August 29, 2007
Category: Art&Design • Technology
It's difficult to nail down the last time this antique city was considered cutting edge. Whatever the answer, New Orleans was not defined by its spirit of innovation in the decades preceding Hurricane Katrina. But the flood that changed everything two years ago has changed that too: Today, by accident and by necessity, this city is awash in ideas: the new and the ambitious, the au courant and avant-garde, the idealistic and the slightly nutty. ( LA Times)
Posted by EJGili at 11:55 AM • 0 Comments
Category: Food&Drink • Health
Radiation has its purposes when it comes to mutating the genetic structure of plants. Microwaving orchids has produced quite a few happy accidents. Dr. Pierre Lagoda the head of plant breeding and genetics at the International Atomic Energy Agency, has been rolling the dice for decades using radiation to scramble the genetic material in crops, a process that has produced valuable mutants like red grapefruit, disease-resistant cocoa and premium barley for Scotch whiskey. (NY Times)
Posted by EJGili at 11:32 AM • 0 Comments
Category:
Scientists may have cracked the merlot code. But but don't hold your breath for that first bottle of "Double Helix Red." The announcement marked the first full accounting of a fruit's genetic material and revealed tantalizing information about the link between a grapevine's DNA and the aromas and flavors of its grapes.
Vintners are not exactly rejoicing over the prospect of science -enhanced varietals. After spending decades teaching consumers to savor familiar, often centuries-old grape varieties, wineries have little motivation to add an uncertain new variable to a crowded field of products.( Sac Bee)
Posted by EJGili at 11:15 AM • 2 Comments
August 28, 2007
Category: Food&Drink • Health
The unintended consequences of factory farming are just beginning to be fully understood. Fattening pigs for market in cramped pens isn't good for the animal and ultimately not for us as consumers or the environment. According to new research from the University of Illinois the routine use of antibiotics in swine production is leaking from waste lagoons into groundwater,
Researchers report that some genes found in hog waste lagoons are transferred, "like batons," from one bacterial species to another. This migration across species and into new environments sometimes dilutes, and sometimes amplifies, genes conferring antibiotic resistance. (ENS)
Posted by EJGili at 11:51 AM • 0 Comments
Category: Environment • Technology
Marc van Roosmalen is a world-renowned primatologist whose research in the Amazon has led to the discovery of five species of monkeys and a new primate genus. But precisely because of that work, Dr. van Roosmalen was recently sentenced to nearly 16 years in prison and jailed in Manaus, Brazil. On charges of biopiracy. Outraging scientists in Brazil and abroad claiming the laws are xenophobic and increasingly stifling scientific inquiry. ( NY Times)
Posted by EJGili at 11:31 AM • 0 Comments
Category: Food&Drink • Health
China plies its trade, apparently without regard for the things that make commerce not only dependable but possible: respect for intellectual property, food and drug purity, and basic product safety. With each tawdry revelation, China's brand of capitalism looks increasingly menacing and foreign to our own sensibilities. That's a tempting way to see things, but wrong. Does anyone recall America's expansionist period of the 1800s and subsequent empire building abroad. ( Boston Globe)
Posted by EJGili at 11:06 AM • 1 Comments
August 27, 2007
Category: Energy • Environment
China's environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut. (NY Times)
Posted by EJGili at 12:24 PM • 0 Comments
Category: Environment • Food&Drink
Stomachs and petrol tanks are for the first time in competition and farmers everywhere are asking themselves a novel question: am I planting food or energy? There is no single source for the revolution sweeping across every continent. But one starting point is Jim Curl's 350-acre farm in Brahman, Oklahoma. This year he planted a third of it with genetically modified corn instead of the area's traditional crop of wheat. ( Times Online)
Posted by EJGili at 12:15 PM • 1 Comments
Category: Food&Drink
There are few satisfactions in the world that compare with eating a sun-warmed tomato that has turned the perfect red and is just barely pliant to the touch: plucked, wiped on the inside of your shirt, and bitten into right there in the garden, seeds slurping down your chin so you have to lean over to keep your shirt clean. ( CS Monitor)
Posted by EJGili at 12:06 PM • 1 Comments
August 25, 2007
Category: Commentary
In NYC Stuyvesant HS is a haven for the five boroughts smartest students. The ultimate magnate school for high achieving middle schoolers seeking entry to the finest high- school education money can't buy. Back in the day, my friends competed for slots at Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Sci and Stuyvesant mainly because the local high schools were all too often holding pens for numbskulls. Getting to and from school was often challenge enough without spending your days getting yolked in the halls. The elite high schools were considered to be at least beatings free zones and desirable for that reason alone. ( The NY Observer)
Posted by EJGili at 12:26 PM • 1 Comments
Enrique Gili is a freelance writer covering Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (
