Endospores are a reduced form of the bacteria meant to survive extreme conditions, but they’re not the bacteria itself. Once the spore is reactivated and the outer protective shell is lost, it becomes just as vulnerable to bleach as any other bacteria.
The paper is titled ” Increasing tolerance of hospital Enterococcus faecium to _handwash_ alcohols” [1]. They’re tolerating small concentrations of alcohol used in hand sanitizer, not a concentrated disinfectant.
The response letter at the bottom- “Is the effectiveness of alcohol-based handrubs against enterococci really compromised?” by INGEBORG SCHWEBKE has some interesting counterpoints and implies they used 23% isopropanol instead of 70%, which is not enough to sterilize.
Laser resistance can take a lot of forms. In the case of weeds, I’d bet that cat briers are already effectively laser proof. You can burn them down, but they send off shoots and store up massive amounts of energy in fragmented little potatoes. Miss any of them, and they come back up and keep going.
So that’s one solution, and it’s a big space for biology to play in. The bigger question will probably be whether or not there’s a route where weeds can make incremental progress toward better resistance from where they are right now.
For insects, as someone else pointed out, the easiest route is probably mimicry. But we might also see insects capable of recognizing the laser bots, noticing the chemical signals of burning bugs, etc.
PS: I know the above was a joke, but it shows people embrace the power of AI so much they can see the weeds withstanding lasers before they can withstand AI classification.
GP wasn't talking about crops, but about the selective pressure that would be placed on weeds to better survive laser attacks. I could imagine that weeds would either develop heat resistance or would change appearance to make detection harder.
https://ehs.weill.cornell.edu/pathogen-resistance-and-disinf...