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.
(Submitted URL was https://scienceblog.com/b-three-schoolgirls-in-kinsale-pulle... and I think we'll ban that site.)
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.
Edit: nevermind, let's just swap the link altogether (more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49553719).
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."
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.
https://www.worldfoodprize.org/en/laureates/20202026_laureat...
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...
It also shows the importance of questioning expert consensus. Its when you find the current consensus is wrong that you find something new.
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".
A wart-covered pea plant is what they refer to (near Cork, Ireland)
Why does shit like that work better than quality contextual advertising?
Isn’t the actual underlying science - which I don’t recall seeing on HN before - more interesting?
I would like to know how it turned out - does it work in practice, is it practical to deploy, is it already or soon going to make any impact on real farming?
At this point what news site isn't AI written? Except for the few remaining human blogs (which are a delight and a pleasure). Why I detected AI: it said "The honest footnote.." at the end. That's how Claude always ends our long-rambling discussions.
(Just kidding! I think it is simply an annoying affectation.)
This was year 2000, when you had to write all code yourself, read man pages for info, without Stack Overflow or whatever to guide you. You were more isolated in such tasks, often thinking deeply, especially as a sole dev in a company.
Point is, your joke just brought all that trama back. I'm a peaceful man, but I almost hit him a few times. Major stress. He sort of stopped it when one time, I think I literally has rageful murder in my eyes. He took a step back. and never did it again.
A bendiction... may no other coder experience this horror.
"Brawndo! It's got what plants crave!"
"Thank God the USA finally sent some scientists to understand things for us!" - the rest of the world. In your head.
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.
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.
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...
My experience with burn areas is that the potash alone will do this. Are you sure that the nitrogen is what's surviving? It could be - sodium nitrate has a fairly high combustion temp of ~300C - but even then it's being boosted by the concentrated potassium left over.
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Atlantic, NPR, BBC, The Verge, The Economist. That's just off the top of my head. Basically none of the reputable papers will touch AI.
(I guess I have to add an "as far as we know" footnote but I'd be truly shocked if The New York Times was secretly using AI.)
The reality is that everyone is using it, and has been using forms of AI and ML for news writing and copywriting for decades. For example, I remember hearing how Reuters used to use statistical models to auto-generate articles from notes taken by journalists 20 years ago that would then be copy edited.
The reality is that Generative AI is here to stay just like the Internet, but there are ways to use it responsibly (also like the Internet).
[0] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/policies/what-were...
[1] - https://www.wsj.com/news/author/wsj-artificialintelligenceto...
[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2023/jun/16/...
[3] - https://www.npr.org/about-npr/1205385162/special-section-gen...
[4] - https://myaccount.economist.com/s/article/How-we-handle-AI-g...
[5] - https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/05/the-economist-launches-a-d...
The mainstream ones that pay journalists, for the most part.
These little internet blogs love AI because they’re usually content farms. They want maximum traffic for minimum effort invested.
* in a regenerative kiln, volotiles are captured and fed to a burner to provide the bulk of the heat needed to char organic materials, the chared materials can do double duty as soil amendments and long term carbon storage or as fuel for a variety of uses. Also the volotiles can be condenced as liquids that have a wide variety of other uses. What would be interesting is if there might be a way to use an enhanced combustion process to capture extra atmospheric nitrogen in the bio char materials.
These were entire divisons that made up the majority of a newsroom. Most members of a newsroom aren't reporters - they're editors, copywriters, translators, graphic designers, narrators, etc.
If the whole point of a good journalist is to provide and synthesize context from sources, validate with experts, and do research then most of those other roles are tangential and can be reduced with human gating.
This is how newsrooms and other similar organizations are approaching and leveraging AI now.