the.com/pesticide
chemistry that wins the war on bugs by quietly drafting everyone else into the fight
means A chemical substance used to kill or control pests — insects, weeds, fungi, rodents, and other unwanted organisms.
from A modern compound stitched from the Latin 'pestis,' meaning plague or pestilence, and the suffix '-cide,' from Latin 'caedere,' to cut down or kill — the same '-cide' that ends 'homicide' and 'genocide.' So at root the word literally means 'plague-killer,' a 20th-century coinage that rose with industrial agriculture and the synthetic chemistry boom.
- origin twist
- DDT inventor won a Nobel Prize in 1948
- resistance
- over 500 insect species now shrug them off
- collateral
- kills pollinators that grow a third of food
- ancient version
- Romans used sulfur and arsenic on crops
- half lives
- some persist in soil for decades
ddt — synthetic insecticide banned in us (1972) but still used in malaria control in africa
glyphosate roundup — herbicide accounting for ~50% of global pesticide use, manufactured by bayer
neonicotinoids — class of insecticides linked to bee colony collapse disorder, partially restricted in eu (2018)