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

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

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

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:

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.

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:

https://www.worldfoodprize.org/en/laureates/20202026_laureat...

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.

ref past winners:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Scientist_and_Technology...

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.

Is the letter 'g' designed to appear as if the bottom loop is missing, or is that a rendering error on my end?

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

Unbelievably I read this news while visiting Cork. Went to Kinsale yesterday. Never been to Ireland before. What a coincidence!

I thought this was going to be an eats, shoots, and leaves style discussion.

A wart-covered pea plant is what they refer to (near Cork, Ireland)

I hate those g's

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?

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.

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.

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?

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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.