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On or about today, Halloween, the world is expected to surpass 7 Billion human inhabitants. That is, plus or minus 56 million. Based on estimates from the United Nations, October 31st lies in the middle of a 12-month margin of uncertainty, wherein is is highly likely that more than 7,000,000,000 people will simultaneously be alive on this world. While babies being born today are being claimed to be the 7 billionth baby, and statisticians  Last night I woke up in a fog, face down on the couch, fully dressed with my work clothes on. It was 3:44 AM and the artifacts around me described the scene. A partially eaten salad, my glasses crooked on my head, a laptop with an exhausted battery and the television running an infomercial led me to the conclusion that I closed my eyes for a minute while eating dinner and drifted off to sleep. Fumbling with the remote, I clicked through a few middle-of-the-night stations. There’s a vibrating weight to firm womens’ arms. Click. A guy with a tie on a news station says that climate change is a hoax. Click. A woman on the next channel lost fifty pounds in a month eating just cookies. Click. A former playboy playmate says that vaccines are dangerous. Another channel has a person claiming evidence that the terrorist attack on 9-11 was an inside job. I turn off the television, put on my jammies and head off to bed, my dog Stinkie following behind. The claims of kooks go in one ear, rattle around for a moment and then leave out the other. We are bombarded with junk science, all the time, every day. I don’t get mad, I consider the source and let it go. They have an agenda, they have to appeal to viewers, and if subscribing to anti-science or abject untruth is their method then so be it. Financial and political gains are there to be had if you can fool enough people. This is part I of a three-part series on Orgenic* Backlash. How is the organic sector handling the argument in favor of integrating of genetically engineered crops into organic agricultural systems? When I read the news a few weeks ago I was at first puzzled, and then inspired. Jim Riddle, Organic Outreach Coordinator for the University of Minnesota, wrote an article for the Rodale Institute outlining 10 reasons why genetic engineering is incompatible with organic agriculture. This is one of the issues that we tackle quite often here at Biofortified. So here are his ten reasons:
The UK supermarket Waitrose announced that they are selling a brand new variety of strawberry, a pale white berry with red seeds dubbed the “Pineberry” so named because it tastes and smells like pineapple. The berries appear in the Daily Mail article Pineberries and cream? The new summer fruit which looks like a white strawberry… but tastes like a pineapple. Due to the timing of the press coverage at the end of March, people |
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Why did The Atlantic publish this piece trying to link miRNAs and GMOs?
Editor’s note: republished with permission from The Biology Files.
By Emily Willingham
A study from a Chinese group led by Chen-Yu Zhang of Nanking University and published in Cell Research, has uncovered the fascinating result that when people eat rice, they can absorb microRNAs (miRNAs)–tiny sequences of RNA–from the rice into the blood. These rice-originating miRNAs turn up in blood and tissues of people who eat rice and…here’s the kicker…one type of rice miRNA interacts with human proteins that are responsible for removing LDL (“bad” cholesterol) from the blood (!). It’s the first report of plant miRNAs ending up in people by way of diet and the finding that at least one of them alters an important process in the body.
The implications could extend in many a direction, but not as far as writer Ari Levaux would like to take them in this remarkably confusing article published on the Atlantic Website. Before taking on the errors and the overstretch that are that piece, let’s look at something far more interesting: miRNAs themselves.
Continue reading…