4 ms·
Laser “death ray” kills weeds 80x faster than humans
- andrewstuart 3y ago[flagged]
- mgsouth 3y agoThat's not surprising. Humans are much larger than weeds and should require many more joules, and thus more time, to kill. [Admit it, you all wanted to make this comment but didn't want the downvotes. I've heroically taken one for the team.] Pivoting to a point with less levity, this is why I find writing user documentation so excruciating. Endless agonizing over precise wording. "Laser weeds 80x faster than humans"? "Humans kill weeds much slower than lasers do"? Should that be "than do lasers"? Bah.
- jkic47 3y agosurely being 80x faster than humans is less relevant than how it performs relative to herbicides? Spraying crops is likely faster and cheaper than using lasers, but externalities are not being factored into the cost.
- bequanna 3y agoThey’ll tell you that herbicides like Roundup have no externalities whatsoever. The perfect weed killer. The truth is that herbicides stay on and in the plants that become your food and likely wreak havoc on your gut biome. This matters because we’ve recently discovered links between gut biome health and diseases like Parkinson’s and Dementia. What’s the result of fucking up your gut biome with Roundup? Hard to say because it’s difficult to study the effects which would play out over the long term. Also, banning Roundup would cause a lot of problems for chemical manufacturers and farmers so who would bother to do this research? So, anything that limits how much herbicide we’re spraying is a net good. But until this becomes a more widely adopted method of weed control, eat organic whenever possible.