SOME GOOD, SOME BAD. RSN has a chiller for your perusal: "Monsanto Corn Causes Tumors, Organ Damage in Rats". The study is disputed by some, but it sure looks scary.
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| A tumor problem |
The French government asked the country's health watchdog to investigate the findings further, although a number of scientists questioned the study's basic methods and Monsanto said it felt confident its products had been proven safe.
Gilles-Eric Seralini of the University of Caen and colleagues said rats fed on a diet containing NK603 - a seed variety made tolerant to dousings of Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller - or given water with Roundup at levels permitted in the United States, died earlier than those on a standard diet.
Gilles-Eric Seralini of the University of Caen and colleagues said rats fed on a diet containing NK603 - a seed variety made tolerant to dousings of Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller - or given water with Roundup at levels permitted in the United States, died earlier than those on a standard diet.
On a positive note, the future of computing just got rosier. ScienceDaily has a report from Australia, "Single-Atom Writer a Landmark for Quantum Computing". This is heap big medicine, because now, information can be written to and read from quantum dots. Why should you care? Because the pathway has been opened to building computers that make anything that exists today, even the petaflop systems at Lawrence Livermore, look like 1980s calculators.
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| This is an artist’s impression of a phosphorus atom (red sphere surrounded by electron cloud, with arrow showing the spin direction) coupled to a silicon single-electron transistor. |
A research team led by Australian engineers has created the first working quantum bit based on a single atom in silicon, opening the way to ultra-powerful quantum computers of the future.
"For the first time, we have demonstrated the ability to represent and manipulate data on the spin to form a quantum bit, or 'qubit', the basic unit of data for a quantum computer," says Scientia Professor Andrew Dzurak. "This really is the key advance towards realising a silicon quantum computer based on single atoms."
TXECHNOLOGIST is a tech blog supported by GE, with a report on leather grown in the lab, "Laboratory Leather: Company to Mass Produce Tissue-Engineered Animal Hides within Five Years".
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| The last round-up? |
But in an exclusive interview with Txchnologist, company cofounder and CEO Andras Forgacs has broken the silence and revealed some details about Modern Meadow’s goals. Their first project? In vitro leather production.
“Our emphasis first is not on meat, it’s on leather,” Forgacs says. “The main reason is that, technically, skin is a simpler structure than meat, making it easier to produce.”
“Our emphasis first is not on meat, it’s on leather,” Forgacs says. “The main reason is that, technically, skin is a simpler structure than meat, making it easier to produce.”
My guess is that 50 years from now, they will be growing custom-size fur coats to order, along with Mastodon Chateaubriand, or T.Rex burgers, and no sentient animals will be involved.
I am fortunate. My son and family live out of town. We only eat what they grow. Vegetables, fruit, eggs, chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks and pigs. There is a select underground, that uses no pesticides. They all barter with each other for, beef and other foods people need to trade for, or buy at reasonable prices. I was surprised to have ground beef that, I could actually get to brown. They also have winter greenhouses. I even buy wonderful loaves of bread, through the underground. My daughter-in-law, makes wonderful home made yogurt. We eat no processed food, what-so-ever. This reminds me of the victory gardens, planted during WW11.
ReplyDeleteI used to love seafood. However, with acid in the ocean, from Carbon Dioxide, I no longer buy any.
I was so tired of opening packages of vegetable and strawberries, that reeked of mold. I was sick of buying chickens, with huge globes of, ugly yellow fat folded under them, for outrageous prices.
My dog was fed steak, I couldn't even cut, let alone chew. My son's dogs are raw fed food, from a butcher he knows. My son mixes in vegetables, that are good for the dogs. So my dog eats healthy now too. Since there was arsenic found in dog food. We don't have to worry about that anymore.
Two things:
ReplyDelete1. Lab and pet rat breeds are actually prone to tumours. The incidence of tumours in aged rats is very, very high.
2. There are questions as to how this research was conducted.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19654825
I'd take a long hard look at this before I'd ever worry about not being "fair" to Monsanto...
ReplyDeletehttp://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-world-according-to-monsanto/
It is striking the rush of technology that lands on desktop everyday.
ReplyDeletehttp://thinkingaboot.blogspot.ca/2012/09/science-fiction-double-feature.html