Brominated Battle: Soda Chemical Has Cloudy Health History

By Brett Israel and Environmental Health News | December 12, 2011


MARIETTA, Ga.It's Monday night at the Battle & Brew, a gamer hangout in this Atlanta suburb. The crowd is slumping in chairs, ears entombed in headphones, eyes locked on flat-screen monitors and minds lost in tonights game of choice: "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim."

To help stay alert all night, each man has an open can of "gamer fuel" inches from his keyboard. "I've seen some of these dudes plow through six sodas in six hours," said Brian Smawley, a regular at the gamer bar.

Gamers say they chug their fuel for the sugar and caffeine, but drinkers of Mountain Dew and some other citrus-flavored drinks are also getting a dose of a synthetic chemical called brominated vegetable oil, or BVO.

Patented by chemical companies as a flame retardant, and banned in food throughout Europe and Japan, BVO has been added to sodas for decades in North America. Now some scientists have a renewed interest in this little-known ingredient, found in 10 percent of sodas in the United States.


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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=soda-chemical-cloudy-health-history

The Secret Problem With That Testing Column

By Scott Huler | December 12, 2011



I hope you won’t object to a post not specifically on point about energy or transmission or connectivity. But I think it gets directly at how we understand those topics, so I think it’s worth mentioning.

Everybody has been reading and posting and cross-posting and commenting on this post, in the blog of Valerie Strauss, who writes The Answer Sheet blog for the Washington Post. In it Strauss allows Marion Brady, an educator living in Florida, to guest post, and Brady talks about a friend of his, Rick Roach, on the board of education in Orange County, Florida. He has, as Strauss says, “two masters degrees: in education and educational psychology. He has trained over 18,000 educators in classroom management and course delivery skills in six eastern states over the last 25 years.”

Brady’s post describes how Roach, to better understand the tests his students were constantly having to face, took a “version of the state standardized test and was horrified at what he found,” as Strauss says. Roach says he couldn’t answer a single one of the math questions but was able to guess right on one-sixth of them. He also says on the reading portion of the test he got a score of 62 percent.

The conclusion is simple: the tests make no sense; they test the wrong things; they don’t accurately reflect a student’s capacities, achievements, or aptitude for study. It’s a listing of problems expressing a distrust of the current educational focus on testing that’s familiar — Brady himself wrote a long guest post for Strauss on November 1 2011 on that exact topic, listing the many reasons educators resist test-based programs like No Child Left Behind.


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http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2011/12/12/the-secret-problem-with-that-testing-column/
Interesting column. Sounds like Roach is an idiot. Maybe a well meaning idiot, but still...

Lets Talk: A Story of Interspecies Communication

Posted on: December 12, 2011 5:00 PM, by Pamela Ronald

It was Sept 4, 1939, the day after the UK declared war on Germany, when mathematician Alan Turing reported to work at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. Within weeks of his arrival, Turing and his colleagues were able to intercept high-level encrypted enemy communication signals and decode a vast number of these messages. The intelligence gleaned from this effort was passed on to field commanders, a process that was decisive to Allied victory.

Like the German military strategists, single-celled bacteria communicate with each other using coded messages to coordinate attacks on their targets. For bacteria these targets are plants and animals that provide the nutrients needed for growth. Until now, the diversity of codes employed by invading bacteria was thought to be extremely limited. However, our new research shows that bacteria communicate with a previously unknown signal. The research is described in two articles published today in the Public Library of Science and Discovery Medicine.

In a feat worthy of the Turing cryptographers, some plants have evolved a cypher-breaking detection system, called the XA21 receptor, that intercept the bacterial code and use this information to trigger a robust immune response, preventing disease.
Over the last 20 years, researchers have shown that bacteria employ specific signals to communicate. These signaling molecules accumulate in the external environment as the cells grow. When the concentration of signal reaches a certain threshold level, the individual bacteria mobilize concerted, group actions. Professor Bonnie Bassler, an early pioneer in studies of bacterial communication, calls the signaling molecules "bacterial Esperanto".

more

http://scienceblogs.com/tomorrowstable/2011/12/lets_talk_a_story_of_interspec.php

Norway out of butter

By Paula Duffy on 2011-12-12

Norway is experiencing a shortage of butter that is being attributed to a weight-loss program sweeping the nation as well as a wet summer that affected the quality of animal feed.

Norway's citizens are enamored of a diet that preaches that higher fat intake while limiting carbohydrates on a daily basis is the path to weight loss. As a result, butter has soared in usage to such an extent that butter is unavailable in certain regions of the country.

It has reached a stage that headlines are popping up in the country's newspapers. Finnish website Helsingin Sanomat reports now that the shortage has spread to Finland.

Norwegian grocers are rationing the sale of butter and it has only added to the panic that traditional Christmas treats are in danger this season. To combat that, Norway's citizen bakers are buying from what government officials are calling a "black market" of butter.

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http://www.huliq.com/10061/norway-out-butter-black-market-sales-soar

Texas approves controversial license plate featuring crosses

Last week, the board of the state's Department of Motor Vehicles voted to approve the "Calvary Hill" specialty license plate that reads "One State Under God" and features three crosses.

Motorists who choose to buy the plate pay a surcharge, which is divided between the state and the sponsoring group -- in the case of Calvary Hill, a Christian-based youth anti-gang ministry in the east Texas city of Nacogdoches.

The board, all appointees of Gov. Rick Perry, voted 4 to 3 to approve the plate the same week he unveiled a television ad in Iowa in which he vowed to end President Obama's "attacks on religion."

The Republican presidential hopeful has avoided commenting about the Calvary Hill plate, saying the DMV board acted alone.

more

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/12/texas-calvary-hill-license-plate-crosses.html

Saudi Arabia executes woman convicted of 'sorcery'

(12-12) 05:21 PST RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) --

Saudi authorities have executed a woman convicted of practicing magic and sorcery.

The Saudi Interior Ministry says in a statement the execution took place Monday, but gave no details on the woman's crime.

The London-based al-Hayat daily, however, quoted Abdullah al-Mohsen, chief of the religious police who arrested the woman, as saying she had tricked people into thinking she could treat illnesses, charging them $800 per session.

The paper said a female investigator followed up, and the woman was arrested in April, 2009, and later convicted in a Saudi court.

It did not give the woman's name, but said she was in her 60s.



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/12/12/international/i052156S05.DTL

Toon: Over the counter birth control

Toon: What a Ragtag Bunch!

Mislabeled Chinese Honey Leads to Criminal Busts

BY ANDREW SCHNEIDER | DEC 09, 2011
After a four-month investigation, federal authorities have indicted yet another group of importers for allegedly smuggling Chinese honey into the U.S.

Since September, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection have seized more than 5 million pounds of intentionally mislabeled Chinese honey at customs warehouses near 11 U.S. ports or being shipped to honey packing operations.

According to U.S. Attorney Robert O'Neill, of the Central District of Florida, the lengthy investigation of the honey smuggling resulted in a grand jury issuing indictments against three individuals for smuggling honey from China into the U.S.

The illicit honey came from more than 120 large ocean-going shipping containers unloaded at large and small ports throughout the country. Each metal box was packed with 64 steel drums each holding 644 pounds of honey.

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http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/12/mislabeled-chinese-honey-leads-to-criminal-busts/

The Surprising Ingredient In Raw Cookie Dough That Could Make You Sick

by NANCY SHUTE

Cookie dough may be one of the joys of the holiday season, but it's dangerous, at least for people who nibble it raw.

That's the lesson from a new study of a 2009 outbreak of E. coli bacteria, which sickened 77 people, most of them teenage girls and children. The outbreak was traced back to eating raw Nestlé Toll House cookie dough. It was the first time that packaged cookie dough had ever caused an outbreak.

Now for the next surprise: Food safety experts think the most likely culprit is flour. Their findings appear today in the journal Clinical Infectious Disease.

"We didn't conclusively implicate the flour," Karen Neil, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who investigated the outbreak, tells The Salt. But of all the ingredients, she says, flour seems most likely.


Some ingredients, including molasses, sugar, and margarine, had been processed to kill pathogens. And in the past, some forms of E. coli have been found in commercial flour.

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http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2011/12/09/143450624/the-surprising-ingredient-in-raw-cookie-dough-that-could-make-you-sick