Simpsons Fan Creates Real Tomacco Plant 733
An anonymous reader writes "So, according to a KPTV newscast, a Simpsons fan with too much time on his hands grafted a tobacco plant and a tomato plant and, ta-da: tomacco! Leaves and most likely the fruit (yes, tomato is a fruit technically) contain nicotine. Delicious AND deadly!" Simpsonschannel.com has a small news piece on the breakthrough, but in a Frink-like move, although scientists have found "nicotine in the leaves", it turns out "the lab hasn't tested if the actual tomato has nicotine in it yet, but they say it probably does."
McDonald's (Score:5, Funny)
What do you bet that McDonald's will start using these tomatoes to make us all addicted to their salads and burgers?
Re:McDonald's (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, no kidding! And then I can sue them when I get really fat and my health turns to sh... oh wait, I can do that now.
Re:McDonald's (Score:5, Funny)
Re:McDonald's (Score:5, Funny)
Re:McDonald's (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:McDonald's (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:MSG is evil (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that MSG is used in great quantities at fast food establishments and hardly at all in Chinese food (at least not anymore) -- but the Chinese food places have traditionally been the ones taking the heat for it. I know plenty of people who are unaffected by MSG that will refuse to eat at a Chinese food place without a "No MSG" policy, but they will happily go to McDonald's a
Re:MSG is evil (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, I was gonna call bullshit on you, but how wrong I was!
At least they admit [mcdonalds.com] it, but here's a list of McDonalds foods with added MSG:
Chicken McGrill
Hot 'n Spicy McChicken
Grilled Chicken Bacon Ranch Salad
Grilled Chicken Caesar Salad
Grilled Chicken California Cobb Salad
Sausage, Egg & Cheese McGriddles
Sausage McGriddles
Sausage McMuffin
Sausage Biscuit
Sausage Biscuit with Egg
Spanish Omelete Bagel
Sausage
Big Breakfast
Sausage Breakfast
Re:McDonald's (Score:3, Funny)
Re:McDonald's (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:McDonald's (Score:4, Interesting)
obligatory (Score:3, Funny)
Re:obligatory (Score:2)
"Mine tastes like burning!"
Re:obligatory (Score:2)
Shall we end it all right now? (Score:4, Funny)
btw, you're wrong.
Simpsons science is always a reality (Score:5, Insightful)
Retraction (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Retraction (Score:2)
Re:Retraction (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, that proves nothing.
Re:Retraction (Score:3, Funny)
Nothing is provable without a URL. [slashdot.org]
What the hell... (Score:3, Informative)
Is it the 1st of April?
Surely you are pulling my leg yes?
Splicing/grafting plants together is not that hard, but I thought this could only be done with plants of the same eh..family.
They are. (Score:5, Informative)
They are both nightshades.
Tomato plants can get the Tobacco Mosaic virus, too.
Re:They are. (Score:5, Funny)
Frightening. Is IE also vulnerable?
Re:They are. (Score:5, Funny)
IE is *always* vulnerable.
Solanaceae, to be precise (Score:5, Insightful)
So not just tomacco on your sandwiches, but also tomatsup and a side of potacco fries. A trip to taco bell would be loaded with tobalsa, in addition to tomacco. Tomeggplant parmesan with tomacco sauce would be absolutely loaded with it.
Tomatsup? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What the hell... (Score:3, Informative)
According to http://www.museums.org.za/bio/plants/solanaceae/ [museums.org.za], tomatoes & tobacco are both in the same family (Solanaceae), along with potatoes, peppers and eggplants. I don't know how closely they have to be related for splicing/grafting tho.
Re:What the hell... (Score:4, Interesting)
So, you can graft together a fruit and tobacco, and get a fruit with nicotine. Could you graft a fruit and, oh, I don't know...say...a cannabis plant, and produce a fruit with THC? Would that be illegal? I mean, marijuana is illegal...but is a tomaijuana? (that would be a tomato with THC in it).
Purely theoretical, of course....just wondering and all
Re:What the hell... (Score:5, Interesting)
It was reported by Warmke and Davidson (1944) that hop scions grafted onto Cannabis stocks produced cannabinoid resins and this led to interest in the technique as a means of producing such material while avoiding legal restrictions.
Re:What the hell... (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm.. (Score:5, Funny)
Someone's very happy (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Someone's very happy (Score:2)
Point... (Score:5, Interesting)
Soon, a Tomacco V8 (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's make our own TV show (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Let's make our own TV show (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, geeks can already download plenty of that.
Re:Let's make our own TV show (Score:3, Insightful)
What to do if your kids won't eat their vegetables (Score:5, Interesting)
Also seems like a good way to try to quit smoking?
Re:What to do if your kids won't eat their vegetab (Score:4, Insightful)
Botanical vs. Legal (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, botanically the tomato is a fruit. However, legally, according to the Supreme Court of the United States, tomatos are vegetables [findlaw.com].
Re:Botanical vs. Legal (Score:5, Funny)
This Might Be The First Patent Application... (Score:5, Funny)
You Just Can't Stop Eating Them! (Score:4, Funny)
They're simply addictive! We hope to have a full line of Tomacco snack food products on the shelves as soon as we can get the pro-forma FDA approval.
-- R.J. Reynolds
Now! (Score:5, Funny)
The return of the killer tomatoes (Score:5, Funny)
Gotta be safer that cigarettes.... (Score:2)
Married with children.... (Score:2, Funny)
Nicotine not so bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Bad company corrupts good character. And in the case of Nicotine, bad cigarette companies.
Re:Nicotine not so bad (Score:2)
Re:Nicotine not so bad (Score:5, Interesting)
A bad name is right.
When the Taino people discovered and rescued that lost Italian guy, Columbus, he saw that they took these dried leaves, rolled them up into a tube, lit them on fire, and breathed in the smoke through their nose. When he asked them what they called that, they replied "tobago".
Tobago is Taino for "tube". It started with a misunderstanding, and that continues to this day.
The original residents of North America have always considered tobacco to be a medicinal plant, to the point of being considered sacred. Science is now finding that nicotine is beneficial to several disorders. Furthermore, there's something in tobacco (other than nicotine) that prevents Parkinson's in two-thirds to three-quarters of people who use it. And yes, that's adjusted for mortality/comorbidity.
As with anything, it's a matter of using it appropriately, or bad things happen.
Re:Nicotine not so bad (Score:3, Funny)
Thank you. I think I learnt something today.
Cheers
Not a good idea (Score:2, Funny)
This is possible because. . . (Score:4, Informative)
All of these plants already contain nicotine, so of course he found them, and various other alkaloids. The only question is the concentration and where that concentration is.
You'll also find nicotine in things you might not expect, like bananas, beef, cow's milk and cottage cheese.
Eat a tomato leaf, potato leaf, or even the wrong parts of a potato and you can end up, very, very dead.
Enjoy your fries and ketchup.
KFG
Re:This is possible because. . . (Score:5, Informative)
Mmmmm.... (Score:2, Funny)
Tomato is legally a veggie (in the US at least) (Score:5, Interesting)
"Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans and peas. But in the common language of the people
"The attempt to class tomatoes with fruit is not unlike a recent attempt to class beans as seeds, of which Mr. Justice Bradley, speaking for this court, said: 'We do not see why they should be classified as seeds, any more than walnuts should be so classified. Both are seeds in the language of botany or natural history, but not in commerce nor in common parlance.'"
Hence, tomatoes are legally vegetables in the US, botany be damned.
Re:Tomato is legally a veggie (in the US at least) (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Tomato is legally a veggie (in the US at least) (Score:4, Informative)
Tomacco Patches? (Score:5, Funny)
An open plea to the Simpsons writers: (Score:5, Funny)
An open plea to the Simpsons writers:
Please, more episodes about cold fusion.
Thank you.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't work with marijuana (Score:5, Interesting)
In order to do something like this with marijuana you'd have to resort to genetic engineering.
This is sooo old news! The Reds beat us to it! (Score:5, Informative)
Now if we only had only had slashdot back in 1956.....
Re:This is sooo old news! The Reds beat us to it! (Score:4, Interesting)
Warning: Botany lesson inside (Score:5, Interesting)
In general, if what you eat has seeds (or is supposed to have seeds, like bananas and certain grapes), they you are eating fruit. We eat corn and bean fruit by strict botanical definitions. "True" vegetables are when we eat the leaves, roots, stems, or flowers.
We (mankind) have done so much genetic manipulation with our crops (for milleniums, not just from Monsanto) that most would never be able to survive without our continued cultivation.
Whether we domsticated them, or they domesticated us, is debatable. From their perspective, it looks like they have enslaved the human race to do their bidding (spread their genes around the would and into the future).
Re:Warning: Botany lesson inside (Score:4, Insightful)
If you take the corn, leave it on the cob for a few more weeks, then grind it up and make a tortilla or corn chips, does it still count as a vegetable ?
From a dietician's perspective, she's guiding you into general nutrition groups and helping you balance your intake of carbs, fats, proteins, etc. so in reality it's ok to count it as a vegetable.
Corn is a grass, so is sugarcane and bamboo shoots. Corn chips (fried in vegetable oil, of course) and corn syrup (Karo syrup brand around here) are certainly yummy ways to get your vegetables!
Had to be said. (Score:5, Funny)
Yum! (Score:3, Insightful)
Garg
I'll take a crate (Score:3, Funny)
You saay tomacco (Score:5, Funny)
A graft is not a genetic change (Score:5, Informative)
In a graft, which is what has been done here, you stick the stem of one plant (tomato in this case) onto the root of another (tobacco in this case). If the two plants are closely related (as are tomatoes and tobacco,) the hybrid plant will grow and survive; often, chemicals (nicotine in this case) will move in the sap from the roots to the leaves (and presumably fruit.)
This is NOT a genetic change. If you took these "tomacco" seeds and planted them, they'd grow into regular tomatoes. Making the genetic changes required for tomatoes to actually make their own nicotine [caryacademy.org] (which would breed true,) is an entirely different and more complicated prospect.
A few points (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A few points in REALITY (Score:4, Informative)
Nicotine is actually a poison [oklahomapoison.org]. Before downplaying the intake of poison [umaryland.edu] I would learn the facts [hyperdictionary.com]. As for cigarettes and the diseaes they help bring on [pmusa.com] learn about how they get those little numbers [pmusa.com] on their packs before thinking you are any less exposed.
Course, you could just prove it all wrong by soaking a pack or two of cigarettes in 32oz of water and chugging it after cutting off your phone service and access to medical help.
Updated Movies (Score:3, Funny)
The bed scene, after the lovin' is done...
"Marinara sauce?"
What we need next. (Score:3, Funny)
popplers, Slurm, and solent cola.
Re:Playing God, with hilarious results. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Playing God, with hilarious results. (Score:2, Insightful)
+1 Funny (Score:5, Funny)
Intelligent Design [csicop.org] is an "accepted" theory?! I think you've been smoking too many tomacco leaves...
Re:+1 Funny (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:+1 Funny (Score:4, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong about an "ad hominem" claim if it is both true and topical- it's actually a valid (though rare) part of formal philosophical debate. In this case, his statement is sufficiently true: creationists are religionists, who believe their position was Divinely affirmed.
An "atheist creationist" is not a contradition in terms; somebody could decide that life evolved by natural selection on some distant planet, from which bioengineers came to Earth in flying saucers. But you don't find people with those beliefs, because (virtually) all creationists are starting from a religious perspective, and then trying to squeeze science to fit the viewpoint they've already decided on.
Re:+1 Funny (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are watching The Elegant Universe on PBS, you will see that the primary argument against the string theorists is that they theories they propose contain no testable (in the reasonable future) concepts. What made Einstein so amazing was he came up with the consequences for the rules of gravity and light virtually out of whole cloth in his head. But his theory made predictions: if they had proved wrong, he would be barely a footnote.
Creationists refuse to submit to the rigors of prediction and testing. If evolution predicts there should be an animal of characteristic X in the record, finding it after such a prediction helps bolster the theory. Working with fruit flys and bacteria have allowed many of the concepts of evolution to be tested, and have help refine the theory. Creationists point to a book and a failed understanding of complexity theory, with little else to stand on. That attitude, in the guise of being "scientific" infuriates me.
Re:Playing God, with hilarious results. (Score:5, Informative)
"Yet evolutionary biologists have answers to these objections. First, there exist flagellae with forms simpler than the one that Behe cites, so it is not necessary for all those components to be present for a flagellum to work. The sophisticated components of this flagellum all have precedents elsewhere in nature, as described by Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University and others. In fact, the entire flagellum assembly is extremely similar to an organelle that Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague bacterium, uses to inject toxins into cells."
Astronomical? (Score:5, Insightful)
First:
I hate to be the one to point this out, but astronomical or not, there are thousands and thousands of these bacteria in every cup of water, and the pond is a lot bigger than that.
And so is the ocean.
And they've had literally millions of years to stumble upon it.
I'm not sure what your definition of Astronomical is, but maybe you don't see what I see.
Second:
The mutations didn't all need to happen at the same time. As long as the original mutations didn't give the organism some disadvantage, there's no reason why it couldn't have spawned thousands and thousands of other organisms with the same oddity, and one of those could subsequently have evolved into the bacteria we see today. Remember, selection pressure works in both directions: unless something is being selected against, it isn't selected out of the gene pool.
Re:Astronomical? (Score:5, Funny)
FYI
Re:Playing God, with hilarious results. (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you trolling, or just entirely ignorant of human history? The OLDEST, most WIDELY ACCEPTED theory of biological diversity is creationism.
Evolution and natural selection are very new ideas (relatively), and are still not believed by most people on the planet.
As for "how much of our biological model it predicts", well of course it does. It's specious/circular logic:
"Something complex needs intelligence to make it, therefore something intelligent made everything that is complex."
"I don't understand the origins/purpose/design of something, so it MUST have been created by something even more intelligent than myself."
Re:Playing God, with hilarious results. (Score:4, Insightful)
Evolution doesn't work towards an end result. That's part of what makes it so difficult to understand. Since there's no stable environment, there's no ultimate solution.
Re:Playing God, with hilarious results. (Score:3, Interesting)
The Turing test is not used by many (any?) scientists yet, not even CS or AI types. And it's not intended to measure intelligence either... all it could really present is a boolean guess.
A real intelligence test is conducted by a dedi
Re:Playing God, with hilarious results. (Score:3, Insightful)
So lemme get this straight. It couldn't possibly have been a 1 in billion chance, because we've been trained that "1 in billion" means "never happens", so it must have been a guy in the sky with lightning bolts, and that's the only "sane" thing you could come up with?
scaffolding theory (Score:5, Insightful)
In an analogy, the intermediate pieces are the equivalent of the scaffolding that holds up an arch while the arch is under construction. When the arch is completed, the scaffolding can be removed, making it appear to people who don't understand arch-construction (but do understand physics) that the arch must have been created by magic.
I don't know anything about flagelli, so I couldn't give you an example of how there could be intermediate stepping-stones to a completed flagellum.
Also, it doesn't make the resultant complexity any less cool. It probably is even more cool because it was created by evolutionary pressure rather than intelligent design.
-1 offtopic (Score:3, Informative)
In this case he has grafted a tomato plant on a tobacco root.
Re:Playing God, with hilarious results. (Score:5, Insightful)
The rhetorical trick we see here is to slip a logical fallacy into the prelude, so it appears to be an indisputable axiom, rather than a challengable part of the argument.
In fact, those structures are not irreducibly complex. In the case of flagellum, scientists have already explained how incomplete organs were beneficial to microbes.
However, even if we do not have an explanation for how a complex structure could've evolved, that doesn't harm the theory of evolution. An inability to explain is not proof of falsehood. Just because you haven't seen a writeup walking through each and every little step of a process, doesn't mean that process can't work. (I don't think any human alive can truely understand all of the machines used for modern, daily life. Yet they carry on somehow.). In fact, given that primitive life was created so many billions of years ago in conditions that were so adverse to preserving evidence, it should be unsuprising that the precise details are unknown.
If one disgards arguments simply because one cannot personally comprehend every little detail, then creationism could be assailed with many more objections.
Re:Playing God, with hilarious results. (Score:3, Insightful)
The number one flaw in the "complexity requires design" premise is that by the very premise, the designer requires a designer, who requires a d
Re:Playing God, with hilarious results. (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, in an infinite universe, astronomical odds mean nothing. It had to happen somewhere in the universe; intelligent life just happened to happen here. Unfortunately for us, we're just as screwed when the sun burns out. It's a load of horseshit. It does not add to the predictive capacity of any scientific theory and is completely circular in its logic. If human beings were intelligently designed, do you think we'd be using the same pipe for breathing and swallowing solid food, thus introducing a potential choking hazard? Or would we have blind spots in our eyes? Wouldn't our bodies be robust, meaning that any part can fail with the rest continuing on? Any flaws of this magnitude in any modern piece of technology would be considered completely unacceptable and the result of inexcusable incompetence on the part of the designer. All of the glaring flaws in the human body are easily explainable by evolutionary theory, but intelligent design is helpless to explain them without assuming that the designer is a complete retard.
Intelligent design is simply creationism in a clown suit, just like Windows 3.1 was to DOS.
Re:Tomato aren't fruits. (Score:2)
Re:Tomatos aren't fruits. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Tomatos aren't fruits. (Score:5, Funny)
MT
Idiot (Score:4, Informative)
Re:cigarettes? (Score:3, Funny)