The Mad Scientist Supreme

Mad Science Ideas. New tech. Cures, treatments medical information. Philosophy, Physics, Faith, Psychic, Space.

The Mad Scientist Supreme is a science podcast hosted by Timothy, with 836 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Timothy hosts The Mad Scientist Supreme, a science show with 836 episodes published.

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  The Mad Scientist Supreme

  Mosquitoes Are Evolving to Find Us

  Sep 1, 20267 min

  Send us Fan Mail Hello, people. This is Mad Scientist Green, talking today about evolution. Not our evolution. Everything else's evolution because we're here. This comes from BBC Science Focus, March 2026, page 21, with the wonderfully disturbing title: “Mosquitoes Are Becoming Thirsty for Human Blood.” Think about what happens when humans move into an area. There might originally be deer, bears, opossums and all kinds of other animals living around a water source. Then people arrive. Roads go in. Houses go up. Wildlife moves away or declines. But the mosquitoes are still there. And mosquitoes need blood. Female mosquitoes don't just fly around randomly hoping to crash into something edible. They use carbon dioxide, body odors, heat and other chemical and physical signals to locate potential hosts. Now introduce natural selection. Suppose some mosquitoes in a population are particularly good at finding deer, while others happen to be slightly better at detecting humans. Then the deer disappear and humans become abundant. Who's getting dinner? The mosquitoes better at finding us. Those mosquitoes survive and reproduce. If some of the traits helping them locate humans are inherited, their descendants are more likely to have those traits too. Generation after generation, humans can therefore push a mosquito population toward becoming increasingly specialized at finding us. We didn't deliberately breed them. We changed their environment, and evolution did the breeding for us. Then We Fight Back We cover ourselves with mosquito repellents. Take DEET, one of the most widely used mosquito repellents. It works very well, but mosquito populations aren't genetically identical. Individuals vary. If some mosquitoes are less sensitive to a repellent, they're more likely to get through our defenses, feed and reproduce. That creates another potential evolutionary pressure. We're not intentionally training mosquitoes to defeat mosquito repellent. But whenever we repeatedly kill, repel or prevent one group from reproducing while another group succeeds, natural selection gets an opportunity. We've already watched this happen dramatically with insecticides. Mosquito populations around the world have evolved resistance to chemicals that once killed them very effectively. Evolution doesn't know what we intended. It simply rewards whatever works. ️ And It Isn't Just Mosquitoes Look at the animals living in cities. Raccoons figure out garbage cans. Squirrels cross roads, buildings, fences and utility lines. Rats and mice live inside an environment completely unlike the one their ancestors occupied. Every one of those environments presents new opportunities and new dangers. A squirrel living in a forest has trees, predators and natural food sources to worry about. A city squirrel encounters automobiles, buildings, people, artificial food, garbage, utility infrastructure and countless other things its distant ancestors never encountered. Some responses are learned. A squirrel can learn that a particular garbage can contains food. That's behavioral adaptation. But something even more interesting can happen over generations. If inherited differences make certain squirrels better at surviving cities, those animals leave more descendants. Eventually the population itself can change. That's evolution. Researchers studying urban wildlife have found differences between urban and rural populations in behavior, physiology and, in some cases, genetics. We're Building an Evolutionary Laboratory Think about a mouse living behind your house. We aren't merely another animal in its environment. We've changed almost everything. We've changed where the food is. We've changed the predators. We've created buildings for shelter. We've created poisons and traps. We've introduced cats. We've built roads. We've created artificial light at night. We've changed the temperature of cities. We've even changed the sounds surrounding these animals. Every one of those things can become a selective pressure. And because mice, rats, mosquitoes and many other small animals reproduce rapidly, evolutionary changes can sometimes become detectable surprisingly quickly. Nature Isn't Standing Still There's a tendency to imagine evolution as something that happened millions of years ago. Dinosaurs evolved. Mammals evolved. Humans evolved. End of story. But evolution never stopped. It's happening around your house right now. When humans transform an environment, the species capable of adapting to that new world survive. Those that cannot adapt decline, disappear locally or move somewhere else. Sometimes we're deliberately causing the selection. Most of the time we aren't. Either way, we're changing the rules of survival. So the next time you see a raccoon defeating a supposedly raccoon-proof garbage can, a squirrel navigating a city intersection, or a mosquito that somehow finds the one tiny spot you forgot to cover with repellent, remember: Some of what you're watching is learning. Some of it may be evolution. And over enough generations, today's human-built environment becomes somebody else's natural habitat. We changed their world. Now they're changing to live in ours. Thank you very much for listening. This is Mad Scientist Green, signing off. Science & Keywords BBC Science Focus, March 2026, p. 21 • mosquito host preference • human specialization • natural selection • DEET • insecticide resistance • urban evolution • behavioral adaptation • urban wildlife • rapid evolution • human-driven selection ✅ What's Well Established Mosquitoes use carbon dioxide, heat and chemical cues to locate hosts. Mosquito populations can differ genetically in their host preferences, including preference for humans. Mosquitoes have also repeatedly evolved resistance to insecticides. Urbanization can produce powerful evolutionary pressures. Scientists have documented behavioral, physiological and genetic differences between some urban and rural animal populations. ⚠️ One Important Distinction An individual raccoon learning how to open a garbage can or a squirrel learning to avoid traffic isn't, by itself, evolution. Learning changes an individual. Evolution changes populations across generations. The fascinating part is that both processes can operate simultaneously. Animals can learn how to survive our cities today, while natural selection gradually changes their descendants for the cities of tomorrow. Separate adaptation from acclimation Strengthen the human health stakes Trim the repeated city examples

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  The Mad Scientist Supreme

  Graphene Thread: Could We Spin a Cable Strong Enough to Reach Space?

  Aug 31, 20268 min

  Send us Fan Mail Hello, people. This is the Mad Scientist Supreme, talking today about graphene, graphene thread, and ultimately a ladder into space. About a year ago, I submitted a patent application based on an idea for manufacturing continuous graphene material. The Patent Office rejected the application, and I decided not to spend the additional money required to continue pursuing it. So today, let's talk about the idea. Start with something called sonoluminescence. Scientists discovered that intense sound waves focused into a liquid can create tiny collapsing bubbles. Under the right conditions, those bubbles collapse so violently that they produce extremely high temperatures and pressures and emit incredibly brief flashes of light. In other words, sound can concentrate energy into an extraordinarily small region. Now let's add graphene. Graphene is essentially a sheet of carbon only one atom thick. Within that sheet, carbon atoms are connected by extremely strong bonds. Ideal graphene has extraordinary tensile strength while remaining lightweight and flexible. But there's a problem. Making a tiny piece of excellent graphene is one thing. Making thousands of miles of essentially flawless graphene is something entirely different. So here's my proposed manufacturing idea. Suspend graphene flakes or other suitable carbon material in a liquid. Then use carefully controlled acoustic waves to concentrate and compress that material within extremely small regions. At the same time, introduce electromagnetic energy. My hypothesis is that under the right combination of pressure, temperature, electrical conditions and carbon chemistry, neighboring graphene structures might be induced to form new carbon-carbon bonds. Then move the acoustic focal region. Bond one microscopic region. Move slightly forward. Bond the next overlapping region. Then the next. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Instead of manufacturing one microscopic graphene flake at a time, you're continuously extending a carbon structure. First make a thread. Then make a wider ribbon. Eventually, perhaps, make sheets. ⚡ Why Would Graphene Thread Matter? The first obvious application is electrical wiring. Graphene has remarkable electrical properties. A practical graphene-based wire would be extremely lightweight, and carbon is vastly more abundant than copper. But there's an important qualification. A perfect microscopic graphene sheet having exceptional electrical properties does not mean a macroscopic graphene cable automatically conducts electricity better than copper. Defects, boundaries between graphene structures, electrical contacts and manufacturing impurities can dramatically change performance. That's precisely why producing a continuous, high-quality structure would matter. Even if graphene conductors didn't completely replace copper, extremely lightweight conductive cables could have major applications in aircraft, spacecraft, electric motors and other technologies where every pound matters. And strength opens another possibility. ✈️ From Airplanes to Spacecraft Ideal graphene is extraordinarily strong for its weight. If we learned to manufacture large structural graphene materials while preserving enough of that microscopic strength, aircraft skins, vehicle structures and spacecraft components might potentially become substantially lighter. But my main interest wasn't an airplane. It was a space elevator. Imagine manufacturing a cable tens of thousands of miles long. Carry the initial cable into space. Deploy one end downward toward Earth while extending a counterweight outward beyond geostationary orbit. Properly balanced, Earth's rotation keeps the cable under tension. Attach electrically powered climbers to it. Now instead of burning enormous quantities of rocket fuel to accelerate every payload into orbit, electricity powers vehicles climbing the cable. Once the first cable exists, it helps carry material needed for additional cables. One becomes two. Two become four. Eventually humanity could have multiple elevators carrying satellites, equipment and people between Earth and space. And extending the structure beyond geostationary orbit produces another fascinating possibility. Because the outer portions are moving rapidly around Earth, payloads released from sufficiently distant points could gain substantial orbital energy from Earth's rotation. In principle, that could assist missions headed farther into the solar system. The Earth itself becomes part of the transportation system. What's Already Established? Graphene: Real, extremely strong at microscopic scales, lightweight and capable of remarkable electrical performance. Sonoluminescence: Real. Acoustic energy can drive violent microscopic bubble collapse and produce brief flashes of light. Graphene fibers: Also real. Researchers already manufacture macroscopic graphene-based fibers and yarns, although their properties remain far below those of a single flawless graphene crystal. Space elevators: Serious theoretical engineering concepts. The fundamental problem has always been finding a cable material with sufficient strength-to-weight performance while also manufacturing that material at enormous scale and with extraordinarily few defects. What's My Speculative Part? The big unanswered question is whether my proposed combination of acoustic concentration, electromagnetic energy and controlled carbon chemistry could actually produce the required carbon-carbon bonding. Simply pressing graphene flakes together and passing electrical current through them would not automatically weld them into flawless graphene. That's the experiment. Can acoustic energy create the necessary local conditions? Can electromagnetic energy assist bonding? Can the process be moved continuously so that instead of isolated flakes we manufacture a long, highly ordered carbon structure? If the answer is no, we've learned something. But if the answer is yes, don't start by building a 44,000-mile space elevator. Make one centimeter. Then make a meter. Measure its tensile strength. Measure its electrical resistance. Find the defects. Make it better. Then make a kilometer. Because if humanity ever learns how to manufacture extremely long carbon structures approaching graphene's theoretical strength, we won't merely have invented a new kind of wire. We may have invented the material that opens the road to space. Thank you very much for listening. This is the Mad Scientist Supreme, signing out.

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  The Mad Scientist Supreme

  ️ Space Junk, the Kessler Syndrome, and Keeping the Road to Space Open

  Aug 24, 20269 min

  Send us Fan Mail Hello, people. This is the Mad Scientist Debrief, talking today about space debris. This comes from Science, 13 August 2026, page 642, discussing the danger that planned satellite constellations could contribute to runaway orbital debris. We are putting more and more satellites into orbit, and they are not all traveling in the same direction. Some follow near-equatorial orbits. Others travel at steep inclinations. Some use polar orbits. They cross one another's paths at tremendous relative speeds. Eventually, something is going to hit something else. When two satellites collide, they don't simply become two broken satellites. They can produce thousands of fragments traveling in new directions and new orbits. Some fragments will fall into the atmosphere and burn up. Others can remain in orbit for years or decades. Then one fragment hits another satellite. That satellite breaks apart. Now there are even more fragments. This is the Kessler Syndrome, or collisional cascading. NASA has been studying this problem for decades. Its modeling has found something particularly disturbing: in important portions of low Earth orbit, collisions among objects already there could continue increasing the debris population even if humanity stopped launching new spacecraft. � Orbital Debris Program Office +1 That means prevention alone may eventually not be enough. We Need Garbage Trucks in Space Years ago, science fiction imagined crews whose job was collecting abandoned satellites, rocket stages, and other orbital junk. We may actually need them. Instead of waiting until an uncontrolled cascade occurs, build spacecraft specifically designed to rendezvous with dead satellites and spent rocket stages, capture them, and either bring them down or push them into trajectories where atmospheric drag will eventually destroy them. Interestingly, NASA's modeling suggests we don't necessarily have to remove everything. For long-term stabilization, targeting only a handful of the largest, highest-collision-risk objects each year could make an important difference. One NASA analysis found that removing roughly five such objects annually could stabilize the long-term LEO debris environment. � Orbital Debris Program Office +1 That's a much more manageable problem than trying to vacuum millions of tiny fragments out of space. The principle is simple: Spend money cleaning up space now, or potentially spend enormously more dealing with the consequences later. Civilization Is Becoming Dependent on Orbit Satellites aren't just scientific toys anymore. They provide communications, navigation, weather forecasting, Earth observation, disaster response, military capabilities, and increasingly direct communications with ordinary consumer devices. Imagine allowing terrestrial communications infrastructure to disappear because satellite communications became cheaper and better. Then imagine a major orbital collision cascade knocking out a substantial portion of that satellite network. We could suddenly discover that the supposedly obsolete backup infrastructure wasn't so obsolete after all. Every major technological transition needs some overlap. The Pony Express kept carrying messages while telegraph infrastructure expanded. Telegraph continued while telephone networks developed. Ground communications should remain resilient while satellite communications become more important. And satellites themselves need protection while whatever comes next is being developed. ⚛️ One Important Correction: Quantum Communication This is where my speculation runs ahead of today's science. Quantum communication is fascinating, and quantum networks could eventually provide extraordinarily secure communications. But quantum entanglement, according to established physics, does not currently allow a telephone to transmit ordinary information instantaneously to another entangled telephone without a conventional communications channel. So we cannot presently put two quantum chips in two phones and use entanglement alone to make an instantaneous call through the Earth or from a submerged submarine. Maybe some future discovery changes that. Maybe the next communications revolution comes from something entirely different. But we shouldn't bet civilization on technology that doesn't exist yet. Maintain the Bridge Until We Build the Next One That's really my point. Humanity builds one communications system and eventually replaces it with something better. But until the replacement actually works, we have to maintain what we've already built. Today, that increasingly means protecting Earth's orbital environment. We should improve satellite tracking. We should design spacecraft that reliably dispose of themselves. We should prevent unnecessary explosions and collisions. And we should seriously invest in active removal of the largest abandoned objects before they become thousands of smaller objects. NASA itself describes active debris removal as an important long-term approach to protecting heavily used orbital regions. � Orbital Debris Program Office Space isn't an infinite garbage dump. It's infrastructure. And just like roads, bridges, power lines, and communications networks, somebody eventually has to maintain it. Clean up the road to space while the road is still usable. Thank you very much for listening. This is the Mad Scientist Debrief, signing out.

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  The Mad Scientist Supreme

  Cure Bacterial Infections

  Aug 19, 20267 min

  Send us Fan Mail Tuberculosis — Mycobacterium tuberculosis. This is the obvious one for your story. WHO estimates about 10.7 million people developed TB and 1.23 million died from it in 2024. It remains the world's leading cause of death from a single infectious agent. Drug-resistant TB makes it especially interesting for your proposed bacteriophage research. Bacterial pneumonia — especially Streptococcus pneumoniae, but also Klebsiella pneumoniae, Staphylococcus aureus, etc. Rather than one bacterium, pneumonia is a syndrome caused by several organisms. Bacterial lower-respiratory infections are enormous killers. S. pneumoniae alone was associated with roughly 829,000 deaths in the major Global Burden of Disease analysis, most through lower-respiratory infection. Staphylococcal infections — Staphylococcus aureus, including MRSA. This one is surprisingly important. The large Lancet analysis estimated S. aureus was associated with about 1.1 million deaths in 2019, making it the deadliest of the 33 bacterial pathogens examined. It causes bloodstream infections, pneumonia, wound infections, surgical infections and sepsis. MRSA adds the antibiotic-resistance problem. Serious E. coli infections. Most E. coli living in our intestines are harmless, but pathogenic strains can cause diarrheal disease, urinary infections, kidney infections, abdominal infections and bloodstream infections. The Lancet analysis associated E. coli with about 950,000 deaths worldwide in 2019. Klebsiella infections — Klebsiella pneumoniae. This is particularly attractive for your storyline because some strains have become extremely resistant to antibiotics. It causes pneumonia, bloodstream infections, urinary infections and serious hospital-acquired infections. The same global analysis associated it with about 790,000 deaths in 2019. An important sixth candidate is Pseudomonas aeruginosa, particularly for hospital patients, burns, wounds, ventilators and people with weakened immune systems. It was associated with roughly 559,000 deaths in that analysis. Hello people, this is the Mad Scientist Green, talking today about bacterial infections. Now, we all get infected by bacteria, but some bacteria is more deadly than others. Tuberculosis, very deadly, and becoming antibiotic resistant. Pneumonia, Staphylococcus, strep throat, E. coli, and Klebsiella, Well, we need to get away from antibiotics. And one way to do that is using the Tree of Life Project. Now, the Tree of Life Project, they are researching all life and genetically analyzing it to see what it's closest related to. And we also have viruses, which are not technically alive, but they're analyzing them too. And certain viruses affect certain animals. There are certain types of virus that only affect bats. And every time it replicates, a few of those viruses are mutating. And they have a chance, a very, very small chance, but a chance that they have mutated so they will affect a human or a mouse or a cow. Bird flu, same way. Affects birds, only a certain type of birds. But then as birds, you know, meet other birds and it spreads, there's a very small chance it'll go to a new species. So something that only affects crows might jump over to affect geese. Well, if you grow a bunch of bacteria, let's say tuberculosis bacteria in a bat, and you can't find any virus that attacks that, but you find a virus that attacks a bacteria that's similar to or very closely related to tuberculosis. Grow tuberculosis and that other bacteria in one bat. So they're co-mingling. And then infect it with that virus. That virus will attack the one it's supposed to attack, and tuberculosis will be unaffected, most of the time. But you keep doing this generation after generation. And eventually, the virus will mutate so it will attack tuberculosis. And you breed it again and again and get the ones that attack it the best. Make it extremely virulent against tuberculosis. And then simply spray that in the air around somebody with tuberculosis. They breathe that in, it affects their tuberculosis, and they're cured. And we can go around curing the world of tuberculosis. Well, strep throat, if you don't have the antibiotics to kill that, it can kill you. Well, we do the same thing again. Find the virus that attacks bacteria that's closest to that. Brew those two or three or four bacterias together. And eventually, the virus will change to attack strep throat and attack the other things. All those other bacteria that kill us. We can kill them by breeding the correct viruses that will only affect those bacteria. Now, it's a hit or miss thing. I realize that. Now, they specifically alter a virus to attack us that only affected bats. Well, if we don't specifically alter this, it's going to take a lot longer for it to happen. You're going to have to have a much larger sample size, etc. But it will be natural. And I don't want to affect viruses or change viruses to affect us. I want it to affect the things that affect us. We can, your bacteria on your teeth that cause cavities. We might be able to get a virus that kills bacteria that causes tooth decay. So, we end up with no tooth decay without having to go through other steps. We end up with not having to floss or brush your teeth as often. Yes, for fresh minty breath and fresh breath, it would be a good idea to floss and brush your teeth. But to prevent cavities, that won't be a problem anymore if we can invent, or if we can breed bacteria and breed the viruses that attack those bacteria. The viruses will naturally change given the right environments. We don't have to go in there with a set of tweezers, change the viruses. And if you intentionally genetically modify an organism, you've got to get government approval for that. But if you're just growing bacteria in a bat, and it happens to be affected by a virus, that's legal. So, let's do things that are legal and make viruses attack those things that attack us. All right, that's my little speech for today, and I encourage people to go out there and actually do this, get the money together to do this. Thank you very much for listening. This is the Mad Scientist Green, signing out. .

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  The Mad Scientist Supreme

  When the Water Runs Out: Crops That “Play Dead” and Farms That Take Care of Themselves

  Aug 10, 20269 min

  Send us Fan Mail Hello, people. This is the Mad Scientist, talking today about food production—and how we're going to keep producing food when water becomes harder to get. This comes from Science Magazine, March 26, 2026, page 1312, in an article provocatively titled “Playing Dead.” There are plants capable of an extraordinary survival trick. During a severe drought, they can dry out so completely that, to our eyes, they look dead. Leaves shrivel. Growth stops. Their metabolism drops dramatically. Then the rain comes. And they wake back up. Scientists call this desiccation tolerance, and plants capable of extreme versions are sometimes called resurrection plants. Now here's my question: Why shouldn't our food crops be able to do something similar? Take wheat. Wheat is fundamentally a domesticated grass. Somewhere among wheat's relatives and other grasses are genes and biological mechanisms that allow plants to survive conditions our modern crops cannot. If we can identify those mechanisms and introduce useful drought-survival traits into agricultural varieties through breeding or biotechnology, a drought wouldn't necessarily mean losing the entire crop. Production would certainly decline. You can't manufacture grain without water. But there's a tremendous difference between producing less this year and losing the plants completely and starting over. And we're going to need every advantage we can get. Underneath much of the central United States lies the High Plains Aquifer, commonly associated with the Ogallala Aquifer. For decades, farmers have pumped groundwater from it to irrigate some of America's most productive agricultural land. The problem is simple arithmetic. In heavily pumped regions, we're removing groundwater faster than nature replaces it. Farmers respond by drilling deeper. But eventually you reach formations where economically useful groundwater simply isn't available. Some agricultural areas have already experienced substantial declines. That doesn't mean America's heartland suddenly turns into a desert tomorrow. Conditions vary tremendously across the aquifer. But it does mean that agriculture in some regions will have to change. So let's attack the problem from several directions. First: drought-surviving crops. Develop wheat, corn and other staples capable of surviving much longer periods without water. Combine that with perennial varieties whose living root systems remain in the soil year after year. Deep roots could reach water unavailable to shallow-rooted crops while protecting soil against erosion. Second: move appropriate crops indoors. We're already growing vegetables through hydroponics, vertical farms and controlled-environment agriculture. Lettuce, herbs, tomatoes and other high-value crops can be produced with carefully controlled amounts of water. We're not going to replace the Great Plains wheat crop with a few towers in somebody's basement. Grain requires enormous acreage, and indoor lighting consumes energy. But not everything needs to be grain. Potatoes and other high-yield crops can provide tremendous amounts of food energy per acre. Different agricultural systems can complement one another instead of trying to make one technology grow everything. Third: automate the labor. This is where robotics becomes extremely interesting. Imagine a household or small farm with a general-purpose robot capable of watering plants, checking for pests, pruning, harvesting vegetables, tending potatoes, moving containers and maintaining equipment. Teach the machine a task once, and increasingly sophisticated software could allow that knowledge to be reused. The economics of small-scale agriculture suddenly change. Tasks that aren't economical when a person must spend hours performing them may become practical when a machine can work, recharge and return to work. And when it isn't tending the garden? Wash the dishes. Fold the laundry. Clean the house. Prepare dinner. That means automation doesn't merely replace agricultural labor. It could free human time while making highly managed, small-scale food production practical again. That's the future I want to see. Don't wait until an aquifer is exhausted and announce that agriculture is impossible. Develop crops that tolerate drought. Develop perennial grains with deeper, permanent roots. Use controlled-environment agriculture where it makes economic sense. Recycle water. And use robotics to eliminate the labor bottleneck. We're not going to stop droughts. But human beings have spent thousands of years modifying agriculture to survive whatever nature throws at us. Let's keep doing it. Thank you very much for listening. This is the Mad Scientist, signing out. Science & Keywords Science Magazine, March 26, 2026, p. 1312 • desiccation tolerance • resurrection plants • drought resistance • High Plains/Ogallala Aquifer • groundwater depletion • perennial grains • controlled-environment agriculture • hydroponics • vertical farming • agricultural robotics • food security Where the Science Stands Well established: Extreme desiccation tolerance exists in some plants; groundwater depletion is a serious problem in portions of the High Plains Aquifer; perennial root systems can offer soil and water-management advantages; and controlled-environment agriculture can dramatically increase control over water use. Promising but developing: Transferring extreme drought-survival characteristics into major crops while maintaining high yields, expanding perennial grain agriculture, and using increasingly autonomous robots for diverse agricultural tasks. The goal: Not one miracle technology, but an agricultural system resilient enough that when one resource becomes scarce, we have several other ways to keep America—and ultimately the world—fed.

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