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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 08 2019, @02:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the zesty-sauce dept.

Gene editing could create spicy tomatoes, say researchers

Spicy tomatoes could soon be on the menu thanks to the rise of genome-editing technology, say researchers. It is not the first time experts have claimed the techniques could help to precisely and rapidly develop fruits and vegetables with unusual traits: scientists have already been looking at changing the colour of kiwi fruits and tweaking the taste of strawberries.

But researchers in Brazil and Ireland say such methods also could offer practical advantages, with spicy tomatoes offering a way of harvesting capsaicinoids, the pungent chemicals found in chilli peppers.

[...] Tomatoes and chilli peppers developed from a common ancestor but diverged about 19m years ago. "All the genes to produce capsaicinoids exist in the tomato, they are just not active," Zsögön said.

Capsaicinoids: Pungency beyond Capsicum (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.tplants.2018.11.001) (DX)


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  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Tuesday January 08 2019, @06:18PM (3 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Tuesday January 08 2019, @06:18PM (#783776) Journal

    In the short term we could more easily fix stupid by simply investing in education.

    No, we really can't. Native intelligence is innate; we are born with (in)sufficient cognitive resources for X; it's a physical brain-related issue.

    Education can only help those who can understand and integrate what they're being taught. There are hard limits here.

    Intelligence/stupidity are hand-wavy terms for a very real range of capability that determines what people can learn, and furthermore, what they can do with it once they've learned it. Or not.

    There are people out there who really can't — not don't want to, or avoided managing to — understand the world past [insert level here.] People like that will continue to be born, unless we find a way to stop it from happening. Genetic engineering will almost certainly be that very thing.

    Compared to the average person, I'm reasonably gifted, and I'm both aware of it and appreciate it. I've been very successful in my life because of it, no question. But one of the things I am very aware of is that I have well-defined limits on my comprehension that aren't the result of a lack of either education or willingness to learn. Some stuff is way hard for me that is easy for people I know personally. I wish it were not so, but there it is. For instance, my mother spoke English, French, Spanish, Latin and Russian fluently. I speak English well, Spanish poorly, and both Korean and Mandarin very poorly, and not because I want to, haven't invested the effort, or don't keep trying, either. Learning these languages has been very difficult for me. Some areas of math defeat me in a similar fashion. These appear to be very hard ceilings for me.

    Same for any other innate characteristic: you are what you get. Vision, height, musicality, etc. Right now, it's basically a roll of the dice. If we can do better than that, I think we should do better. I'd like to be better. I know perfectly well I'm not that good. I also suspect that the smarter you are, the clearer you can perceive your own limits and spot when someone else blows right by them.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Tuesday January 08 2019, @07:19PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 08 2019, @07:19PM (#783804) Journal

    When I say in the short term we can fix stupid by investing in education:
    * We can't fix a biological mental defect
    * We CAN fix a lot of the stupid which we currently have in our society
    * We cannot turn everyone into gifted geniuses

    That's all I meant.

    I have a mild form of aspbergers. I can hyperfocus to a degree. Poor people skills. Good machine skills. There are probably others on SN who could relate to that.

    People skills, to a degree CAN be learned. On my latest reviews I get comments like I could coach others in how to resolve conflicts . . . that's a surprise to me, but I've been doing what I do for decades. I proactively look to resolve conflicts. From personal experience, whenever there is a conflict, two people are not really seeing each other's perspective. Once everyone's concern it taken into consideration -- often in some kind of design decision -- the end result is even better than what either one person was proposing. The improved solution addresses the problems seen by both people. I also point out that we're on the same team, we have the same goal: to maximize our bonuses. Which at the end of the day means making the company profitable, successful, keeping customers happy, getting more customers, etc.

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    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday January 08 2019, @08:43PM (1 child)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday January 08 2019, @08:43PM (#783840) Journal

    Well...there's the size of the bucket (native capacity for intelligence, "g-factor") and then there's the effort put into filling said bucket. I have no doubt that millions of geniuses have lived and died behind a ploughshare somewhere, and equally that plenty of people are holding positions and being showered with intellectual accolades far beyond their actual capacity due to just being in the right place at the right time.

    Wouldn't it make the most sense to help everyone become the best human s/he can be, up to capacity? I'd rather work with a good-hearted janitor with an IQ of 80 than some entitled, sociopathic C-suite parasite with an IQ of 150. There is a reason INT and WIS are separate dice.

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    • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday January 09 2019, @12:44AM

      by fyngyrz (6567) on Wednesday January 09 2019, @12:44AM (#783921) Journal

      I fall pretty far over towards the "we'd all be better off if people were smarter" side of these issues.

      I certainly have no beef with "find a better way to educate them", and even have what I think is a reasonable list of things I would like to see changed in the educational and social systems to facilitate that. But the odds of them actually changing... not high. Too many entrenched hooks drawing blood cast by the religious, the morally constipated, the sports-afflicted, and the "OMG we can't let kids enter the work force" crowd. Just for starters.

      OTOH, the odds of genetic engineering becoming able to provide more intellectual capacity without otherwise screwing us up... I think those are actually pretty high, as in, if we don't actually blow ourselves up, destroy the climate, or meet an interstellar object in an unfortunate manner, it'll happen. Fundamentally, it's a technical challenge, and most likely a simple implementation once perfected. Not saying that the NIMBYs and reincarnated Luddites won't try to get right in there and piss all over everything. Pretty sure they will. Pretty sure they'll fail, too. There's far too much to gain here. Longevity, same thing.

      I'd rather work with a good-hearted janitor with an IQ of 80 than some entitled, sociopathic C-suite parasite with an IQ of 150. There is a reason INT and WIS are separate dice.

      Well, it remains to be seen how much of what we see as a natural divide between wisdom and intelligence is just another genetically guided characteristic. That whole "nurture vs. nature" thing has taken so many arrows it seems like psychobabble's most prominent cactus to me. It seems it isn't all that much about nurture, as long as you're not way out on the extremes. Either that, or it's factors we simply have no understanding of. IMHO.

      --
      If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy?