With pores barely wide enough to allow water molecules through, we're already talking about submicron level filtration.

If this were a significant issue, we'd be seeing dramatic changes in the dating scene. Reports from colleges with male female ratios as skewed as little as 55/45 (in either direction) suggest that even reasonably small changes tend to have drastic social consequences. Yet it doesn't seem like anything like that is being observed in the adult world (for lack of a better term).

Ninety percent huh? Ever heard of Pioneer Hi-bred? Syngenta? BASF? Monsanto's market share if the american seed corn market fluctuates between 30-40%. And yes, their lawyers are trigger happy. But that's no excuse for getting your facts wrong.

Although at least in my field the problem is that no one ever thought to set lower limits on the quality of what you can call a genome. So now we get "genomes" made up of 100,000 contigs (many only a couple of hundred base pairs long) and even counting all of those, the total sequence might account for only 70% of the total size of the genome. But it's still a "genome" paper, which is still an instant ticket to Nature Genetics (or Nature Biotechnology if the assembly is REALLY bad).

BGI is certainly one of the biggest offenders (Cucumber and Pigeonpea are both examples of the sort of terrible genomes-in-name-only BGI puts out) but I think the real problem is that Illumina sequence data is so cheap people keep trying to use it to sequence genomes, thinking if they throw enough raw data and enough mate-pair libraries at the problem it'll eventually make up for the fact that Illumina reads are so short. Illumina data is great for a lot of things. Calling SNPs, measuring gene expression, studying methylation patterns.

But, at least for any genome significant transposon content, it simply does not work.

Obligatory post by a plant biologist who is sick of the animal folks overgeneralizing their findings in press releases.

It seems to me neither taking money way from rich people nor people not paying their student loans were responsible for creating "this situation" (I'm assuming you mean the ongoing bad economy). So while I agree the protests are unfocused and/or advocating extreme positions, at least their positions are extreme in the OPPOSITE direction from what got us into this mess.

Your sig line is awesome!
(Fellow biologist)

To maintain a stable orbit at the same distance from a more massive object would mean moving faster, not slower, right?

Thirty-three states exclude food from sales tax, and only nine tax it at the same rate as things people don't need to survive.

Now if you live in one of those eight states, like Oklahoma or Mississippi, I agree you've got a legitimate grievance with the way your state is being run.

You give the initial percentage of the school's total operating budget supported by the state. Now I don't know what percentage of the budget originally came from student tuition, but let's say it was also 20%. If state support drops 7% to 13%, then to make up the same amount of funding from tuition (bringing tuition to 27% of the total budget) would require raising tuition 35%. And this doesn't take into account regular inflation, which would have driven a 30+% increase in tuition over 10 years even without having to make up for declining state support. Even so, that doesn't explain the total increase in tuition you describe, but it does explain why the increase was going to be a whole heck of a lot more than 7% regardless.

People deciding to be calm and logical and sacrificing for the good of humanity as a whole? (The opposite of the ignorance and greed and fear we see all around us.) Or some guy in a lab coat eventually inventing a quick technical fix?

Personally I think cold fusion (or a similarly improbable technological breakthrough like the sunlight->metal->hydrogen described in this article based solely on computer simulation) is by far the more likely of the two possibilities, so I find joy in reading stories like this one, and continue to hope that someday, one of them will come to fruition.

The much talked about Terminator Technology was developed by a company called Delta & Pine that went broke and were bought out years ago. Who knows what they were planning to do with it. But the fact remains that neither that technique, nor any comparable technology has been commercialized but people lie and claim the corn planted across the country is sterile to scare people.

Can we at least agree that lying is bad?

I grew up in the middle of the American midwest, earned the money for my first computer working hot summers in cornfields, and if you don't want our (US) corn, just don't buy it! And don't buy South American soybeans (which are almost all GM).

The EU is a huge food importer, mostly to feed to livestock.

If you don't like the kinds of the food the rest of the world wants to grow, you could grow your own. Or you could eat a lot less meat. Nobody is going to come in and make you plant GM crops if you guys decide to stop importing it from across the globe.

And corn produces four times as much food per acre as wheat while using more (but not seven times as much) water. Which is why we grow so much of it over here. But once more, if you'd like to start growing your own food again instead of outsourcing to the western hemisphere, you can make your own decisions about whether you'd rather cut down more forests and plow more prairies for farmland or grow crops that produce more food on less land.

As far as I know are two ways to make a crop resistant to an herbicide. Either the way you describe, or substituting another enzyme that can do the same job as the one inhibited by the herbicide (IIRC the second is what has been done to produce crops resistant to roundup but I believe both have been used). I guess my point is that if you do either of those things in the absence of that specific herbicide the GM crops should perform a lot like the same variety without the transgene.

This discussion got started as a response to a fellow who was saying companies had engineered crops to do worse in the absence of specific herbicides (made by the same companies) than non-GM varieties. To me that's a very different thing from engineering plants to resist specific herbicides.

Thank you.

Let me start out by saying the parts I completely agree with. Modern breeds of most crops have been selected to identify varieties that use fertilizer efficiently, converting as much as possible of it into extra food instead of, say, longer stalks (an issue that crops up when you heavily fertilize older varieties of wheat and rice). So in the absence of fertilizer, older varieties developed prior to the development of cheap synthetic fertilizer will outperform varieties developed to take advantage of the fertilizer.

The trade off in investing energy in yield (usually in the form of starch and sugars) vs defense is a real one, and it wouldn't surprise me if there has been some accidental selection towards less investment in defense related compounds and more in yield during conventional breeding programs, since, as you point out, yield is a much easier thing for a plant breeder to measure. However this is where we part ways. I've read extensively on the small handful of traits introduced to plants by genetic engineering and none of them have been aimed at knocking out or reducing the plant's innate defenses. Maybe such a strategy might work (defining work as increasing yield), but if so, no one has successfully done so yet.

The original post I was replying to made it sound like plants had been crippled in order to require specific pesticides sold by the same company. Which would require an intentional act, not simply a focus on yield over immunity to disease and pests during the breeding process.