Scientists have developed a breakthrough food supplement that could help save honeybees from devastating declines. By engineering yeast to produce six essential sterols found in pollen, researchers provided bees with a nutritionally complete diet that boosted reproduction up to 15-fold. Unlike commercial substitutes that lack key nutrients, this supplement mimics natural pollen’s sterol profile, giving bees the equivalent of a balanced diet.
Celebrate or doomer whatever you want, but a lot of us who still do care about larger things still want to do what we can to mitigate damage, and stories like this one are more damaging than beneficial to that cause. I would encourage finding a middle-ground between hopeless despair and “celebration” about anything.
People only read headlines and stories like this gain traction because it makes people think they don’t need to care about something anymore, and our species is profoundly lazy and eager to stop worrying about even existential threats to their own existence.
There’s nothing bad whatsoever about a breakthrough discovery allowing for essentially nutritionally-complete synthetic pollen. It’s all positive, full stop. The negatives you want to emphasize are that it doesn’t also solve other related problems. I never said that it did, only that it was the most uplifting science story in a long time. I read the whole dammed article, not just the headline, and I was very happy to have it get into a lot of details.
Feel free to have your middling reaction without celebration. I’m excited to have a positive science story I can discuss with my kids, and I’m sticking to that.
k