2 years after nuclear disaster, Japan spawns freaky fruits and veggies | Hacker News Reader

2 years after nuclear disaster, Japan spawns freaky fruits and veggies

m.now.msn.com

11 pointsstfu11 comments

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I'm not sure what this proves. 5 minutes with /r/pics finds me all sorts of weird carrots:

http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/d17jf/i_grow_some_weir...

http://imgur.com/7T7g3

http://imgur.com/TULjm

http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/da7t6/carrots_have_evo...

http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/rjxkf/i_found_a_double...

And tomatoes:

http://imgur.com/a/AeNuC

http://imgur.com/a/5luwR/mutant_tomatoe

http://i.imgur.com/WGjZQ.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/NrUh0jH.jpg

A search for "peach" finds me primarily princess peach, primarily in cosplay form.

With: peach fruit double

Siamese Twin Peaches; Double and Triple Peach Fruits: http://xtremehorticulture.blogspot.com/2012/04/siamese-twin-...

I've also seen ears of corn growing seeds of grass instead of kernels of corn, but sadly I don't have pictures. Mutations are fairly common in agriculture; the misshapen produce is usually removed before it gets to you at a store.

Great, MSN journalism :"It might be wise to steer clear of vegetables from Japan's Fukushima area for, oh, say a few hundred years. ".

Yeah, like you know what you are talking about. The radiation levels in Fukushima are lower than in some other parts of the world where natural radioactivity occurs.

These pictures don't prove anything. When you grow vegetables you always get abnormalities. I have seen tons of discolorations, deformations, and other freaky products of nature when I was a kid. You don't need a nuclear incident to get that.

Without a meaningful control and in the absence of any other information, it's impossible to make a meaningful conclusion.

Is it possible to use such radiation for plant breeding purposes? Some of those modifications (like gigantism) could be useful.

Yes. "Chemical mutagens like EMS and DMS, radiation and transposons are used to generate mutants with desirable traits to be bred with other cultivars - a process known as Mutation Breeding." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeding

Yes, it's very common. ~75% of rice grown in California descends from seeds exposed to gamma radiation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding

In the 1950's, seeds were exposed to Cobalt-60 and then sold for people to plant and grow into whatever they were mutated into. It was called "atomic gardening". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening

I don't care for nuclear alarmism, and if you grow enough veggies some of them are going to come out strange, but that is a pretty disturbing set of pictures and suggests some systematic study of the fallout effects is warranted.

the set of similarly weird peaches is the only one that ticked me off.

The article couldn't help but use the catchphrase of un-science, "You never know," twice.

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