Maggie Wolfe Riley's List: Science and Nature

• Genetic engineering is a technology—a specific way of modifying the plants we eat—and, like all technologies, it has both advantages and risks. Banishing all GMOs in one fell swoop solely because of the way they are made would be equivalent to, say, forbidding any object made by metalwork because some metal objects are dangerous
• • I am not opposed to genetic engineering like many of my friends for the exact reasons mentioned here. However, I find the practice of creating "terminal seeds" horrifying, and a potential threat to survival. I worry that creating crops, especially wind-pollinated crops like corn, that have "natural" insecticide qualities built-in will have long-term devastating ecological consequences - you cannot prevent that genetic material from getting out into the environment on a wind-pollinated plant, and plants hybridize, so those traits have probably already been "released into the wild." Insects, while some are crop pests, are incredibly important to our ecosystems, and we are already seeing pollinator collapses, which could lead to massive crop (and wild species) declines.
    
    Some genetic modification seems helpful and non-problematic, however. 
• Marker-assisted breeding is one of the engines pushing breeders to completely rethink their craft. Whereas the major GMOs and most conventionally created crops on the market were designed primarily to benefit farmers, many breeders are now shifting their attention to the consumer

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• Playing the games makes you better at the games, in other words, but not at anything anyone might care about in real life.

• In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of your life literally transforms you.
• The supportive part is crucial. Loving relationships alter the brain the most significantly.
• Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.
• If you’re in a healthy relationship, holding your partner’s hand is enough to subdue your blood pressure, ease your response to stress, improve your health and soften physical pain. We alter one another’s physiology and neural functions.

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• Scrubbing your exposed surfaces with soap changes the species that are most common (tending to kill the most abundant species and make space for the rarer forms),

  • And therein lies the problem!
• • Ha ha!! Yes I do. Pull things out... :)
    This is such a funny, well written article with references to both pop culture and vulgar sayings and also Neruda and Sagan - I LOVE it!!
• What we can choose is not whether to wear this life, but instead which species we will wear. Until now, we have tended to choose to kill as many of the species on us as we can. We scrub, we wipe, and we spray. In doing so we have favored the species that survive despite us.

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