"...so I put the ruler down and I rang the Cabinet Office," my head grower said on Friday. She was holding the peanut in a tissue. It was slightly larger than the others.
We planted twenty-six seeds. They came from a tin left behind by the Atomic Gardening Association, which Muriel Howorth founded in 1959. She gave her members seeds that had sat near radiation and asked them to grow big things. Popular Science has the history. We have the tin.
Twenty-five of the seeds grew ordinary peanuts. The last grew a peanut one millimetre longer than the control group. A control group is the peanuts we treated the same but did not hope for. The gap has a p-value of 0.71. A p-value tells you how likely a result is nothing. Ours says it is very likely nothing.
We cannot rule out that it will keep growing. We cannot rule out that it has stopped. The peanut is in a drawer.
We have still advised the public to fill a bath and stay away from windows. Growth of this size has never been recorded in this lab, because this lab opened in March. Howorth ate hers. We have not decided.
