just science related topics. please contribute
note: clickbait sources/headlines aren't liked generally. I've posted crap sources and later deleted or edit to improve after complaints. whoops, sry
Rule 1) Be kind.
lemmy.world rules: https://mastodon.world/about
I don't screen everything, lrn2scroll
There is not going to be any rational discussion in this thread.
The article is far too shit. There is nothing there. No evidence. No nothing. It's just anger bait.
I can add a lot of (correct) information here, but I will just piss people off.
Let's be better.
I thought salon was better than this, but I guess we can't escape enshitification.
If it helps, I can rationally discuss glyphosate. Plant geneticist here.
You called it. It's just went downhill as I scrolled.
It's just so hard to resist. Everything is wrong. It's like it's designed to make everyone angry.
Well... That drives engagement.
I don't know why you thought salon would be better. I was literally about to say they're the liberal equivalant of Fox but I just looked it up and even Fox is actually ranked higher on factual reporting than Salon. A closer comparison would be that they're the liberal equivalent of Breitbart.
Detectable is not the same thing as being found at a level known to be harmful. The concentration of things matters.
I am really curious who those hard defenders of Glyphosate are - are you guys Farmers?
No, I'm a chemist. Does that count?
Wouldn't you need to be a biologist of some sort to have any ability to weigh in on the effects on human health?
Can we stop spreading this bullshit anti-glyphosate propaganda? educate yourselves
You wanna know what else has been linked to cancer, and with actual good evidence for it? Hot water. source
Go touch grass and worry about the things you should really worry about, like the fact your food system is set up for collapse with 2 decades and you'd better hope big Ag comes up with something brilliant cuz otherwise you're in the shit unless you're at least partially self-sufficient.
Liar.
Their own documents proved that RoundUp causes cancers. Review them for yourself.
What you think they paid out $10,000,000,000.00 in settlements because of something you have figured out, but they can't prove at trial?
No, it's that their shit causes cancer and they knew it and sold it anyway without a warning.
https://www.wisnerbaum.com/documents/monsanto-documents-chart-101217.pdf
The lawsuits are not about glyphosate, they are about RoundUp™.
I'm not a liar, you just have a very simplistic view of things.
They knew glyphosate (aka RoundUp) causes cancer and did not disclose it. This likely led to some severe exposure cases and thus they had to pay out (although I strongly believe prison sentences should also have been part of it). This is just as terrible as if I sad sold you lye and never told you it is corrosive, thus endangering you.
None of this means you cannot use lye for making pretzels/ uncloging your sink. For those uses it is safe. Same for Glyphosate.
I'd clarify I'm not Bayer fanboy - genetic modification for the sale of a herbicide is a poor use of modern genetic technology. But I cannot deny the measurable climate benefits of using it (in terms of CO2 emissions and soil degradation) source
That's two different things. The second point is very interesting.
First, Monsanto's own documents say there is no safe level of glyphosate. The mechanism of action is antibiotic and genotoxicity. It was patented as an antibiotic. Small amounts kill gut bacteria, for example. You're oversimplifying and underestimating the safety of any amount of glyphosate and NNG, a contaminate inherent to all glyphosate.
Second, no doubt the overall benefit to agribusiness is massive, but to humanity as a whole, who can say? What might have been developed if not this? Even with this, people are still starving to death and the planet is overheating. I agree everything requires a balance of risks and benefits. The allies would have lost WWII without asbestos. The manipulations of science and failures to follow the science because of "company product objectives" is inexcusable. No corporations should have such influence over science and medicine.
other things in the probably carcinogenic category: coffee & working the night shift.
the difference is, those things are on the list with good reason.
I mean, Round-up is absolutely dangerous and unhealthy. It's a fucking terrible idea to get a cubic meter tank and mix glyphosate by submerging your arms up to the shoulder to stir the product till it's diluted. You really shouldn't start your day with a tall glass of it, nor should you rub it in your eyes.
It's very hard to say if it actually causes cancer, since the type it reportedly causes it causes by about a million things, among them, almost every pesticide and herbicide from the generations before round-up (and potentially after, but we don't know yet). Since it commonly manifests in older people, it's very hard to tell if a random farmer got it from round-up, another pesticide, or just bad luck.
What we DO know is that plants grown with round-up have no effect on consumers, and when used properly, has less severe effects than alternatives.
But if you're in the habit of mixing roundup with your bare hands, and spraying it in shorts and flip flops, you should probably stop doing that.
F’real. I’d like to know what alternate timeline has more deaths: the one where, going forward, we continue our modern farming practices as-is; the other, we ban them and revert to only organic farming.
I’d bet cancer deaths per calorie of food produced would be roughly the same…organic farming being both less efficient and not a guarantee in itself that pesticides/herbicides are safer for humans. And l, being less efficient, I’d wager we’d hit famine simply by not having enough good farming land to meet dietary needs.
And who is getting cancer? Mostly farmers that are too lazy/proud to don PPE, and migrant workers who aren’t provided it. In either case it takes a lot of intentional, repeated, unprotected direct exposure. Joe Public isn’t gonna get cancer spraying his poison ivy or even his tomato’s.
While i think that link is more correct, it is hard to take it serious when they call it a pesticide.
Pesticide is a pretty standard generic word (at least in British English) covering insecticides, herbicides, fungicides.
In murican, at least in my area, pesticide is used exclusively to refer to something that kills animals like an insectiside or vermin poison. We would just use herbicide when talking about a weed killer.
It is a pesticide?
No, it is a herbicide. Those are very different things and no farmer would ever mess this up.
Herbicide is a subset of pesticides where the pests are herbs. You're thinking of insecticide where the pest is an insect. Pesticide is the broad term that encompasses both insecticides and herbicides.
Herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides are all pesticides used in agriculture.
A. I'm not a farmer, I'm a scientist. B. All herbicides are pesticides... look it up. It's like how all horses are mammals but not all mammals are horses