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Hello everyone, I just wanted to give everyone a brief update on our recent spam user purge. I used a plugin that flagged every user account for deletion that hasn’t been used to write posts or comments, but there was no way to automatically exclude users that have only posted in the forum from this list. So I went through every forum post to look for users that have commented in the forum, checked  Thomas Sims, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Biological Sciences department at NIU. He was interviewed for a column about genetically engineered crops written for Northern Star Online, that claimed that GE foods are unsafe, quoting Dr. Oz, Jeffrey Smith, and the AAEM. Here is an example of the claims made in the piece.
His words only got a brief mention, and his response is a model for how scientists should respond to these kinds of claims. We have received permission to republish his spot-on commentary. (He has asked that I obscure the name of the young reporter who wrote the column so that it is about the information and not the person. So only the name has been edited.) Enjoy! Column regarding genetically modified foods was one-sided and misinformedThis author’s column on Genetically Modified (GM) foods is a thinly-veiled hatchet job, repeating a mixture of half-truths, lies and grossly misinformed opinions about this technology.
Continue reading… Well, if you saw the fireworks last week and over the weekend, you’ll know that Biofortified has just moved to a new host. A faster host, and a greener host! We started having site errors that coincided with our move to Dreamhost – but we couldn’t tell if it was entirely due to that, or the large assortment of plugins we have installed on the site to make everything from the Forum, Community pages, Syndication, and GENERA work. It seems that the problem was a combination of both issues. Each plugin takes up a certain amount of server RAM to run, and the hosting account only let us use so much. Unlimited disk space, yes. Unlimited Bandwidth, yes. But should our site use more than a certain piddly amount of active memory – comments are lost and authors have trouble saving their posts. We had to pay more for more memory, but it did not fix the problems. When our site went down (again) due to server errors early last week, within hours we were in agreement that it was time to get off of Dreamhost.
Continue reading… Update: Biofortified is now in the process of transferring to a new web host, please bear with us as we make this transition. Comments are temporarily disabled. Update 2: Biofortified has completed the move to our new server – comments are re-enabled! ***** You probably noticed the downtime that we experienced Monday afternoon. And memories of previous page loading errors are not far behind. Well, we are finally fed up with our |
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Copyright © 2012 Biofortified All text on this site is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License, unless otherwise stated. |
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Greenpeace goes after Australian Wheat
Update: See post a week later– Greenpeace destroys Australian wheat trials
Last week, blogs and twitter feeds were lit up by news that a group of scientists had written a letter to CSIRO, in Australia, criticizing them for proposing a nutritional trial of genetically engineered wheat. It appeared with this article, Scientists reject human trials of GM Wheat, and is part of a new thrust of transparently poor public relations. And it foreshadows more to come. An excerpt:
The trials in question appeared to be of the simple kind – the wheat has been altered in a way that should affect its glycemic index, how rapidly the sugars are absorbed into the bloodstream, and that CSIRO is interested in seeing if it has the desired effect when eaten by human beings. These kinds of studies have been done before, such as on calcium-biofortified carrots as described in this post. The letter appeared to be out of place.
While news about this letter was easy to find, the actual letter itself was not, nor were the names of the “prominent” scientists who signed it. The article mentioned only two: Dave Schubert, and Michael Antoniou. I have had contact with Schubert before, so I emailed him to find out what the text of the letter was, and who signed it. He responded promptly with a draft of the letter that he signed. However, when I asked if he knew who signed it (or who to contact), he had this to say:
Continue reading…