Robot Drones Fight the Blight
A group of agricultural scientists are using high tech modern technology to battle the potato blight. But this isn't a group of time-traveling daredevils out to restore a lost Great Celtic Global Empire by undoing the potato famine that killed over a million in the nineteenth century - they're battling a very real and current risk to North American farming.
The original blight fungus, Phytophthera Infestans for those who want to get formal with their crop-destroying pathogens, isn't much of a risk anymore. It's easily destroyed by commercial fungicide metalaxyl, and only wreaked such devastation during the famine because the only treatment option the farmers had was prayer, which might lighten the soul and promise eternal life but was pretty much a wash in terms of microbe-destroying properties.
The problem is that the blight (labelled as US-1) has evolved considerably since the original model and is now up to US-8, meaning it's come back more times than Freddy Kreuger and - like the be-fedoraed stabber - has gotten more deadly each time. The latest incarnation spreads much more rapidly, laughs at metalaxyl, and modern farmers would much rather deal with the knife-fingered Nightmare from Elm street than an outbreak of the potato-melting plague. Mr Kreuger might be a big man when he's targeting idiot teenagers, but stick him in a room with some hard-working physical labourers and heavy agricultural machinery and it'd be the end of the movie franchise before you can say "Beaten into paste and combine harvested".
While others work on advanced fungicides or other predictable but boring strategies, Virginia Tech plant pathology assistant professor is readying the attack that the enemy won't see coming - an army of robotic planes! This plan combines the advantages of surprise, superior air power, awesomeness and ROBOTIC PLANES, which have been scientifically proven capable of tilting ANY battle in your favor. This airborne armada will collect air samples from agricultural regions and allow the professor to build a 3-D map of likely outbreak locations, integrated into Google Maps and available online. Since many modern treatments for the blight need to be applied shortly before symptoms become severe, for many farmers this information could make the difference between warehouses of food and fields filled with ex-potato flavored mush.
The combination of concepts involved in "Internet Potato Warning System" may sound like another retarded macro meme, but the web has been battling this tuber-killer since 1998 - making it older than most of the idiocy you know as the online world.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
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Links:
Robot planes fight the blight http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080125214750.htm
The online battle http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/03/980317070559.htm
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