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Tue, 20 Feb 2018 08:27:30 -0500 |
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It just never ends.
I can get a dozen "Is THIS actually true?" questions a day via email and
direct messages.
Some are very entertaining.
The one below is fact - opportunistic visions of "robot bees" still seem
like a profitable business model to those who can't do the basic math on how
many "flower visits" are implied by "pollination".
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2120832-robotic-bee-could-help-pollinat
e-crops-as-real-bees-decline/
https://tinyurl.com/hmmaeyy
The one below is also fact, and it makes one wonder how many people and
groups have tooled up to do CRISPR work "in their basement" while assuming
that they can keep the modified insects or bacteria absolutely contained.
There's an entire film festival of 1950s movies with this exact premise, and
most of them did not end well for large numbers of innocent humans. (If
thermalcyclers are outlawed, will only outlaws do CRISPR work?)
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/world-s-first-genetically-modified-an
ts-shed-light-how-complex-insect-societies-evolved
https://tinyurl.com/zenp5ec
The two reports above seem to have prompted the story below, which is
absolute fiction, but is circulating far more widely than the other two:
http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/genetically-modified-ants-could-replace-hone
y-bees-claims-monsanto-expert/
https://tinyurl.com/pzqfe7l
The two factual stories make the fictional story seem that much more
plausible, but the factual stories themselves raise the same
questions/concerns/anxiety as the fictional one. This is a whole new class
of "science", where the work is well-intentioned, and being performed by
legit researchers, but essentially indistinguishable from deliberate
misinformation.
The same problem exists to a lesser extent when a new beekeeper buys an old
beekeeping book in a used book store, and trusts the contents to still be
pragmatically useful in current beekeeping.
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