Scientists are trying to design a chili pepper that's easily-harvested by machines

[boingboing]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/09/scientists-are-trying-to-desig.html

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[DonatellaNobody]

@boingboing

Instead of picking the peppers off the plant, the machine would literally rip up the entire plant and try to stuff it in its mouth

I resemble that remark

[anonotwit]

I think you want to cook the leaves first, though.

[tuhu]

Slippery slopes, slippery slopes everywhere! /s

[Tamsin_Bailey]

Potatoes would have made better batteries and not needed a Matrix…

[Rindan]

My head canon is that Morpheus just didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, and that the machine use human minds for processing power.

[Tamsin_Bailey]

You’re not supposed to think further than PVC, kung fu and machine guns, don’t worry about it.

[TobinL]

They had me at PVC.

[Gyrofrog]

@boingboing

Instead of picking the peppers off the plant, the machine would literally rip up the entire plant and try to stuff it in its mouth, like some kind of mechanical toddler choking on a toy. Another machine they tested had the opposite problem — it was so gentle that it left 40 percent of the fruit on the plant.

Sounds like a good premise for a film starring Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons!

[GulliverFoyle]

I’ll just leave this here…

[Tamsin_Bailey]

Funny you should mention that…

Adorable Mini Cheetah robots tested

[image]

[anon25507830]

scientists have set out to design a chili pepper that’s easily-picked by a machine

Wow, that sounds really cool! I wonder what how they’ll–

Lots of farmers are wary of GMOs, so Walker isn’t using any fancy genetic editing techniques. The traditional breeding process requires rubbing flower parts together in a greenhouse, planting the seeds, and waiting to see what you get, year after year.

[Engineer666]

GLaDOS wants to disagree…

[navarro]

@anon25507830

The traditional breeding process requires rubbing flower parts together in a greenhouse, planting the seeds, and waiting to see what you get, year after year.

the first year i tried growing ghost peppers the pollination rate was tiny. i’d have loads of blooms but no fruiting. turns out that the city spraying to eliminate mosquitos carrying west nile killed off most of the wasps and bees that could pollinate it. i ended up rubbing a q-tip from flower rto flower and started getting some peppers.

[Tamsin_Bailey]

That extra half a volt really made a difference though.

[the_borderer]

It’s how the Carolina Reaper was created, and how the varieties of Capsicum Annuum in South America are becoming a separate species from those in North America.

[RickMycroft]

And will the chili peppers be machine-wrapped, with butter?

[anon25507830]

Yeah, I know old-fashioned breeding methods can get results (eventually), but I’m just annoyed that paranoia over GMO has prevented use of the latest techniques. The harvesting methods are entering the 21st century, but the breeding methods are still stuck in the 19th.

[hecep]

[stephen_schenck]

Green chilis are just unripe red chilis which means that the seeds inside of them aren’t ready to germinate yet, so the plant doesn’t want to give the fruit up, and it holds onto it more tightly.

Wait, is the problem just that they’re hard to pull off by hand? Give the people harvesting them a little pair of clippers.

Seems easier than designing a new cultivar and an elaborate harvesting machine.