Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2014)

From their about page

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."

Thank you so much for this. Turned an article I was annoyed about (for AI speak) into an amazing story again.

> This content is from 2014-15; perhaps they AI-rehashed the Yahoo! News story about them?

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.

I've put that older yahoo.com link at the top since it seems to be the original source. Thanks!

(Submitted URL was https://scienceblog.com/b-three-schoolgirls-in-kinsale-pulle... and I think we'll ban that site.)

"Hungria" cant have a better name for food research. Nitrogen fixing is one of the more frustrating things to work on as there is such a massive ready supply of unfixed nitrogen to work with everywhere on our planet and all in all we need such a tiny proportion to dramiticly improve agriculture.The whole thing is so finly balanced that herbivors can likely smell the diference in plants that have been given nitrogen fertiliser and raid our crops and gardens for the fixed nitrogen that then facilitates there own internal bacteria and thereby achive better nutrition for themselves. But to my frustration and anger, nothing eats alder bushes, which are a never ending problem in taking over fields, but when after employing machinery to uproot them,( it bieng the only way to kill them), reveals there bright orange knobly roots, that host the nitrogen fixing bacteria that they contain. There is enough nitrogen and other nutrients in alder that the area's where they are piled and burnt will remain significantly more fertile for many years after. One of my(many) projects is to experiment with "terra preta" and build a charcoal kiln, primarily for alder and hopefully be able to retain a greater portion of the "good stuff™" that is otherwise lost to rotting or combustion.

There are some plants with symbiotic relationships with nitrogen fixing bacterial.

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...

The new key detail of this story is using them for cereal crops. The piece is about discovering that they can be used on some crops that were previously not thought to work with them.

> You would think that scientists would spend more effort trying to create "super" rhizobacteria that can colonize even more aggressively and also fix many times more nitrogen than ordinary ones

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.

There are also “free living” bacteria that are capable of nitrogen fixing (diazotrophic), but are not as strictly root dwelling like Rhizobia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paenibacillus

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.

> Refreshing to see there are other outcomes than asking AI what it is these days.

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".

In 2014 asking AI "what it is" wasn't an option.

It's a design choice / affectation.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Syne

It's just how the font looks: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Syne

Oh I already posted elsewhere here about this! Hah. I absolutely hate the font.

Agreed, it's an article with an interesting topic for once, and it's completely ruined by the way it's presented.

Why did our fellow HN readers upvote this story at all?

I think the problem is, when someone rewrites a 12 year old story for clicks, it's a little deceptive, AI or not. And AI makes it even easier to be deceptive like this.

Lots of news sites aren't AI written; or if AI is involved, it's not as blatant as in this article. The 'papers of record' largely remain AI-free. You increasingly have to pay for good journalism.

> At this point what news site isn't AI written?

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.)

> At this point what news site isn't AI written?

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.

Studies show that your concentration remains sharper if your visual processing system is jarred out of its complacency at frequent, semi-random intervals, preventing you from lapsing into a low-effort 'skim-reading' mindset. It's something to do with the predictive processing model; over time, your brain comes to rely increasingly on top-down processing if its expectations are consistently met, and I guess there is some interplay between visual processing and semantic comprehension in this context.

(Just kidding! I think it is simply an annoying affectation.)

For real, I thought it was just me but I find the unfinished g's really distracting, even though I understand it's a stylistic choice my brain keeps thinking it's being rendered funky

I don't see any of that - but I use reader mode.

Putting aside the cultural imperialism (this happened in Ireland, which is in Europe, which is also where two of the greatest agricultural schools in the world, if not also the two greatest for this, are based), it also happened over a decade ago, so I guess everyone has tried furthering it by now.

I thought all those school/systems of colleges had their budgets cut last year?

> ... what happens when some of the great American agricultural schools further this experiment.

"Brawndo! It's got what plants crave!"

> when some of the great American agricultural schools

"Thank God the USA finally sent some scientists to understand things for us!" - the rest of the world. In your head.