Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

This is a really great invention — a hand held water bottle that can purify a year’s worth of water. It removes not only parasites and bacteria, but also viruses. It was just announced recently at a defense industry tradeshow and was a big hit among military commanders who need a better way to get [...]

Suspicions of a link between Aspartame (the commonly used artificial sweetener) and various forms of cancer have received another boost from a new Italian study. The study found that even at relatively low levels of consumption, rats exposed to Aspartame had a significantly increased risk of several types of cancer. The implications of this are [...]

This is a somewhat scary article about the hazards of genetically modified grapes and the wines they may be used to produce. The article is from the extreme anti-genetic-engineering perspective, and so I don’t know how balanced it is or what the opposing view might say. But it is certainly food for thought… or thought [...]

Check out this fascinating video on the correct way to order and eat sushi in Japan. Very informative! I had no idea that all these years I had been doing it all wrong. How embarrassing!
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My cousin, Jeremy (the reincarnation of Ernest Hemmingway, I am certain), lives out by Muir Beach, San Francisco. Today he and some manly-man friends are going fishing for "monkey faced eel." YUCK. But ok, anyway, they’re the ones who have to eat the stuff. Now I’m not a fan of eel (can you tell?), and [...]

New research suggests that all the world’s ocean seafood stocks will be gone by 2050…

WASHINGTON (AP) – Clambakes, crabcakes, swordfish steaks and even
humble fish sticks could be little more than a fond memory in a few
decades. If current trends of overfishing and pollution continue, the
populations of just about all seafood face collapse by 2048, a [...]

I just improvised tonight and made
something pretty yummy that you might want to try sometime.
Take a cut of really good
steak 
Make a marinade with a half bottle of
red wine, chili spices (chili, cumin, oregano, onion powder, mesquite), copious amounts of rosemary, garlic flakes or cut garlic slices, a little bit of cayenne, and a little
salt. [...]

It has just come out that supplies of rice in the USA have been contaminated with a gene that was not approved for human consumption. 
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A University of Arizona professor has invented a ripeness sticker that shows how ripe a piece of fruit is. Why didn’t I think of this!!! This is a simple, brilliant idea. It’s right up there with the blue-tip match. The University of Arizona is going to make a lot of money on this.
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The next generation of the breathalyzer won’t just measure blood alchohol content, it will detect many types of disease as well. A laser-based technology for measuring the breath is being proposed as a viable alternative to blood tests.
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Hi everyone, the next SF Web Innovators Network (SFWIN) meetup is happening at the SF office of Adobe (formerly Macromedia), on April 13, 2006.
We had over 140 people at our last event and a number of companies did demos as well. If you are in the SF Bay Area and in the Internet or [...]

A new study has found a fatal flaw in past studies that claimed moderated drinking is good for your health. It seems the past studies compared moderate drinkers to abstainers, and found the moderate drinkers were more healthy. Unfortunately what they neglected to consider was the fact that many of their abstainers were abstaining because [...]

More evidence that many synthetic food and beverage packaging materials are unsafe:
A CHEMICAL used to make food wrapping and line tin cans could be the
cause of surging prostate cancer rates in men, says a study.
Bisphenol A is widely used in the food industry to make
polycarbonate drinks bottles and the resins used to line tin [...]

More news about aspartame ("Nutrasweet"), which is being found to be far more toxic than anyone imagined…  (from: this article)
Combining food additives may be harmful, say researchers
   

  · Aspartame and artificial colourings investigated
  · Mice nerve cells stopped growing in experiments

Felicity Lawrence, consumer affairs correspondent
  Wednesday December  21, 2005
  The Guardian

   New
research [...]

A recent study has found that human-level dosages of aspartame (the artificial sweetener formerly known as Nutrasweet and now cleverly disguised by new, obscure trade-names) causes stastitically significant increases in the occurrance of multiple forms of cancer. In other words, don’t drink diet colas that include aspartame, don’t chew sugar-free gum, and when you see [...]

Yuck. I hate sauerkraut. But even I will eat the stuff if it turns out to help fight bird-flu, as this article reports. Anyway, the good news is that kimchee may be equally effective; kimchi is delicious.
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This article presents some fascinating evidence that nutrition has a direct relationship on behavior, particularly antisocial behavior.
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A modified form of salt water has an ion imbalance that kills viruses, bacteria and other single-celled organisms. It also speeds burn and wound healing dramatically. Best of all, it’s safe if ingested (and has no calories!).
Meanwhile, researchers continue to discover that germs are the cause of previously misunderstood diseases, such as many cancers.
[...]

An unusual chef with a technical bent has modified an inkjet printer to print in edible colors on edible paper. He’s printing out edible pictures, and even making his menus edible. But his ideas for the technology go far beyond this. Read the article here, then eat it!
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This is an interesting article that points out some facts and unanswered questions about the safety of Splenda, an artificial sweetener that has been gaining in popularity since 2000.
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The US Army has developed a new way to enable soldiers to carry less water. They have created rehydratable food rations that come in a wrapping that is actually a sophisticated semi-permeable membrane. So to rehydrate the food, soldiers can simply pee on it, or even pour dirty water on it if that’s all [...]

A Russian scientist proposes turning all that wasted blood out there into yogurt, milk, cheese, etc. To quote the film, “Soylent Green is Made of People….!!!” Thanks, but I’m not hungry.
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Shrimp fishing and shrimp farming are devastating the oceans. This brief report lists some of the surprising statistics related to this problem. For example, did you know that the ratio of discarded (wasted) fish to kept shrimp in a typical catch is often as high as ten to one? And what happens to all that [...]

Yikes this one freaks me out — A project to splice the DNA of dead people to apple trees as a way to preserve people’s “essence” after death. Fortunately, it has hit some snags. I would not want to bite into an apple and find out that I was actually eating grandma!!!! This project really [...]

Another reason to eat chocolate is that it protects the arteries. Considering all the chocolate I’ve been eating lately, this is very good news.
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One more reason to drink coffee — a major study found that those who drank the most coffee had the lowest chance of getting diabetes.
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Researchers have discovered a safe way to rapidly bring about weight loss, using a protein called Leptin.
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New research and experiments indicate that deliberately ingesting certain types of parasitic worms may be the cure for colitis, hay fever, asthma and a host of other auto-immune diseases. Gross!!! But seriously, the theory is that since humans co-evolved with gut-worms they may in fact be necessary to our health. This is an interesting idea [...]

This is really big. Scientists have discovered that a molecule that is not normally found in humans — but IS found in tumors — comes from milk and red meat. They also found that the human body reacts to this molecule with an immune response. In other words, drinking milk and eating red meat [...]