Potato farmers conquer a devastating worm with paper made from bananas | Hacker News Reader

Potato farmers conquer a devastating worm with paper made from bananas

science.org

208 pointsrbanffy35 comments

>In a field trial, researchers added abamectin, a pesticide that kills nematodes, to the paper. They also planted potatoes in banana paper without abamectin as a control.

Kudos to the NC state team for setting up this control, and digging into the results, especially when the purpose of their experiments was different (their intent was to find a better way to deliver pesticides).

It is amazing how many times this happens - unintended or unanticipated results from an experiment, often peripheral results, which turn out to be extraordinarily interesting (usually for a different purpose as the original experiment), if observed and followed-up on with rigor and innovation.

One example of this was a study of how electrical currents affect bacteria. E. coli were grown in a medium through a which a current was being passed. Weird effects were seen, and eventually this was traced not to the current, but to a chemical that was being produced at one of the platinum electrodes. And thus was discovered the biological effect of cisplatin, today a standard chemotherapy drug for many kinds of cancer.

Nice one - didn't know that. Penicillin is maybe the most famous example? The Wizard and the Prophet (Mann) and How Innovation Works (Ridley) also show how combinations of these types of discoveries (many of them in different fields, being studied for other purposes, etc.) over multi-year periods often results in world-changing level outcomes.

The discovery of LSD is another.

The very best scientific breakthroughs are announced with the words "Huh? That's weird!"

Also, a good signal for programmers to dig deeper into strange software behavior.

If a C or C++ programmer did that they'd never find their way out of the rabbit hole.

Sadly, in the tech world, phrases like "It's acting weird, try a reboot." are the opposite of this.

Every time something isn't behaving as it should, somewhere in the bytes of RAM will be the reason it isn't working properly. You could dump that ram and single step the code to find the fault. And then fix it for the millions of other people out there.

Or you could just reboot, and the problem will be erased, and probably never happen again to you for many years, by which time you'll have moved onto new hardware anyway.

In the tech world the "huh, that's weird" can apply to users using your app to solve problems in unexpected ways.

Because 99% of the time understanding the root cause is not interesting or valuable. When you find a bug you won't accidentally discovery the cure for some disease. You'll fix it, and a low impact, intermittent issue that could be mitigated with a restart is now gone.

When you find a bug you shall be able to learn and not make the same mistake again.

Which suggests the funding going directly to cancer research remains the waste energy done in vain. When its just random other research that winds up having the most efficacy.

There was a lot of research between "discovering this cool chemical has an effect on bacteria" and "it's now the standard treatment curing 85% of testicular cancers."

I don't see a logical path from one to the other.

What a short sighted commitment.

1) a lot of cancer research occurred between the random bacteria observation and viable chemotherapy.

2) ignoring the above, you still have too compare the success rate of funding cancer research vs random experiments.

Fun fact: abamectin an analog of ivermectin, differing only by a single double-bond. It is used in both agriculture and pharmaceuticals.

I'm reminded of the discovery that grapefruit impacts how drugs are processed by the body.

If I'm remembering correctly, the scientists were trying to find a way to see if alcohol impacted some drug, but wanted the measurement to be blind. So don't participants would need to drink alcohol without being sure if they had or not. The author and his wife spent a lively evening trying to find some kind of mix that hid the alcohol and found grapefruit to be very good at it.

Then when the actual study ran, they had participants take the drug or a control as well as vodka with grapefruit or just grapefruit. And to their surprise, the grapefruit had a massive effect regardless of the vodka!

Yes. The VW emissions scandal comes to mind:

"But vindication implies that we are out to get somebody. And we weren't. We had no idea that this was out there."

https://www.npr.org/2015/09/24/443053672/how-a-little-lab-in...

Somewhat related but I was watching Idaho Public TV the other night and found it interesting that high school students get a school vacation during harvest season and comprise a large percentage of the harvest workers in Eastern Idaho: https://www.capitalpress.com/high-school-students-key-to-eas...

I lived in south east Idaho during some of my high school years and worked for a local potato farmer. During the fall break, I would work 18 hours a day driving potato trucks, and pulling dirt clods from conveyor belts.

If the work was not done by the end of the break, you could get excused from school for as long as needed to finish. Kind of weird priorities for the area if you ask me.

And yes, it was just as glamorous as it sounds.

How were the earnings? Sounds like it might be some pretty solid income for a highschooler.

My wife is from the area and she did "spud harvest" as it is called. You are correct it is a pretty good income, my wife would regularly walk away with 3-4k which considering just a week of work isn't bad.

Heck I've thought about taking a week off to do spud harvest, take a chance to get out of the office and do something physical for once.

that's pretty interesting. Reminds me of this statement a coworker of mine said when the California wildfires returned last year. He shared with us that up in Oregon, the state he recently moved to, they recruit a ton of volunteers and local men to go to town on any fire that pops up and take care of business so things don't get out of control. That's a very different response from California where I think everyone waits for the officials to take care of it as far as I can see.

In NZ, most fire brigades outside of urban areas and bushfire response are volunteer based. Which requires a lot of understanding employers - it wasn't uncommon in my rural town during our high fire risk season for our teacher to sprint out the classroom when his pager went off, then the principal would cover for him.

A year or 2 back someone did a little arson on the wooden part of the fence around an electric substation in my town (California). The firefighters were standing around with their thumbs up their asses watching it burn because they had to wait for some official to get dragged out of bed to tell them the mean electricity wasn't going to hurt them.

I still kick myself for not just grabbing a one of their fire extinguishers off the back of the truck and putting it out myself. From outside the fence where the public are allowed to go at all times and no electricity magically kills them.

The vast majority (around 67% in 2018) of US firefighters are volunteers[1]. My mother started as a volunteer in her small canyon community in Orange County, CA, and did that for five years before becoming a full-time engineer for the OCFD. She worked several wildfires in the area as a volunteer.

1: https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Data-research-and-too...

I live near Mountain View and one only needs to go 15 miles out in rural areas like La Honda where the local fire service is all volunteer (cause there's not enough taxes to pay for fulltime fire fighters) with a few CalFire outposts scattered in closer for state forest coverage. There's also a combined network of professionals and volunteers who watch for signs of fire in forested areas statewide.

All depends on how rural your area is / the availability of services. Many places don't have fire service of their own, or they have volunteer service that doesn't necessarily work around the clock.

Similar vacation scheduling happens in northern Maine around the potato harvest.

https://bangordailynews.com/2016/10/08/news/aroostook-county...

The numbers don't work out, or am I misunderstanding something?

> These microscopic worms... cutting harvests by up to 70%. > The new technique has boosted yields fivefold in trials with small-scale farmers in Kenya

Seems like there are factors beyond the worms in Kenya, unless they are really saying that they are getting over 150% yield after the banana tree paper is used?

The authors are not doing a particularly good job of framing the losses or the benefits with their wording in the article.

They link to a source that indicates that losses can be as high as .. well, exceeding the value of a seed stock used to plant the crop, so I guess that is greater than 100%?https://www.cabi.org/isc/datasheet/27034#tosummaryOfInvasive...

The actual article in question cites 60% losses: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00852-5

The five-fold statement appears to be sloppy/misleading writing with respect to comparing the improvement over the baseline, not 5x the actual production. The article is not generally dishonest but the specific claims seem to be well into the "geez.. IDK guys.." territory.

Potatoes are a pretty variable crop, with lots of both seen and unseen things having a large impact on yield. I can totally imagine a lot of noise in any results unless they were really large scale and well designed.

I am wondering if this approach could work on soybean cyst nematode which is a huge problem worldwide. Farmers can currently plant seed that is highly resistant to the nematodes but they yield less. If seed companies could figure out a way to automate wrapping the seed would this possibly be a solution?

This is exactly the sort of thing we need to develop and reduce our excessive use of pesticides as it's already having a deleterious effect on wildlife that we need such as bees.

Archived: https://archive.ph/AyJNc

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