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Submission + - Crop nutrition down 3.2% in under 4 decades due to rising CO2 levels

Submitted by GameboyRMH
GameboyRMH writes: It's a well-understood phenomenon that rising CO2 levels decrease crop nutrition, but now Futurism reports that Dutch researchers have tallied the recent damage: in a survey of 43 different crops, nutrients were found to have fallen an average of 3.2% since the late '80s. Higher CO2 levels cause crops to gain biomass faster without absorbing nutrients at an accelerated rate and with decreased water consumption, resulting in lower nutrient concentration. “The plant is becoming more efficient, but it’s occurring at a price, from a human perspective,” Lewis Ziska, a plant biologist at Columbia University who studied the phenomenon for more than two decades, told WaPo. Previous studies have estimated that by 2050, this effect could cause zinc deficiency to affect an additional 175 million people, protein deficiency to affect an additional 122 million, and could decrease iron uptake by 4% while 1.4 billion women of childbearing age and children under 5 already live in countries with anemia rates of over 20%.

Comment Auto translation is worse (Score 1) 100

by alexandre (#66125918) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Are YouTube's Subtitles 'Appallingly Bad'?

Opening a French video out of the blue and hearing some weird English translation no one asked for instead of simply adding subtitles is such an awful example of American exceptionalism...
I'm not necessarily going to set my browser to every language I want to hear with subtitles, but auto-voice translation is just wrong.
If you managed to get to Youtube, you can read and choose to activate it if you want, but stop with this English-centric view.

Comment Re:Should be easy to find the users (Score 1) 134

by dgatwood (#66125898) Attached to: Smuggled Starlink Terminals are Beating Iran's Internet Blackout

Think about it .. the US landed C-130s, and a bunch of other aircraft including helicopters deep in their territory --- hung out for like 45 minutes and left. They couldn't track noisy ass helicopters and you're telling me they can find a phase array antenna Starlink? Most units of which, I can pretty much guarantee, are owned by government-connected people. And btw, they can be solar powered and planted some distance away from whoever owns it.

If the U.S. can do that, they can put drones in the air and create a Starlink-based swarm network providing free Wi-Fi to everyone, replacing the hardware as it gets shot down. Nobody has to have the Starlink hardware if it is a few hundred feet up — complete anonymity and complete destruction of the government's Internet blackout.

Comment Re:Ban paying ransoms (Score 2) 22

because countries that have outlawed paying ransoms to kidnappers have broken the kidnapping industry?

this doesn't work, it just makes more people criminals.

But corporations are not people. Corporations exist at the mercy and whims of the state. And corporations have to tell who they paid money and for what.

If you make it illegal for corporations to pay ransoms to the tune of "If you get caught, your corporate charter is revoked," it won't make more people criminals; it will make it nearly impossible for corporations to pay ransoms without the corporation ceasing to exist, which would make paying the ransom entirely moot.

But for it to work, the cost of getting caught and the odds of getting caught would both have to be high enough to exceed the cost of throwing out all the affected equipment and rebuilding from off-site backups (or starting over from scratch). Otherwise, they'll just pay the ransom.

Comment Re: I Wonder Why? (Score 1) 95

The only way to "save money" by using an H1B is to advertise, say, that you need a full stack dev for $50k in an area where 200k is what they normally earn, then try to convince the authorities that 50k is ACKSURELY the going rate, and that the reason you didn't get any qualified candidates was that Americans are dumb.

The usual way of doing that is to say, "But those $200k jobs are Software Engineer III. We're hiring for Programmer I".

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