> By evaluating the individual compounds in coffee we were able to map the most significant ones contributing to the characteristic aroma and flavor of coffee.
More and more, we're learning how micronutrients and chemicals that we wouldn't even class as micronutrients are beneficial to human health. If they've brought over only those compounds most significant for aroma and flavor, what are we missing? I don't think it's alarmist to suggest that this "coffee" might resemble the real thing as far as our senses are concerned, but it might lack all of the health benefits of grows-on-a-tree coffee.
I don't think you need the sarcasm tag. Most people seem to use it as a drug to get them going in the morning and on through the day. I usually hear people complaining about how they wish they didn't need to drink so much to get through each day. Then again, I live in a region where it is cloudy much of the year, so it does seem to help with the lack of sunlight.
Why stop at coffee? Why not ingest nicotine everyday? Or amphetamine salts? Caffeine is still a drug. The health benefits are minor at best, in that it will reduce insulin resistance. But any stimulant will do that, because it elevates your basal metabolic rate.
Humans have been doing this for hundreds of years. The varieties of many fruits that we get today are because they have been selected for looks, taste/smell so this is not really anything new.
> Good news everyone, we are gaining new green spaces!
Is not so simple, sadly. This is a well known ecological problem. A huge problem.
Big mountains have lots of endemic flowers that evolved for standing very high and cold places and growing very slow. Now they are being pushed literally towards the top of the mountain. They can't compete with the other plants in warmer places.
Eventually the entire mountain will go out of their ecological range in the same way as an island that is being slowly sinked in the sea. At this moment the entire ecosystem and thousands of unique species will go extinct. And is happening at a worlwide scale, all at the same time. Himalayan plants could survive but most mountains do not have a upper level devoid of life.
This species specially adapted to stand really harsh places could be sorely missed in the future if we want to terraform other planets
Megafauna being a fine example. Mastodons, dire wolves ... many theories, but nobody has a lock on what wiped them out ... not long ago. It's been said that many of the surviving non-surficial (unscavenged) bones are found buried in debris. (Alaskan muck, e.g.)
We humans are found at the smaller end of the megafauna scale (weight > 40kg). Maybe hiding in the earth was helpful. It may be again.
The general acceptance is that megafauna extinction is the result of some mix of climate change and human action, and this mix varies in different areas.
In Eurasia, the consensus is "mostly climate change." For Australia, it is "mostly human." For South America and Africa, I don't know what the consensus is.
For North America, the only strong consensus you will find is for both factors to be implicated, with vehement disagreement over the degree to which factor is stronger. The megafauna extinction event happens to occur at the same time as both the Clovis period and the Younger Dryas onset, which means the timing doesn't really work better for one or the other factor. However, we have since learned more about human migration to the Americas (humans arrived a few millennia before Clovis, although the exact amount is disputed), as well as the nature of the Younger Dryas (sharper than expected [1], with the worst effects occurring in some portions of North America). A more realistic approach would be to view North American megafauna of suffering a variety of negative population pressures, with humans providing more of a coup de grace rather than the primary driving factor of their extinction.
[1] 10 degrees Centigrade in less than a century, maybe even a decade. In other words, sharper than the current climate change concerns.
Ultimately, his point is "these very dangerous animals will find a way to escape your control".
Breeding becomes a particular problem in the book because the computer system is only programmed to count up to the expected number of animals, and not show an overcount.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...