Per the article, ONT sells tiny sequencers that all this genre of "Omg I just sequenced my genome" posts use. They've been around for a decade or so. A commercial lab will give you 30x illumina sequencing for maybe 5% of the cost of this post.
The good thing is we've learned this already from cloud. When one AWS region is degraded we all failover to other regions, and then other cloud providers, right? ...right?
This is an example of the "appeal to nature" logical fallacy. You may be able to make a case that Stevia is healthier than Aspartame, but it should be based on evidence to that effect rather than because you like the idea that it has ingredients derived from organic material.
And this is an example of "where is the evidence" logical fallacy. In complex systems, such as the human body, the only evidence of safety is time -- a very long time. The Stevia plant (though not the same as extract) has been used for centuries. Aspartame was (accidentally) created in the lab in 1965.
If you are going to mess with complex systems, such as feed yourself aspartame, vape, give pregnant women a synthetic sedative and medication for morning sickness etc., you do it for a high potential gain that offsets potentially huge downsides. Benefits of aspartame are close to nil; if anything it probably makes things worse because people think they can consume more ultra processed foods sweetened with it because such foods have "fewer calories".
> In complex systems, such as the human body, the only evidence of safety is time -- a very long time. The Stevia plant (though not the same as extract) has been used for centuries. Aspartame was (accidentally) created in the lab in 1965.
Time is not evidence of safety, that is an odd claim (see smoking tobacco), thankfully we have the scientific method to investigate hypotheses like "x is bad for you".
Only if a long time passes without evidence of harm, we consider that the "evidence" of safety -- there is no other. It is very difficult to claim that something new introduced in a complex system is safe, so you weigh what you get right away from it vs. what you might end up paying down the road if it ends up being unsafe. Aspartame does not, in my view, clear that bar.
The problem is that you assume consistency, but in reality, we keep modifying plants / fruits / etc by selecting them and planting them. IIRC fruits are now too sweet for zoo animals.
It is the statistical processes that determine how much something is "natural". Our bodies evolved alongside fruit that was on the smaller and less sweet side, and logically that's what we are the most compatible with. Over centuries and millennia we selected fruits to favor size and sweetness, and over 5 years we e.g. genetically modify a strawberry to have peach flavor. The last one is like a step function compared to the slow moving processes of the agricultural selection and so less "natural" and almost certainly less compatible with our bodies.
We might still get lucky and get beneficial side effects of aspartame or peach-flavored strawberries that makes us faster, stronger, smarter, but with these things the luck usually works in the other direction.
Seriously? I should trust some scientists getting paid to push a product to multi billion dollar companies, over something simple you can grow yourself?
These are indeed links but quite random ones. Mostly they are reporting that growing two things together in a field can give higher yields than growing a single thing. None seem to be related to GMOs, which could obviously also be grown with complimentary species to increase yield.
All crops are inclined to be grown in monocultures. That's because even if you'd get more yield pairing with other species — as in these studies — pragmatically the time and cost of sowing, harvesting and separating multiple species outweighs the theoretical yield gain per unit area of a monocrop.
There is no biodiversity in agriculture. Whether or not the seeds you purchased have been edited to add drought resistance or high vitamin A content or other fantastic benefits to humankind you are still growing a monoculture, just as you were with non-GMO crops.
On the local level, yes. But I pointed out that the issue is with "wide-scale" adoption. GMO manufacturers make it so that the same, e.g, rice or carrots or tomatoes are grown in different parts of the world.
To re-iterate: there is no biodiversity in agriculture. As an example, "non-GMO" bananas are cloned from a single species the world over. If you'd be concerned about a single disease destroying genetically-identical crops worldwide, that happened with the Gros Michel cultivar in the 20th century. Competing GMO banana products would introduce more diversity than exists today.
