto
- Oh I already posted elsewhere here about this! Hah. I absolutely hate the font.by birdsongs
- It's just how the font looks: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Syne
- It's a design choice / affectation.by modernerd
- Refreshing to see there are other outcomes than asking AI what it is these days.by pluc
- In 2014 asking AI "what it is" wasn't an option.by nervousvarun
- > Refreshing to see there are other outcomes than asking AI what it is these days.
In science, that's the only way to obtain results: do experiments, gather data.
It's also what sets scientists apart from other people: curiosity. "Hey that's odd, I wonder...". Non-scientists (read: most people) just care about quick answers & how to apply knowledge to their situation.
Note that knowledge in a field, intelligence, 'professional qualification' or whatever, is not essential. These can all be learned or 'sourced' from 3rd parties. But (imho) the curiosity part is essential to make a good scientist.
AI helps to trawl through the mountain of data & knowledge already out there. Re-hash & make it more easily accessible. Discover connections (like proving a math conjecture) that were overlooked before. Which is a good thing. But it can't produce raw data itself. Unless given control of equipment to run experiments on its own. Which might happen btw - if not done already.
The fun thing about research like this is that biology is a 'dirty' science (pun intented): results obtained in experiment A may differ from results in experiment B, due to differences in the local environment: presence/lack of other nutrients, bacteria occuring in A but rare/absent in B, specific varieties of crop used, pollinators, soil pH, etc (yes even local climate).
It's fine if people use AI to lower the bar to entry & make sense of things they don't (yet) understand. But it's sad if people think AI has all answers when it does not, and cannot possibly ever do so. Or even hallucinates at times. Rely on AI as The One Oracle(tm) at your own peril.
"Truth is not decided by majority vote".
by RetroTechie - Leaving aside the issues with this version of the story, it does demonstrate the value of teaching scientific method properly. Its very easy to teach the discoveries of science but neglect the method (hint for British people, get your kids to do GCSE astronomy, its better than the usual trio for this).
It also shows the importance of questioning expert consensus. Its when you find the current consensus is wrong that you find something new.
by graemep - The Stripe Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition (formerly the BT Young Scientist) is Ireland's biggest school science competition, held every year in Dublin.
The winners are often kids whose parents happen to be experts in some domain.
There are certainly some genuinely bright kids in the mix, but it feels a bit unfair on those who don't have parents "helping" them.
ref past winners:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Scientist_and_Technology...
by Ecstatify - 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:
https://soilscapesolutions.com/products/RhizoGenesis-p668356...
Do a Google search: Methods for Breeding "Super Strains"
Chemical Mutagenesis: Scientists expose the rhizobacteria to alkylating agents like Ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) to force point mutations.
Physical Radiation: Exposing bacterial cultures to UV light or gamma rays breaks DNA strands, inducing random repair variations.
Experimental Evolution: Google it.
- 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.
by Modified3019 - > 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 think the problem with that idea is that the rhizobacteria needs energy to break the nitrogen tripple bond. A lot of energy. It gets that energy by getting carbohydrates from the host plant - which in turn are not available to the plant to grow.
I'm sure there's plants where not fertilizing with nitrogen at all would make the trade-off worth it, but the vast majority of our optimized crops can't spare double-digit percentage points of their total yield to feed bacteria. You're much better of just using natural gas (or green hydrogen) to fix the nitrogen.
by pbmonster - Using nitrogen-fixing bacteria is not a new concept and it's the life's work of Dr Mariangela Hungria, who recently received the 2025 World Food Prize for her achievements in the field:
https://www.worldfoodprize.org/en/laureates/20202026_laureat...
by Tade0 - There are some plants with symbiotic relationships with nitrogen fixing bacterial.
I read that they're trying to cross breed modern corn with one from Oaxaca that has this relationship: https://news.wisc.edu/corn-that-acquires-its-own-nitrogen-id...
by chrisgarand - The new key detail of this story is using them for cereal crops. The piece is about discovering that they can be used on some crops that were previously not thought to work with them.by Aurornis
- "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 fertiliser and raid our crops and gardens for the fixed nitrogen that then facilitates there own internal bacteria and thereby achive better nutrition for themselves. But to my frustration and anger, nothing eats alder bushes, which are a never ending problem in taking over fields, but when after employing machinery to uproot them,( it bieng the only way to kill them), reveals there bright orange knobly roots, that host the nitrogen fixing bacteria that they contain. 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. One of my(many) projects is to experiment with "terra preta" and build a charcoal kiln, primarily for alder and hopefully be able to retain a greater portion of the "good stuff™" that is otherwise lost to rotting or combustion.by metalman
- 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:
https://ciarajudge.github.io/about
And recently earned her Ph.D publishing GPL3 software:
https://github.com/ciarajudge/EpiFusion
> EpiFusion uses particle filtering to simulate epidemic trajectories over time and weight their likelihood according to both case incidence data and a phylogenetic tree using separate observation models, resulting in the inference of trajectories in agreement with both sets of data.
by altairprime - Thank you so much for this. Turned an article I was annoyed about (for AI speak) into an amazing story again.by tclancy
- From their about page
https://scienceblog.com/about-us/
"Every published piece is editorially directed and reviewed before it goes live. We use AI tools in research, drafting, and editing. Editors decide what claims, framing, and pieces make it to publish."
by ChrisRR - > 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 in 2026. So yes, I’d agree this is an AI rehash and republish of an old story. An interesting story, but the older articles you linked to are so much better to read and more informative than this AI rehash.
by Aurornis - 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.)
by dang