Chinese scientists plant seeds bred on Tiangong space station
The new colonial movement: Chinese scientists have now planted on Earth some of the 12,000 seeds that were bred on China’s Tiangong space station for six months and brought back to Earth in April.
The seeds, including alfalfa, oats and fungi, were selected by multiple research institutions last year. They were brought back to Earth by the Shenzhou-13 on April 16. Space breeding refers to the process of exposing seeds to cosmic radiation and microgravity during a spaceflight mission to mutate seed genes and then send them back to Earth to generate new species.
The goal is to see which seeds survive best in the harsh environment of space, which would thus make them better candidates for transport to other planets for planting.
While some of the results of this research will be published, much will not. China tends to keep what it learns close to the vest.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The new colonial movement: Chinese scientists have now planted on Earth some of the 12,000 seeds that were bred on China’s Tiangong space station for six months and brought back to Earth in April.
The seeds, including alfalfa, oats and fungi, were selected by multiple research institutions last year. They were brought back to Earth by the Shenzhou-13 on April 16. Space breeding refers to the process of exposing seeds to cosmic radiation and microgravity during a spaceflight mission to mutate seed genes and then send them back to Earth to generate new species.
The goal is to see which seeds survive best in the harsh environment of space, which would thus make them better candidates for transport to other planets for planting.
While some of the results of this research will be published, much will not. China tends to keep what it learns close to the vest.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I wonder what the anti-GMO people think of this.
Random exposure to radiation and planted in an oh-so-secure Chinese location hoping for the best vs careful gene tailoring to get just what is desired and regulated planting.
It seems an obvious choice to me, but I’m not willing to blind millions of children because OMG! GMO!
Seemore Feed Me!!!!!!!!
Or
Its Supper Kudzu. Grows twice as fast and large in less fertile soil.
markedup2 pondered: “I wonder what the anti-GMO people think of this.”
When pointing out that all our food is genetically modified by cross breeding, over the past few millennia, relying upon random mutations to create a better food source rather than some sort of hazardous food, the anti-GMO people I have had these discussions with think that nature cannot make something bad for us, like rattlesnake poisons or plagues. However, these same people have also insisted to me that Wuhan flu is natural rather than a lab-made genetically modified organism created specifically in order to see how bad bad can be. The argument changes in order for them to always get their way.
For the anti-GMO people, only scientifically performed gene-splicing is bad, not the variations we find in nature, so the next time those people come across an oleander plant, how many of them will ingest the poisonous sap?
The anti-GMO people do not think through their arguments but rely upon their emotional gut reactions to drive their decisions. This is what three-year-olds do, not what the adults in the room do. The adults perform experiments and make their decisions based upon the results. Knowledge, rather than emotion, drives the decisions of the adults. This is why we do experiments on the ISS.
It is the difference between Galilean science and Aristotlean science. During his time, there were two schools of thought: one that believed we could think about and deduce the secrets of nature and another school that believed that experimentation was necessary to prove the truth of what we thought. Aristotle believed in the former. This was an emotional belief, based upon hubris. Had he experimented with this hypothesis, he would have discovered that heavier objects fall at the same rate as lighter objects, and that his hypothesis was incorrect, that we need to perform experiments. Instead, science followed Aristotle’s hubris and set us back two millennia, until Gallileo convinced scientists that experimentation was necessary in order to determine the truth, and science started making forward motion again.
Sometimes what we think is obvious is not how nature works. This is why we no longer believe that light travels through ether, the obvious medium through which such waves must travel.