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A 13-year-old girl from Connecticut named Mallory Kievman has come up with a pretty clever cure for hiccups: vinegar lollipops! She developed the idea after researching various at-home remedies—a teaspoon of vinegar, hard candy, etc—as well as the physiological reason for a bout of hiccups. More »
from Gizmodo
Here’s something that might just blow your mind: ketchup—the national condiment of 1896, according to the New York Tribune—wasn’t always tomato based. In fact, if it had remained in its early form, we might be spreading fish paste on our burgers (gulp) instead of the tangy tomato-y goodness we presently rely on. More »
from Gizmodo
Americans are now consuming more chicken than beef or pork. To help meet the demand, Texas has become the sixth biggest state in poultry production. But more chickens mean more waste, and more pollution.
from Morning Edition
How could organic stuff not be better? Eschewing pesticides and fertilizers is better for consumers, farmers, the environment, and all the denizens of the ecosystems that comprise it—everyone knows that. Even ask Prince Charles.
Yet, like many ideas that seem to be straightforward, this one turns out to be somewhat complex. If organic agriculture has lower yields, it will require more land to generate the same amount of calories as conventional farms. It will thus cause more deforestation and the loss of biodiversity that accompanies it—hardly environmental boons. To find out how things balance out, researchers at McGill and the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota have performed a meta-analysis comparing the yields of organic and conventional farming. Their results are published in Nature.
from Ars Technica
Mutated shrimp from Al Jazeera’s video report
Al Jazeera‘s report on seafood in the Gulf Coast reads like a horror story: eyeless shrimp, fish with oozing sores, clawless crabs. Unfortunately these deformities are very real and disturbingly common two years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. Chemical dispersants used by BP to “clean up†the oil spill are the likely cause.
Deformities happen even in ordinary circumstances, but scientists and fishers are seeing them in unprecedented scales in Gulf marine life. For example, half the shrimp caught in a Louisiana bay lacked eye sockets, according to fishers interviewed by journalist Dahr Jamail.
“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],†[commercial fisher Tracy Kuhn] added, “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.
Perhaps the most troubling line in the whole article is this: “Questions raised by Al Jazeera’s investigation remain largely unanswered.†When Jamail …
from Discover Magazine
Fast-food items in the U.S. are much saltier than the same items in Europe, according to new research. France and the United Kingdom had the least salty food overall.
from News
Booooo!!!
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Modern food packaging has transformed our diets for the better in many ways—fresh-tasting canned tomatoes in January and low rates of food-borne disease are not to be scoffed at. But increasing scrutiny of the materials in the cans, bottles, and vacuum packs you bring back from the store have raised fears that certain chemicals—notably, those like bisphenol A (BPA) that can mimic hormones such as estrogen—may be prompting early puberty in children, among other health problems. Last year, the National Resource Defense Council sued the FDA demanding that the agency respond to a petition to ban BPA in food packaging. Yesterday, the FDA announced that it would not be banning BPA, saying that the science linking the chemical to health risks is not yet convincing. But some companies, responding to consumer desires, are already moving to remove it from their packaging.
Studies have found that there are low levels of BPA present in many people’s urine, but what’s still under discussion is whether the amounts we pick up can do anything to us, and even if it does little to adults, whether there are any stages of development—infancy, say—when BPA exposure might be …
from Discover Magazine