frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2016)

https://scienceblog.com/b-three-schoolgirls-in-kinsale-pulled-up-a-pea-plant-covered-in-warts-and-instead-of-binning-it-spent-three-years-testing-13000-seeds-in-a-spare-bedroom-the-bacteria-living-in-those-warts-made-barley/
42•DamonHD•2h ago

Comments

rmason•2h ago
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.
dofm•1h ago
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.
KaiserPro•53m ago
I thought all those school/systems of colleges had their budgets cut last year?
blooalien•45m ago
> ... what happens when some of the great American agricultural schools further this experiment.

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

CalRobert•1h ago
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)

altairprime•1h ago
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

telesilla•40m ago
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.

albumen•
spiderfarmer•44m ago
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?

Tade0•40m ago
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...

metalman•15m ago
"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.
GaryBluto•8m ago
Is the letter 'g' designed to appear as if the bottom loop is missing, or is that a rendering error on my end?
modernerd•1m ago
It's a design choice / affectation.

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

invalidusernam3•1m ago
It's just how the font looks: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Syne
21m ago
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.

Pre-Release of Polars 2.0

https://pola.rs/posts/announcing-polars-2/
114•komape•2h ago•20 comments

The Browser's Main Thread Is Expensive

https://kciter.so/posts/the-expensive-main-thread/en/
37•kciter•1d ago•10 comments

Muse Spark 1.3

https://developer.meta.com/ai/models/muse-spark/
580•bvaldivielso•13h ago•382 comments

Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/3-8-flash-and-3-8-flash-c...
1014•bratao•18h ago•570 comments

Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2016)

https://scienceblog.com/b-three-schoolgirls-in-kinsale-pulled-up-a-pea-plant-covered-in-warts-and...
42•DamonHD•2h ago•14 comments

LLMs and Self-Referentiality

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10046
42•mavdol04•1d ago•29 comments

The Computer Museum of America reclamation project

https://computer-museum.org/wp/
42•rbanffy•2d ago•14 comments

Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/technology/google-ad-tech-remedies.html
379•donohoe•18h ago•278 comments

Holden's Lightning Flight

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holden%27s_Lightning_flight
151•ColinWright•2d ago•33 comments

Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

https://trellner.com/reports/manufactured-sources-behind-ai-recommendations/
412•jakobgreenfeld•19h ago•205 comments

Can I opt out of my input or output data being used for training?

https://help.mistral.ai/en/articles/455207-can-i-opt-out-of-my-input-or-output-data-being-used-fo...
440•teekert•21h ago•199 comments

Higher Multipoles of the Cow

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00506
68•MrOrelliOReilly•2d ago•22 comments

Reverse Engineering Unknown File Formats with ImHex

https://werwolv.net/posts/file_format_reverse_engineering/
199•carlos-menezes•2d ago•37 comments

Fable 5.1 World Modeling

https://github.com/PhiloLabs/fable51-worlds
244•surreal_•13h ago•73 comments

Launch HN: RonanRX (YC S26) – Personalized Peptides and GLP-1s

60•lloydarmbrust•10h ago•69 comments

Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle

https://www.science.org/content/article/world-s-biggest-dark-matter-detector-spots-single-weird-p...
296•randycupertino•19h ago•103 comments

Wendell Berry has died

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/31/us/wendell-berry-dead.html
187•Curiositry•2d ago•98 comments

Aging brains blend memories together instead of just forgetting them

https://studyfinds.com/aging-brains-blend-memories-together-instead-of-forgetting-them-study-finds/
280•mdp2021•20h ago•118 comments

Qantas Airbus A380 engine failure in 2010 (2023)

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-the-story-of-qantas-flight-32-bdaa62d...
134•gumby•14h ago•81 comments

Engineering of the fastest WebAssembly interpreters

https://wasmi-labs.github.io/blog/posts/wasmi-v2.0/
91•herobird•1d ago•8 comments

Async Rust vs RTOS showdown (2022)

https://tweedegolf.nl/en/blog/65/async-rust-vs-rtos-showdown/
90•kooi•15h ago•44 comments

Exit the Cave

https://turtlespace.blog/p/exit-the-cave
262•akkartik•19h ago•92 comments

Reasons robotics is hard

https://secondthoughts.ai/p/14-reasons-robotics-is-hard
94•ddp26•11h ago•51 comments

A Selection of Los Alamos Rolodex Business Cards

https://clui.org/collections/los-alamos-business-cards/selection-cards
169•1970-01-01•2d ago•46 comments

Altair Basic Interpreter Source Code (1975) [pdf]

https://images.gatesnotes.com/12514eb8-7b51-008e-41a9-512542cf683b/34d561c8-cf5c-4e69-af47-3782ea...
60•Eridanus2•13h ago•34 comments

We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cache-transcoding/
111•torutofu•1d ago•47 comments

Poisson Disk Sampling

https://stripeacross.com/posts/poisson-disk-sampling/
162•vismit2000•19h ago•19 comments

WebLLM: high-performance in-browser LLM inference engine

https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-llm
119•saikatsg•19h ago•20 comments

Nango (YC W23) is hiring across eng, product and GTM (SF and remote)

https://nango.dev/careers
1•bastienbeurier•12h ago

Quasar 438B: Europe's Leading AI Model

https://multiversecomputing.com/resources/introducing-quasar-438b-europe-s-leading-ai-model
176•amunozo•23h ago•111 comments