5 ms·
I'm hesitant to share this because it's completely unverifiable in any way I'd be comfortable documenting. Not my life, not my secrets to tell. I had a close f
by r3trohack3r 3y ago
I'm hesitant to share this because it's completely unverifiable in any way I'd be comfortable documenting. Not my life, not my secrets to tell.
I had a close friend who did undergraduate research in a fisheries department.
They had been researching plant selection for aquaponics to increase the yield of tilapia. They had a filtration system that pushed tank water through a bed of plant roots. The plants would be harvested, processed into fish food, and fed back to the fish. On top of this platform, they'd experiment with different plant combinations to measure the impact on water quality and protein conversion.
They were seeing very high protein conversion with their plant choices (numbers high enough they gave me pause at what it would mean for society, but if I tried to throw out a number now I'd certainly get it wrong).
Recycling energy like this reduced the amount of food you'd have to put into the system, and the plants handled a good portion of the filtration for the system.
At some point, a large agriculture business with strong ties to the department offered a large grant that was understood to be contingent on this project being discontinued.
The project was abandoned and my buddy dropped out of his degree program.
- jurynulifcation 3y agoCan you give any further details? This might be worth experimenting with, and I do already have an aquaculture setup.
- r3trohack3r 3y agoWas a long time ago and not my research. Superficially, focus on driving down net waste in the system. Take the nutrient profile of tilapia waste. Compare that with the nutrient demands of plants to find candidates. Then look for plants where the majority of the biomass can be converted into food that the tilapia can digest (i.e. edible roots, stalks, leaves; the more the fish can eat the less energy you take out of the system). IIRC at least one of the plant choices had a tuber. IIRC there is also something about the efficiency of waste->biomass conversion for the plants at different stages of development; figuring out when the ideal time to harvest is to minimize energy loss.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jongjong 3y agoWell isn't that a similar story behind OpenAI drama? Big money suppressing innovation.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoNot even closely related. One is big money corrupting academia, another is startup drama.
- jongjong 3y agoThis is incorrectly assuming that all innovation happens in academia.
- omginternets 3y agoSigh… no. It’s saying that this is a case of academic innovation, and that that is startup drama.
- jongjong 3y agoI know what intentional suppression of innovation looks like. I worked in blockchain sector. I think you're underestimating the scale of it and hence you do not see that it's the same ideology behind both cases and many more cases.
- JacobThreeThree 3y agoPar for the course in higher education. Corporations and wealthy donors don't give money while expecting nothing in return.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- rdedev 3y agoAt that point is it legally okay to just open source whatever findings you have in hand? Do university research come with some form of NDA?
- paxys 3y agoOn one hand I absolutely believe this does routinely happen. On the other every researcher/inventor out there with a project that went nowhere claims that they were on the cusp of a breakthrough and only silenced because of the government/corporations/illuminati. I'd wager the vast majority are in the second category.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- snowflakeandrey 3y agoForgive me if I'm being dense, but why wouldn't the researchers just go off and sell this to the customers of the large agriculture business?
- FoxBJK 3y agoMy guess is that the researchers don't "own" the research they're doing since it was being funded by the university. It's property of the university and if you take it and try to sell it now you're stealing IP.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]