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1/31/11

South Carolina scientist works to grow meat in lab




CHARLESTON, South Carolina (Reuters) – In a small laboratory on an upper floor of the basic science building at the Medical University of South Carolina, Vladimir Mironov, M.D., Ph.D., has been working for a decade to grow meat.

A developmental biologist and tissue engineer, Dr. Mironov, 56, is one of only a few scientists worldwide involved in bioengineering "cultured" meat.

It's a product he believes could help solve future global food crises resulting from shrinking amounts of land available for growing meat the old-fashioned way ... on the hoof.

Growth of "in-vitro" or cultured meat is also under way in the Netherlands, Mironov told Reuters in an interview, but in the United States, it is science in search of funding and demand.

The new National Institute of Food and Agriculture, part of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, won't fund it, the National Institutes of Health won't fund it, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration funded it only briefly, Mironov said.

"It's classic disruptive technology," Mironov said. "Bringing any new technology on the market, average, costs $1 billion. We don't even have $1 million."

Director of the Advanced Tissue Biofabrication Center in the Department of Regenerative Medicine and Cell Biology at the medical university, Mironov now primarily conducts research on tissue engineering, or growing, of human organs.

"There's a yuck factor when people find out meat is grown in a lab. They don't like to associate technology with food," said Nicholas Genovese, 32, a visiting scholar in cancer cell biology working under a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals three-year grant to run Dr. Mironov's meat-growing lab.

"But there are a lot of products that we eat today that are considered natural that are produced in a similar manner," Genovese said.

"There's yogurt, which is cultured yeast. You have wine production and beer production. These were not produced in laboratories. Society has accepted these products."

If wine is produced in winery, beer in a brewery and bread in a bakery, where are you going to grow cultured meat?

In a "carnery," if Mironov has his way. That is the name he has given future production facilities.

He envisions football field-sized buildings filled with large bioreactors, or bioreactors the size of a coffee machine in grocery stores, to manufacture what he calls "charlem" -- "Charleston engineered meat."

"It will be functional, natural, designed food," Mironov said. "How do you want it to taste? You want a little bit of fat, you want pork, you want lamb? We design exactly what you want. We can design texture.

"I believe we can do it without genes. But there is no evidence that if you add genes the quality of food will somehow suffer. Genetically modified food is already normal practice and nobody dies."

Dr. Mironov has taken myoblasts -- embryonic cells that develop into muscle tissue -- from turkey and bathed them in a nutrient bath of bovine serum on a scaffold made of chitosan (a common polymer found in nature) to grow animal skeletal muscle tissue. But how do you get that juicy, meaty quality?

Genovese said scientists want to add fat. And adding a vascular system so that interior cells can receive oxygen will enable the growth of steak, say, instead of just thin strips of muscle tissue.

Cultured meat could eventually become cheaper than what Genovese called the heavily subsidized production of farm meat, he said, and if the public accepts cultured meat, the future holds benefits.

"Thirty percent of the earth's land surface area is associated with producing animal protein on farms," Genovese said.

"Animals require between 3 and 8 pounds of nutrient to make 1 pound of meat. It's fairly inefficient. Animals consume food and produce waste. Cultured meat doesn't have a digestive system.

"Further out, if we have interplanetary exploration, people will need to produce food in space and you can't take a cow with you.

"We have to look to these ideas in order to progress. Otherwise, we stay static. I mean, 15 years ago who could have imagined the iPhone?"

By Harriet McLeod

Beware of Fake Chinese Eggs !

Manufacturing fake eggs

In China there are fake schools and classes that teach a variety of blatant fraud technology, even eggs can be modulated by chemical materials, but also be able to fry cook, is currently the most popular False course.

Step 1 modulation of raw materials

Using 7 kinds of chemical materials, see pic below

Beware of Fake Chinese Eggs

Fake egg was made from calcium carbonate, starch, resin, gelatin, alum and other chemical products.

Step 2 egg production

Raw egg into the mold to 2 / 3 full, put calcium chloride, colouring die, the egg appears on the film been announced.

Beware of Fake Chinese Eggs

The 'yolk' is shaped in the round mould. 'Magic water' containing calcium chloride is used.

Beware of Fake Chinese Eggs

By adding a yellow pigment and become raw egg yolk..

Step 3 fake egg shape

In the mold into 1 / 3 raw egg white, like the first package, like dumplings into the egg yolk, egg white into another, into the magic water, a shell eggs will come slowly. Naked egg shape to 1 hour to dry after washing with water, at shells ready.

Step 4

Sewing lines through the use of eggs, immersed in paraffin wax, calcium carbonate, such as modulation of the eggshell into a solution, repeated several times until the shell a little dry, immersion in cold water pumping line shape, this point, the egg has been put on a false cloak , You're done.

Beware of Fake Chinese Eggs

Hard shells are formed by soaking in paraffin wax onto the egg, which are then left to dry.

Beware of Fake Chinese Eggs

Beware of Fake Chinese Eggs

Oh yeah The Egg is ready. The artificial egg shell is very fragile and break easily but who cares!!

Look so real

Beware of Fake Chinese Eggs

Many small bubbles is formed during frying the egg but not many people can tell the difference.

The egg look exactly the same, and the eggs taste better than real but you are adding to the

statistic of food poisoning person.

Beware of Fake Chinese Eggs

Beware of Fake Chinese Eggs

Beware of Fake Chinese Eggs

Why make fake eggs ?

Because of money.

The cost of fake egg is only 0.55 Yuan/kg, while the true market price is 5.6 Yuan/kg.

Cases of problem foods and food poisoning are widely reported in Mainland China over the last few years.. In 2001, there were 185 cases of food poisoning, affecting about 15,715 people and causing 146 deaths.

The cases doubled in 2002. In 2003, the number of reported cases was ten times more than that in 2001, and the number of people suffered was as high as 29,660, including 262 deaths Now In Sept 2008 Nearly 53,000 Chinese children sick from contaminated milk; 4 have died.

www.funzug.com

1/29/11

Kilogram is losing weight, say experts


Experts want to redefine the kilogrm, which came into existence two centuries ago. They fear it is not as constant as it should be.

Experts are willing to make the changes so that it is no longer based on the mass of a solid cylinder of platinum-iridium alloy that sits beneath three layers of protective glass sealed in a locked vault in Sevres, France .

This metal block, known as the International Prototype Kilogram, has been used since it was first registered with the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in 1889 as the definitive unit of mass against which all other kilograms are measured. In the past 122 years, it has been brought out of storage just three times to calibrate the national prototype kilograms used by countries around the world.

However, scientists now believe it is time to redefine the kilogram because there is evidence that the precise mass of the international prototy

pe in Sevres is not as constant as it should be. "We think it is losing weight, and we don't know why," the Independent quoted BIPM's Michael Stock, as saying. "From the three times we have had it out to make calibrations, we have had indications that it is not perfectly stable.

It seems to have lost about 50 micrograms and there is no real explanation," he said. "There are no real problems now but if it continues, then we may run into problems in 10 or 20 years' time because measurements are getting even more precise.

We need to anticipate the problems and, from time to time, we have to improve our definitions of the standard units of measurement - if you need to make an accurate measure of length, you need a good ruler," he added.
ISMAIL CHOHAN

Extreme Gravy Wrestling !

The following series of pictures is from the World 2010 Gravy Wrestling Championship held in Lancashire, England .

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Joel Hicks, a 30-year-old lawyer from Burbage, took the men’s title.

But the real winner was the audience anyway.

From : offbeat earth

What's at the Center of Black Holes?


Produced from the implosion of massive stars, black holes are wells in the fabric of space-time so deep that nothing, not even light, can escape them.

At the center of a black hole is what physicists call the "singularity," or a point where extremely large amounts of matter are crushed into an infinitely small amount of space.

"From a theoretical point of view, the singularity is something that becomes something infinitely large," said physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Technically, that "something" is the curvature of space, or the heightened gravity that scientists have observed in the presence of very large masses like planets and stars.

Similar to how a stretched rubber sheet dips around a bowling ball, massive objects can cause space-time to curve around them. And the more massive the object is, the steeper the curvature will be. First theorized by Einstein, nowhere is this effect more extreme than for a black hole, whose center represents an infinitely curving curve. Like a bottomless hole in a rubber sheet, the force becomes infinitely bigger as objects travel further and further into the hole.

Around the singularity, particles and materials are compressed. As matter collapses into a black hole, its density becomes infinitely large because it must fit into a point that, according to equations, is so small that it has no dimensions.

Some scientists have debated whether the theoretical equations that describe black holes are correct – meaning whether they actually exist.

No one can be sure that their singularity doesn't describe a physical reality, Hossfelder told Life's Little Mysteries. But most physicists would say that the singularity, as theorized by equations, doesn't really exist. If the singularity was "really real," then it would mean that "energy density was infinitely large at one point," exactly the center of the black hole, she said.

However, no one can know for sure, because no complete quantum theory of gravity exists, and the insides of black holes are impossible to observe.

Britain’s Ugliest Dog: DoUGLY !


He’s partially blind, and has a misaligned jaw, but no, he doesn’t answer to “lucky”.
His name, is “Ug”, actually.
Although April Parker, who recently adopted him, renamed him “DoUG”.

Offbeat Earth

1/24/11

Officials: 'Bath salts' are growing drug problem !


FULTON, Miss. – When Neil Brown got high on dangerous chemicals sold as bath salts, he took his skinning knife and slit his face and stomach repeatedly. Brown survived, but authorities say others haven't been so lucky after snorting, injecting or smoking powders with such innocuous-sounding names as Ivory Wave, Red Dove and Vanilla Sky.

Some say the effects of the powders are as powerful as abusing methamphetamine. Increasingly, law enforcement agents and poison control centers say the advertised bath salts with complex chemical names are an emerging menace in several U.S. states where authorities talk of banning their sale.

From the Deep South to California, emergency calls are being reported over-exposure to the stimulants the powders often contain: mephedrone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone, also known as MDPV.

Sold under such names as Ivory Wave, Bliss, White Lightning and Hurricane Charlie, the chemicals can cause hallucinations, paranoia, rapid heart rates and suicidal thoughts, authorities say. The chemicals are in products sold legally at convenience stores and on the Internet as bath salts and even plant foods. However, they aren't necessarily being used for the purposes on the label.

Mississippi lawmakers this week began considering a proposal to ban the sale of the powders, and a similar step is being sought in Kentucky. In Louisiana, the bath salts were outlawed by an emergency order after the state's poison center received more than 125 calls in the last three months of 2010 involving exposure to the chemicals.

In Brown's case, he said he had tried every drug from heroin to crack and was so shaken by terrifying hallucinations that he wrote one Mississippi paper urging people to stay away from the advertised bath salts.

"I couldn't tell you why I did it," Brown said, pointing to his scars. "The psychological effects are still there."

While Brown survived, sheriff's authorities in one Mississippi county say they believe one woman overdosed on the powders there. In southern Louisiana, the family of a 21-year-old man says he cut his throat and ended his life with a gunshot. Authorities are investigating whether a man charged with capital murder in the December death of a Tippah County, Miss., sheriff's deputy was under the influence of the bath salts.

The stimulants aren't regulated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, but are facing federal scrutiny. Law officers say some of the substances are being shipped from Europe, but origins are still unclear.

Gary Boggs, an executive assistant at the DEA, said there's a lengthy process to restrict these types of designer chemicals, including reviewing the abuse data. But it's a process that can take years.

Dr. Mark Ryan, director of Louisiana's poison control center, said he thinks state bans on the chemicals can be effective. He said calls about the chemicals have dropped sharply since Louisiana banned their sale in January.

Ryan said cathinone, the parent substance of the drugs, comes from a plant grown in Africa and is regulated. He said MDPV and mephedrone are made in a lab, and they aren't regulated because they're not marketed for human consumption. The stimulants affect neurotransmitters in the brain, he said.

"It causes intense cravings for it. They'll binge on it three or four days before they show up in an ER. Even though it's a horrible trip, they want to do it again and again," Ryan said.

Ryan said at least 25 states have received calls about exposure, including Nevada and California. He said Louisiana leads with the greatest number of cases at 165, or 48 percent of the U.S. total, followed by Florida with at least 38 calls to its poison center.

Dr. Rick Gellar, medical director for the California Poison Control System, said the first call about the substances came in Oct. 5, and a handful of calls have followed since. But he warned: "The only way this won't become a problem in California is if federal regulatory agencies get ahead of the curve. This is a brand new thing." In the Midwest, the Missouri Poison Center at Cardinal Glennon Children's Medical Center received at least 12 calls in the first two weeks of January about teenagers and young adults abusing such chemicals, said Julie Weber, the center's director. The center received eight calls about the powders all of last year.

Dr. Richard Sanders, a general practitioner working in Covington, La., said his son, Dickie, snorted some of the chemicals and endured three days of intermittent delirium. Dickie Sanders missed major arteries when he cut his throat. As he continued to have visions, his physician father tried to calm him. But the elder Sanders said that as he slept, his son went into another room and shot himself.

"If you could see the contortions on his face. It just made him crazy," said Sanders. He added that the coroner's office confirmed the chemicals were detected in his son's blood and urine.

Sanders warns the substances are far more dangerous than some of their brand names imply.

"I think everybody is taking this extremely lightly. As much as we outlawed it in Louisiana, all these kids cross over to Mississippi and buy whatever they want," he said.

A small packet of the chemicals typically costs as little as $20.

In northern Mississippi's Itawamba County, Sheriff Chris Dickinson said his office has handled about 30 encounters with users of the advertised bath salts in the past two months alone. He said the problem grew last year in his rural area after a Mississippi law began restricting the sale of pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient in making methamphetamine.

Dickinson said most of the bath salt users there have been meth addicts and can be dangerous when using them.

"We had a deputy injured a week ago. They were fighting with a guy who thought they were two devils. That's what makes this drug so dangerous," he said.

But Dickinson said the chemicals are legal for now, leaving him no choice but to slap users with a charge of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor.

Kentucky state lawmaker John Tilley said he's moving to block the drug's sale there, preparing a bill for consideration when his legislature convenes shortly. Angry that the powders can be bought legally, he said: "If my 12-year-old can go in a store and buy it, that concerns me."

By :Shelia Byrd, Associated Press

No app for this: Croc gulps phone, starts ringing !


KIEV, Ukraine – Workers at a Ukrainian aquarium didn't believe it when a visitor said a crocodile swallowed her phone. Then the reptile started ringing.

The accident in the eastern city of Dnipropetrovsk sounds a bit like "Peter Pan," in which a crocodile happily went "tick-tock" after gulping down an alarm clock.

But Gena, the 14-year-old croc who swallowed the phone, has hardly been living a fairy tale: He hasn't eaten or had a bowel movement in four weeks and appears depressed and in pain.

Gena noshed on the Nokia phone after Rimma Golovko dropped it in the water. She had stretched out her arm, trying to snap a photo of Gena opening his mouth, when the phone slipped.

"This should have been a very dramatic shot, but things didn't work out," she said.

Employees were skeptical when Golovko told them what happened. "But then the phone started ringing and the sound was coming from inside our Gena's stomach and we understood she wasn't lying," said Alexandra, an employee who declined to give her last name as she wasn't authorized to speak publicly.

Since then, Gena has been refusing food and acting listless. He also won't play with three fellow African crocodiles, despite being the leader in the group.

"His behavior has changed," Alexandra said. "He moves very little and swims much less than he used to."

Doctors tried to whet the crocodile's appetite this week by feeding him live quail rather than the pork or beef he usually gets once a week. The quail were injected with vitamins and a laxative, but while Gena smothered one bird, he didn't eat it.

Dnipropetrovsk chief veterinarian Oleksandr Shushlenko said the crocodile will be taken for an X-ray next week if he continues to refuse food. Surgically removing the phone would be a last resort, he said, since incisions and stitches usually take at least three weeks to heal in reptiles and the procedure is dangerous for the animal and the vets.

"Everything will depend on where the foreign body is located," Shushlenko said. "We don't have much experience working with such large animals."

The crocodile in "Peter Pan" with the ticking stomach was on the hunt for Captain Hook after getting a taste for the pirate's flesh from eating one of his hands. But luckily for Hook, he could always hear the crocodile coming.

Golovko has about as much optimism for retrieving her phone as Hook did for retrieving his hand. But she does want to get back the phone's SIM card, which holds her precious photos and contacts.

By :Maria Danilova, Associated Press