Thursday, September 25, 2014

Google science prize awarded...

Google science prize awarded ... to three Irish teenagers who have apparently made a rather consequential discovery: a simple, inexpensive way to significantly boost the productivity of grain crops.

I keep getting surprised at how biologists, botanists, and agriculture experts (and now teenagers!) keep finding ways to boost farming yields.  Those yields have been climbing steadily and rapidly ever since the late 1800s.  Any number of times, experts have predicted that the end of these steady gains is imminent – and every time, they've been wrong.  We don't seem to have reached “peak agriculture” yet, just as we haven't reached “peak oil” or “peak silicon” yet, either...

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