Teen Skepchick’s Reality Checks 7.27
- Stop policing geek women. Anyone can be a geek! (via John Scalzi)
- How do seedless watermelons become seedless and are they really less flavorful? (via NPR)
- Pop music is getting louder and less creative. (via Scientific American)
- A new computer simulation illustrates how the Milky Way formed. Plus a video! (via io9)
Featured image credit: NASA
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Is this chemical treatment that causes triploidy a one-time thing, and they just make cuttings from then on, or do they continue to breed some sort of precursor and turn them seedless with the chemical?
This is what I found with a quick Google:
“Seedless watermelons are particularly interesting because they must be propagated by seed, and yet growers can still exploit parthenocarpy. One way to make seedless watermelons is to produce triploid seed. As in the case of bananas, triploid watermelons cannot produce functional seed, but they still develop good fruit through parthenocarpy. Plant breeders produce triploid seed by crossing a normal diploid parent with a tetraploid parent, which itself is made by genetically manipulating diploids to double their chromosome number. In the case of watermelons, this manipulation has to be performed each generation, so it is a somewhat expensive proposition but still worthwhile.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-do-seedless-fruits-ar
Thanks!
My pleasure