Nuclear Deep Fakes
Nuclear power’s deep fake was launched 75 years ago, quite deliberately, using public opinion manipulation tools that were primitive compared to those available today.
The image above is of the “Geiger Counter plant,” KU9 Spiderwort. I have been propagating this strain in my garden from the original clone I obtained from its creator in 1977. It has an uncommon tolerance to heat and cold, reappearing as a perennial despite extremes of minus 25°F in winter and 120°F in summer. This makes it especially well adapted to rapid climate change.
Tradescantia nonukes, var. Ichikawa (1977), also known as Tradescantia x ‘KU9’, was called “the most excellent test system ever known for low-level radiation” by Japanese geneticist Sadao Ichikawa, part of the team at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island that developed this monitoring system in the late 1960s. Unlike its more common counterparts bred for the beauty of their flowers, this particular cultivar was bred to serve as a natural, biological Geiger counter.
‘KU9’ has segmented stems with grassy blades and produces blue, three-petaled flowers. When exposed to radiation, the blue cells of the single-cell strand stamen hairs turn pink. The increase in pink cells is proportional to the dose of radiation…