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German scientists harvest their first Antarctic salad
- pvaldes 9y agoWhat? Romaine? No Iceberg lettuce in the salad? Boy, this left me cold. How iceappointed.
- pvaldes 9y agoThe fact is that this is not a big deal. Is a pretty uncomplicated thing as long as you have electricity (can have light, heat and liquid water from snow). Then, all that you need is some minute seeds cheap to travel, and 2-the secret weapon in this master plan: a few humans, or as cucumbers would say, the automatic urea's dispenser of mother nature. Lettuce and its green cousins have a mission, they are the members of the team in charge of regenerating fast and cheaply the closed circuit of water. You put urea in the "no-soil" circuit and it magically vanishes. As a nice subproduct, you can have a salad too (if you want to order a dish low in calories in one of the coldest places in earth) and also a lot of fun growing it.
- needToSay 9y agoThis aint reddit asswipe
- closeneough 9y agoalso known as the Garden of Eden Creation Kit (GECK)
- inceptionnames 9y agoAre you a water chip?
- chrischen 9y agoCouldn’t they have tested this indoors anywhere?
- enticeing 9y agoIt seems like part of the reason might be to provide fresh vegetables in a place where they are very hard to get, to keep the researchers happy and healthy.
- gleglegle 9y agoThey already have, at industrial scales.
- jessriedel 9y agoYea, a refinedment of chrischen's question would be "what did performing this easy indoor experiment in Antarctica tell us that we didn't know before?".
- pvaldes 9y agoNot much. Maybe that there is not much point in spending money moving 100Kg of water in vegetable's form all around the world when you can put 10 gram of seeds in your bag instead.
- tw1010 9y agoPR stunts also produce value, indirectly
- cpncrunch 9y agoHow is it a PR stunt? They are doing the research so they can supply their German Antarctic research station.
- detritus 9y agoGiven how many companies there are out here already offering container-based growing solutions, it seems like the basic principle's been tested outwith extreme environments.
- baxtr 9y agoThat’s a conundrum, because “German scientists harvest their first indoor salad” would have never made to the top list on HN.
- salatschussel 9y agoFinally, someone made an Eisbergsalat that stays true to it's name. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisbergsalat https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisbergsalat
- raverbashing 9y agoIt's also Iceberg Lettuce in English so the name works as well (also, "its name", not "it's name")
- aw3c2 9y agoPlease keep using your account so that smiling every time I see that nickname will be a regular occurance ;)
- baxtr 9y agoYours is not so funny...
- dekhn 9y agoWhat is the energy source for this- is it running off a diesel generator? lettuce is the ultimate waste of resources. if you're running your grow lights on generators, spend it on something better than lettuce.
- theandrewbailey 9y agoI'm wondering if a greenhouse could be integrated into the normal living spaces, so people would be using the excess light.
- detritus 9y agoI'd like to know about energy too. Whilst I agree in an absolute and technical sense that lettuce is nutritionally and productively irrelevant as a food source, I don't think you can underestimate the value of fresh produce alongside whatever it is they normally eat all the way down there. You can also include [micro-]herbs and other tasty leaves and then use that experience to one day grow even more useful things. Small steps!
- udp 9y agoYet another website asking my browser to allow push notifications. I respond to this request as so: echo "127.0.0.1 livescience.com www.livescience.com" >> /etc/hosts (Apart from being annoying, it's a pretty good indicator that the website isn't worth bothering with.)