Leaving aside the issues with this version of the story, it does demonstrate the value of teaching scientific method properly. Its very easy to teach the discoveries of science but neglect the method (hint for British people, get your kids to do GCSE astronomy, its better than the usual trio for this).
It also shows the importance of questioning expert consensus. Its when you find the current consensus is wrong that you find something new.
> 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.
> 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.
"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."
Definitely AI written, though it got the point across and it wasn't terrible to read and it was new information to me so I was glad to read it.
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.
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 New York Times is publicly using generative AI, but responsibly: "We should tell readers how our work was created and, if we make substantial use of generative A.I., explain how we mitigate risks, such as bias or inaccuracy, with human oversight." https://www.nytco.com/press/principles-for-using-generative-...
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.
Rhizobacteria are not known to colonize the roots of cereal crops, typically only only legumes. 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 cannot say this one below has independent reviews by well published agroscientists, but it's a step in the right direction:
> 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.
Using nitrogen-fixing bacteria is not a new concept and it's the life's work of Dr Mariangela Hungria, who recently received the 2025 World Food Prize for her achievements in the field:
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.
"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 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.
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 Stripe Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition (formerly the BT Young Scientist) is Ireland's biggest school science competition, held every year in Dublin.
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.
> 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.
Can we stop every comment thread being about why is this written by or with the help of AI? Right now as I comment that is pretty much all the comments here are about!!
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?
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.
Cool a science blog! But it's a rehashed article, followed by an infinite amount of random Taboola scams, arbitrage posts, clickbait articles with jarring content.
Why does shit like that work better than quality contextual advertising?
". Émer, then in her early teens, did the thing that separates a science story from a compost story: " this reads so AI / LLMish.. it's like the same feeling if you had to eat the same food again and again, not quite sickness but something about the repetition.
That's a qreat discovery by these three qirls. But what IS it with websites that use a font with utterly weird g's? Do they think they need it to stand apart?
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.)
I had a boss who tried to claim that the "creative process" was helped by him interrupting my coding many, many times per day. With a loud, jovial greeting.
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.
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
For years the holy grail has been for corn to produce its own nitrogen. This could be a small step in the right direction. Interested to see what happens when some of the great American agricultural schools further this experiment.
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.
It also shows the importance of questioning expert consensus. Its when you find the current consensus is wrong that you find something new.
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.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012528
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.
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."
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
https://www.worldfoodprize.org/en/laureates/20202026_laureat...
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 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...
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Syne
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".
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?
A wart-covered pea plant is what they refer to (near Cork, Ireland)
Why does shit like that work better than quality contextual advertising?
(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!"