Teen girls' pea-plant warts discovery makes barley germinate 50% faster, wins Google Science Fair
Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2016)
In 2012, three Irish schoolgirls—Émer Hickey, Ciara Judge, and Sophie Healy-Thow—pulled up a pea plant with wart-like nodules and, instead of discarding it, spent three years testing 13,000 seeds in a spare bedroom. They discovered that rhizobium bacteria from the nodules could boost barley germination rates by up to 50% and increase dry mass by up to 74%. Despite skepticism from experts, their project won the 2014 Google Science Fair grand prize, highlighting a low-cost, natural method to improve cereal crop growth and address global food security.
The ailment was the assumption, and the cure, as it often is, was a child asking what, exactly, is wrong with this thing you were about to throw away.
- altairprime
This content is from 2014-15; perhaps they AI-rehashed the Yahoo! News story about them?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/16-old-girls-win-google-science-f...
They posted a video summarizing their efforts in 2014:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL9N7O0uJoU
Vice did an interview in 2016:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/these-teenagers-science-proj...
Ciara Judge went on to join the research effort to stop Covid in 2021:
https://ciarajudge.github.io/about
And recently earned her Ph.D publishing GPL3 software:
https://github.com/ciarajudge/EpiFusion
> EpiFusion uses particle filtering to simulate epidemic trajectories over time and weight their likelihood according to both case incidence data and a phylogenetic tree using separate observation models, resulting in the inference of trajectories in agreement with both sets of data.
- DivingForGold
Rhizobacteria are not known to colonize the roots of cereal crops, typically only only legumes. You would think that scientists would spend more effort trying to create "super" rhizobacteria that can colonize even more aggressively and also fix many times more nitrogen than ordinary ones. I cannot say this one below has independent reviews by well published agroscientists, but it's a step in the right direction:
https://soilscapesolutions.com/products/RhizoGenesis-p668356...
Do a Google search: Methods for Breeding "Super Strains"
Chemical Mutagenesis: Scientists expose the rhizobacteria to alkylating agents like Ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) to force point mutations.
Physical Radiation: Exposing bacterial cultures to UV light or gamma rays breaks DNA strands, inducing random repair variations.
Experimental Evolution: Google it.
- Tade0
Using nitrogen-fixing bacteria is not a new concept and it's the life's work of Dr Mariangela Hungria, who recently received the 2025 World Food Prize for her achievements in the field:
https://www.worldfoodprize.org/en/laureates/20202026_laureat...
- Ecstatify
The Stripe Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition (formerly the BT Young Scientist) is Ireland's biggest school science competition, held every year in Dublin.
The winners are often kids whose parents happen to be experts in some domain.
There are certainly some genuinely bright kids in the mix, but it feels a bit unfair on those who don't have parents "helping" them.
ref past winners:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Scientist_and_Technology...
- GaryBluto
Is the letter 'g' designed to appear as if the bottom loop is missing, or is that a rendering error on my end?