Great to hear from someone so close to actual food production.

When it comes to rice is there really enough slack in the system to make a dent in the missing corn? My understanding is the amount of rice traded internationally is actually quite small (most is eaten in the same country it's grown in). I'm sure you/your tenants will get a great price for this year's crop, but realistically it seems the only place we'll be able to find slack in the US food system would be relaxing the ethanol mandate for one growing season (seems unlikely especially in an election year) or significantly reducing meat production. It's sounding like the second may already be happening, with many ranchers and feedlots thinning out their herds drastically this fall because the math shows they won't be able to afford to feed all their livestock at the prices corn is headed towards this winter.

In countries without a lot of meat consumption it's not clear what people will be able to do besides spend a lot more of their budgets on food or start missing a lot of meals.

I have to disagree with your characterization of the EU as a food exporter. In fact the EU is a major net food importer. Grain and soybeans to feed lifestock from Brazil and Argentina, fruit and vegetables from Africa. To the point where they're actually contributing to the problems with food insecurity in some parts of the world by exporting their opposition to various modern ag technologies to countries that depend on EU to buy their crops. Also, the US doesn't withhold exports to keep food prices high. We do other things that mean the price of US grown food is higher than it would be otherwise (like subsidizing ethanol and paying farmers not to farm certain acres through the CRP program.) but there aren't any barriers other than the higher prices preventing that food from being exported from the country. The ultimate effect is the same though, so I suppose it's one of one, half a dozen of another.

Actually XY individuals who develop into females as a result of a broken copy of a gene which encodes a testosterone receptor protein are overrepresented among the top female athletes of the world. A mixture of the developmental effects of zero testosterone signal during development (regular XX women have less than men but a lot more than zero) and the effect of the non-sex determining genes unique to the Y chromosome.

The difference is you can choose to not mention your username in, say, a job application, and there is no way to link your real name to your activity online (assuming you haven't done anything stupid that links the two). You are also under no obligation to provide your username on your drivers license, legal documents, or when checking into a hotel. Setting up a new username and account with no connection to your previous online presence is also much more simple and effective than trying to set up a new and unlinked real-world identity.

On my first read of your upstream comment I thought you were arguing conventional submicron filtering would do a BETTER job of filtering than the graphene pores being discussed in TFA, though on a second read through I realize that wasn't your point. Since I now understand you are making an argument for redundancy in case of failure of the first system, I can understand and agree with where you are coming from.

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.