It's amazing how such long experiments are organized. My first thought when I read "longest-running experiment" was the Rothamstead Park Grass Experiment.
I'm accustomed to thinking of Big Science as the LHCs and the Human Genome Project and the Human Brain Projects of the world, but there might be a category of experiments that are instances of Long-Term Science.
That is a very cool experiment and a fantastic read!
It reminds me of my own adventures making yogurt, each generation carried forward to the next batch. Being able to freeze the samples (for the ecoli, not the yogurt!) is really neat. At anytime they rewind the clock to test an ancestor.
I find this both reassuring and terrifying. It's reassuring because if life was completely wiped out on the planet there would be trillions of seeds waiting for the right conditions to germinate and repopulate the Earth with life.
It's terrifying because why would this have evolved?
Sowing wildflowers is becoming more popular here in Ireland. You can buy wildflower mixes or seed bombs but the expert view is to just stop mowing, there are enough dormant seeds in the soil. And those that are present are generally more suitable to the local environment than anything you'd introduce.
A lot of the earth is frequently inhospitable to plant life, so it makes sense that the ones that have survived to the modern day would be able to cope with hard times.
Check out the Death Valley super blooms, they are amazing. Vast areas of the desert will just spring to life, polinate and spread seeds for the next generation, many/most of which will not grow for years.
Presumably the curators of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault [1] regularly test (or at least intend to as it is fairly new) the efficacy of their storage for different types of seeds?
Seems like a good problem to tackle with NLP text summarization.
Text summarization is already pretty good for the real article issue you mentioned. I wonder if the same process could be applied in reverse to identify low quality headlines too.
Its four pages including large pictures. Shorter than a children's book. Have a heart - its an interesting story with lots of detail packed into those 20 paragraphs.
I don't get moralizing the point. And if you want to go that route, I'd argue that forcing someone who is coming to you based on a headline's promise to sift through a short children's book is disrespectful and rude.
But maybe it's a generational thing and stories are what more people expect now. I bet NYT knows its audience better than I do.
I'm the same and it's not like I do it on purpose. I simply cannot enjoy the style, I like the important information up front. If I felt like reading a children's book I'd go grab a children's book. If I'm reading an informational article I want it to read like an informational article.
I understand where you’re coming from, and I’m a proponent of story-telling, but give me the main points first, then let me read the story of if I feel like it.
To be more cynical, this is because it’s behind a paywall. They want to entice you with a little morsel of information, get you hooked into a story, then cut you off at the paywall.
If they gave away all the info in the first few lines, less people would want to keep reading
I recall an episode of a daily TV series in Japan where they found seeds from a several thousand year old archaeological dig, which yielded a still viable magnolia tree when planted today.
And there was that story just recently about bacteria found in the deep mantle, dormant for a couple million (?) years, that grew when cultured.
Amazing how patiently life can wait for the moment to be revived again, with no promise or knowledge of when the day may come.
Readit News
EDIT: I just realized that the LTEE and Beal’s experiment are being conducted at the same place, Michigan State University!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment
I'm accustomed to thinking of Big Science as the LHCs and the Human Genome Project and the Human Brain Projects of the world, but there might be a category of experiments that are instances of Long-Term Science.
.. and how they are financed. Sometimes I wonder what humanity missed because experiments that only yield after more than one generation are rare.
It reminds me of my own adventures making yogurt, each generation carried forward to the next batch. Being able to freeze the samples (for the ecoli, not the yogurt!) is really neat. At anytime they rewind the clock to test an ancestor.
It's terrifying because why would this have evolved?
Reassuring as you say.
https://pollinators.ie/wildflowers-to-plant-or-not-to-plant/
Check out the Death Valley super blooms, they are amazing. Vast areas of the desert will just spring to life, polinate and spread seeds for the next generation, many/most of which will not grow for years.
https://rove.me/to/death-valley/super-bloom
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/emhxgkd/a-seedy-lat...
1. https://www.regjeringen.no/en/topics/food-fisheries-and-agri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judean_date_palm
Clickbait Headline
informative intro
Real Article Begins: Once upon a time…
Please just tell me the information, I’m not here to read a story
Text summarization is already pretty good for the real article issue you mentioned. I wonder if the same process could be applied in reverse to identify low quality headlines too.
But maybe it's a generational thing and stories are what more people expect now. I bet NYT knows its audience better than I do.
To be more cynical, this is because it’s behind a paywall. They want to entice you with a little morsel of information, get you hooked into a story, then cut you off at the paywall.
If they gave away all the info in the first few lines, less people would want to keep reading
And there was that story just recently about bacteria found in the deep mantle, dormant for a couple million (?) years, that grew when cultured.
Amazing how patiently life can wait for the moment to be revived again, with no promise or knowledge of when the day may come.