#NASA issues call for new space taxis to fly to International Space station NASA hopes to be able to fly its astronauts on commercial carriers by about 2017.
Program managers from NASA said they are looking for at least two U s. firms to design
and build space taxis to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space station. NASA plans to invest $300 million to $500 million in each of the firms selected under new 21-month partnership agreements, Ed Mango,
manager of NASA s Commercial Crew program, said at an industry briefing at the Kennedy space center prior to the release of a solicitation on Tuesday.
The new program aims to build upon previous NASA investments in companies designing commercial passenger spaceships.
With the retirement of the U s. space shuttles last year, Russia has a monopoly on flying crews to the station,
a $100 billion orbiting laboratory for medical, materials science and other research. China, the only other country that has flown people in orbit,
is not a partner in the project. Russia charges NASA about $60 million per person for rides to the station,
which flies about 240 miles above Earth and is staffed by rotating crews of six astronauts from the United states, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada.
Winning firms would have until May 2014 to complete their integrated designs with the intention,
if funding allows, to test fly their spaceships in orbit by the middle of the decade,
Once again Nut butter produces organic products in upstate New york#t s a pretty successful company as far as organic food goes,
However, Orr noted, Once again Nut butter, we re lucky. If there was a water contamination issue in Nunda,
as Jill Wiener, an upstate cut-flower grower, told The Valley Table, You can buy from an organic farmer who s never going to lease their gas rights,
#Urban Cultivator compact garden Fresh herbs taste better than their dried counterparts, and there is no denying that garden-fresh veggies are preferable to ones that have spent the past several days in a truck or on a supermarket shelf.
the Urban Cultivator is enclosed an hydroponic system designed for continuously growing herbs and smaller vegetables indoors.
#Road Runoff Spurring Spotted salamander Evolution A female spotted salamander gravid with eggs in route to her breeding pool.
There she will lay a cluster of approximately 100 eggs. Eight to ten weeks later, those eggs will hatch as larvae.
In late summer, if the pool has dried not already, larvae will metamorphose into juveniles that migrate to the adjacent upland habitat.
Chief among these is sodium chloride from road salt, which reaches average concentrations of 70 times higher in roadside ponds compared to woodland ponds located several hundred feet from the road.
These animals are growing up in harsh environments where they face a cocktail of contaminants,
In roadside ponds, only 56 percent of salamander eggs survive the first 10 weeks of development,
#Researchers say sugar should be regulated as a toxin Sugar and other sweeteners are so toxic to the human body that they should be regulated as strictly as alcohol by governments worldwide, according to researchers.
A spoonful of sugar might make the medicine go down. But it also makes blood pressure and cholesterol go up,
along with your risk for liver failure, obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Sugar and other sweeteners are, in fact,
so toxic to the human body that they should be regulated as strictly as alcohol by governments worldwide, according to a commentary in the current issue of the journal Nature by researchers at the University of California,
and drinks that include added sugar, banning sales in or near schools and placing age limits on purchases.
and statistics to make their case that added sugar#or, more specifically, sucrose, an even mix of glucose and fructose found in high-fructose corn syrup
and in table sugar made from sugar cane and sugar beets#has been as detrimental to society as alcohol and tobacco.
And chronic diseases related to diet such as heart diseases diabetes and some cancers#for the first time in human history#kill more people than infectious diseases, according to the United nations. Less known,
and still debated, is sugar s role in the obesity and chronic disease pandemic. From an evolutionary perceptive, sugar in the form of fruit was available only a few months of the year, at harvest time,
not a dietary staple. 6 Easy Ways to Eat More Fruits & Veggies Today, added sugar,
as opposed to natural sugars found in fruits, is added often in foods ranging from soup to soda.
Americans consume on average more than 600 calories per day from added sugar, equivalent to a whopping 40 teaspoons.
Nature made sugar hard to get; man made it easy, #the researchers write. Many researchers are seeing sugar as not just empty calories,
#but rather a chemical that becomes toxic in excess. At issue is the fact that glucose from complex carbohydrates,
such as whole grains, is metabolized safely by cells throughout the body, but the fructose element of sugar is metabolized primarily by the liver.
This is where the trouble can begin#taxing the liver, causing fatty liver disease, and ultimately leading to insulin resistance, the underlying causes of obesity and diabetes.
Added sugar, more so than the fructose in fiber-rich fruit hits the liver more directly and can cause more damage#in laboratory rodents, anyway.
Some researchers, however, remained unconvinced of the evidence of sugar s toxic effect on the human body at current consumption levels,
as high as they are. Economists to the rescue Lustig, a medical doctor in UCSF s Department of Pediatrics, compares added sugar to tobacco
and alcohol (coincidentally made from sugar) in that it is addictive, toxic and has a negative impact on society,
thus meeting established public health criteria for regulation. Lustig advocates a consumer tax on any product with added sugar.
Among Lustig s more radical proposals are to ban the sale of sugary drinks to children under age 17
whether a consumer tax#such as a soda tax proposed in many U s. states#is the most effective means of curbing sugar consumption.
not the end product containing sugar. This concept, published last year in the journal Contemporary Economic policy, would give companies an incentive to add less sweetener to their products.
high-fructose corn syrup is ubiquitous in food in part because it is so cheap and serves as a convenient substitute for more high-quality ingredients,
not sugar, is the root cause of obesity and chronic disease. Others argue that it is processed highly foods with simple carbohydrates.
and health food instead of industrial commodities. This new GM corn variety is a joint project between Dow and Monsanto
Such spread has been documented for a while, but this latest is some pretty stark detail: Throughout North dakota, little yellow flowers dot thousands of miles of roadsides.
which grow plants using nutrients without soil. Electric pumps send water up the stands based on a timing system that can be customized for each pod.
Plus, there s the added benefit of growing herbs, vegetables and even fruit at your desk or in your city apartment.
a time sensitive special such as hot bread just pulled from the over, or situational conditions such as announcing the sale of umbrellas during the start of a rainstorm. 11.)
#Experts rate 25 diet plans DASH Diet is best diet overall. The U s. News & World Report rated the Best Diets for 2012 this week,
including 25 different diet plans. The DASH Diet (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) was the winner.
The DASH Diet is a plan to prevent high blood pressure and it took the top spot in the Best Diets Overall category.
Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes (TLC), a diet that s high in fiber and low in fat,
developed by the National institutes of health, took second place. Mayo Clinic Diet, the Mediterranean, and Weight watchers all tied for third place overall.
Mayo Clinic Diet includes foods with low energy density such as fruits and vegetables, and allows dieters to eat more while eating fewer calories.
The Mediterranean plan includes whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, healthy fats such as olive oil, and red wine in moderation.
Weight watchers focuses on portion control and encourages plenty of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy.
such as best diabetes diet, best commercial plan, and easiest diets to follow. David Katz, MD, MPH, founding director of the Yale university Prevention Research center,
and a panel member noted that, The diets near the top of the lists are sensible.#
#Those on the bottom we wouldn t recommend you choose.##Diets on the bottom of the overall list include the Dukan Diet, a high-protein, low-fat, low-carbohydrate plan,
and the Paleo Diet, which encourages eating like ancient hunter-gatherers, with fruits, vegetables, and animal proteins.
Those diets tied for last place. Before choosing, think of your priority, says panel member Andrea Giancoli, RD, a spokeswoman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
Do you want most to eat better? Lose weight? Prevent or manage diabetes? The experts rated the diets in six other ways.
Easiest to follow: Weight watchers Jenny Craig Mediterranean For best weight-loss diets: Weight watchers Tied for second place were Biggest Loser, Jenny Craig,
and raw food. Biggest Loser focuses on weight loss and includes fruits, vegetables, lean proteins,
Raw-food diets focus on eating plant foods in unprocessed or uncooked states. For best diets, commercial plans:
Weight watchers Jenny Craig Biggest Loser For best diabetes diets: Biggest Loser and DASH tied for first place.
Mayo Clinic, Ornish, and vegan were tied next, all. The Ornish plan is a very low-fat diet for weight loss and prevention and reversal of health problems such as heart disease.
Vegan diets exclude meat, fish, poultry, eggs, and dairy products. For best diets that are heart-healthy:
Ornish TLC DASH Best diets for healthy eating: DASH TLC Mediterranean Before picking a plan,
Get more information on the diet before plunging into it, says Marion Franz, MS, RD, a Minneapolis dietitian and another panel member.
Most people will be successful for the first six months on a diet##she says. The real question is
A fly (Apocephalus borealis) had inserted its eggs into the bees, using their bodies as a home for its developing larvae.
Courtesy of John Hafernik The parasitic fly lays eggs in a bee s abdomen. Several days later, the parasitized bee bumbles out of the hives often at night on a solo mission to nowhere.
and where the flies are finding the bees in which they lay their eggs. We assume it s
#That s both because of the mess they might create in the form of rotten fruit
Much like the whack-a-mole game at video arcades, as one problem gets pounded down, another pokes its ugly head out.
Visions of the Great depression and its soup lines were haunting us like a reoccurring nightmare,
Ten years earlier, in March of 1993, Hock gave a dinner speech at the Santa fe Institute where he described his unusual organizational theories in managing VISA,
they are constantly shooting behind the duck.##Similarly, whenever a column is written about the best paying jobs of the future, jobs like civil engineers, registered nurses,
Top 10 Photos June 12, 2011 Weight watchers newest diet plan begins every meal with a vegetable shower
and lays its eggs in my brain, because later you might think you re having a good idea but it s just eggs hatching.#
#--Jack Handey..3.)Top 10 Photos April 19, 2011 When Dr. Seuss came up with the idea,
the technique used is used the same to engineer#oeglowing green rabbits#in Turkey earlier this year:
As excellent as it might be to enable bacon-enthusiasts to more easily locate their quarry in the dark,
These will recycle all nutrients and end the ecological disaster that constitutes contemporary factory farming.
and vegetables and in vitro cloning of muscle tissue for meat, that is meat without animals, thereby ending animal suffering.
#oea long tiresome speech delivered by a frothy pie topping.##It correctly responded#oewhat is a meringue harangue.#
#What is appreciated not widely is that Watson got its knowledge by reading Wikipedia and several other encyclopedias, a total of 200 million pages of natural language documents.
herbal tea pioneer Celestial Seasonings, Storagetek (later acquired by Sun microsystems for $4. 1 billion), and the biochemistry lab that led to Amgen.
a place where visiting Texas schoolteachers could hike, picnic, and listen to lecturesa sort of bucolic TED Conference of the time.
the 19-year-old began gathering herbs in the foothills surrounding Boulder, filling up gunnysacks with chamomile and red clover blossoms, sewing them into little muslin tea bags,
It would become the first year of business of Celestial Seasonings, the brand that became known for teas such as Sleepytime and Red Zinger.
Celestial Seasonings was among the first of many natural-foods companies, including White Wave, maker of Silk-brand soy milk;
and Alfalfa s, a specialty market akin to Whole Foods. For these sorts of entrepreneurs, Boulder was an ideal test market.
A onetime line cook, he started selling premade burritos out of a cooler to support himself.
and Evol Burritos, his 73-employee company, now distributes to supermarkets nationwide and rang up $12. 4 million last year.
Anson, the burrito maker, says it took eight weeks just to get a permit to install a new refrigeration unit at his plant.#
Chocolate Chocolate is delicious, right? Unfortunate, then, that the majority of the world s cocoa supply comes from West Africa,
in other words, the kind of labor that produces the chocolate you re putting in your mouth. Even with slave labor,
At this rate, in about 20 years, chocolate could become a luxury with a caviar-comparable price points.
The fact of the matter is chocolate will just be too expensive to produce en masse. Plus, it s not like other parts of the world can pick up the slack.
fifty years down the line, that candy haul could payoff big time. Sardines This one might not be as upsetting for some of you,
What s more, any sardine eggs we re getting these days are coming from fish born a decade ago#sardine generation that s just about dead.
Goat cheese Back in 2010, the UK saw a major outbreak of Q fever disease. As a result, over 50,000 pregnant goats and sheep were culled
While goat cheese is particularly popular in the time leading up to the holidays#specially in Europe#nother,
This is putting goat cheese suppliers in quite a predicament. As George Paul, director of cheesemaker Bradbury & Son, toldthe Telegraph:
if you start seeing painfully high goat cheese pricetags littering the shelves#ust be glad it s made its way over at all.
Bacon Perhaps the most beloved of salty, cured meats, bacon is on the fast path to breaking hearts.
which is a delightfully real thing, a worldwide shortage of bacon (and other pork products, for that matter)# oeis now unavoidable.#
Of course, this doesn t mean that bacon will be disappearing entirely any time soon, but prices are certainly going to reflect the diminishing stock.
They rubberneck, hotdog, and take pity on turtles, cause fender benders, pileups, and head-on collisions. They nod off at the wheel,
but they had a chicken-and-egg problem. To be had useful, they to be built on a large scale;
#oehe paid us in burritos,#Charles Smart, now a professor of mathematics at M. I t.,told me.#
#oealways the same burritos. But I remember thinking, I hope he likes me and lets me work on this.#
They added cameras, gyros, G. P. S. modules, computers, roll bars, and an electric motor to turn the wheel.
Would he be interested in building a self-driving pizza delivery car? Within five weeks, he and a team of fellow Berkeley graduates and other engineers had re
maps and histories and stories they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing,
Some convert sugar into medicines. Others create moisturizers that can be used in cosmetics. And still others make biofuel,
A vanilla flavoring that promises to be significantly cheaper than the costly extract made from beans grown in rain forests is scheduled to hit the markets in 2014.
They compare the spread of bio-factories to the large-scale burning of coal at the turn of the 20th century#a development with implications for carbon dioxide emissions
including synthetic versions of fragrances extracted from grass, coconut oil and saffron powder, as well as a gas used to make car tires.
When fed sugar, it produced energy and excreted alcohol and carbon dioxide. Humans have harnessed this power for centuries to make wine, beer, cheese and other products.
Could they tinker with some genes in the yeast to create a biological machine capable of producing medicine?
The next major product to be released is likely to be a vanilla flavoring by Evolva a Swiss company that has laboratories in the San francisco bay area.
Cultivated in the remote forests of Madagascar, Mexico and the West indies, natural vanilla is one of the world s most revered spices.
have 99 percent of the vanilla market but have failed to match the natural version s complexity.
Now scientists in a lab in Denmark believe they ve created a type of vanilla flavoring produced by yeast that they say will be more satisfying to the palate and cheaper at the same time.
whether the flavoring can be considered#oenatural.##Evolva boasts that it is, because only the substance used to produce the flavoring was modified genetically#not
what people actually consume.##oefrom my point of view it s fundamentally as natural as beer or bread,#said Evolva chief executive Neil Goldsmith,
who is a cofounder of the company.##oeneither brewer s or baker s yeast is identical to yeast in the wild.
They say that representing Evolva s laboratory-grown flavoring as something similar to vanilla extract from an orchid plant is deceptive,
and they have mounted a global campaign urging food companies to boycott the#oevanilla grown in a petri dish.##
##oeany ice-cream company that calls this all-natural vanilla would be committing fraud, #argues Jaydee Hanson, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Food safety,
Artemisinin is farmed by an estimated 100,000 people in Kenya, Tanzania, Vietnam and China and the vanilla plant by 200,000 in Madagascar, Mexico and beyond.
Evolva officials say they believe there will still be a strong market for artisan ingredients like vanilla from real beans
Feed a bunch of walnut shells or wood chips into these $27 000 machines and you get fully clean energy at less than 10 cents a kilowatt hour, a fraction of
Or California s Central Valley, where walnuts are a major crop. All those cobs and shells can now be used as the basis for cheap energy.
#he said and then ticked off the goodies#oethe Android operating system, search, voice, social, maps, navigation, even Chauffeur.#
It s a catch-22, a classic chicken-and-egg problem: Which will come first,
the astronauts will get treated with a fresh meal. NASA chose lettuce for the experiment
Everything from pop, to juice, to vegetables, to beer, to soup, and much more. Transporting water is expensive
A University of Utah study in November 2012 confirmed that this could be done in a lab. Perfection of this technology could result in the potential end of tooth decay, gum disease, fillings,
They take footage from the many live video feeds around the world and use it to layer complex animations on top of Google earth,
It will use a donut-shaped magnetic field to contain gases that will reach temperatures comparable to those at the core of the sun, in excess of 150 million degrees C (270 million F),
which means it takes pasta longer to cook in Denver than it does in Del Mar.
#Salt for Life incredibly realistic salt replacement Salt for Life will begin rolling out online and in grocery stores in August and September of this year.
Salt for Life comes from Nu-Tek Salt, a Bill gates-endorsed company that sells salt replacement products that contain 70%less sodium than traditional salt.
Unlike salt replacers of the past, Nu-Tek s products actually taste like the real thing.
Big food producers have started already using it, but soon you ll be able to buy it yourself.
replacement products) into meats and other items since its launch in 2010.##oewe have taken a logical path on how we have developed the technology and put it in the marketplace.
so we re available for food applications in processed meats, bakery, dairy, and cheese,#says Mower.#
#oethe next logical step is a product for service operators and consumers that uses the same technology in a way that s more consumer-friendly.#
#That consumer-friendly product is Salt for Life, which will begin rolling out online and in grocery stores in August and September of this year.
Nu-Tek s secret sauce, says Mower, is what it calls#oesingle crystal technology.##Traditional sodium reduction products mix potassium chloride with salt
so eaters still pick up the metallic flavoring. Other companies have tried pressing all the materials together, but they come apart easily in food processing,
Nu-Tek takes potassium chloride and salt, turns it into a wet slurry (diluting it), blends it in an organic acid like lemon juice, and recrystallizes it.#
#At first, Salt for Life will probably appeal to people who are actively trying to keep their salt intake down (in fact,
Salt for Life tastes more realistic than most sugar replacers. Consumers in the U s. are increasing their sodium consumption by 63 mg per day every two years, according to Medical Daily.
Nu-Tek s products may be an option for a populace that has grown accustomed to ever-higher amounts of salt in their foodsand who may be unknowingly eating large amounts of the stuff in processed items (when cooking,
it s easier to simply cut down on salt use altogether).##oethe whole paradigm on the importance of nutrition in food is really having a dramatic shift with consumers,
and wheat to salt and sugar. Even cars and trucks#nown in the trade as#oeroro,#or#oeroll-on
#oeright now, we ve got too many eggs in too few baskets, #says Muller. In the U s.,two adjacent ports#os Angeles and Long beach#andle nearly half of the nation s container traffic.
#says Karl Olaf Petters, a spokesman for Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG (HHLA), the company that runs Altenwerder and most of Hamburg s other cargo terminals.
rice was a primary ingredient of their diets, after all. But RNA molecules are pretty fragile.
The Monsanto researchers combed through large datasets of genetic sequences obtained from mammals, chickens, and insects, looking for any trace of plant mirnas.
#oethat horizontal delivery of micrornas via typical dietary ingestion is neither a robust nor a frequent mechanism.#
It just requires a skilled egg handler and a textured egg shell. Source: Business Insider.
and a bad diet are much bigger factors. Source: British Medical Journal. 17.)) Lightning does strike twice.
) Chewing gum does not take seven years to digest. Actually, we won t digest it at all, but the body passes it normally, within several hours.
#oemy Very Earnest Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles#is an easy way to remember the planets (just keep in mind that Pluto has been demoted to a dwarf planet.
7. Eat breakfast. Eating breakfast has been proven to improve concentration, problem solving ability, mental performance, memory, and mood.
Breakfast is the first chance the body has to refuel its glucose levels after eight to 12 hours without a meal.
Stay away from Sugar. Any simple carbohydratessuch as pasta, sugars, white bread and potato chipscan make you tired and lethargic.
Sometimes called the#oesugar blues##this sluggish feeling makes it hard to think clearly. It results from the insulin rushing into the bloodstream to counteract the sugar rush. 11.
Cultivate Your Emotional Intelligence. It s not enough to have a high IQ. High IQ is just potential.
Growup founders Kate Hofman and Tom Webster built the Kickstarter-funded farm to demonstrate the possibilities of aquaponic farmingwhere wastewater from fish tanks is turned into nutrients (with a little help from microbacteria) that fertilize plants
but the Kickstarter page assures us that the vegetables (the box can grow salads, herbs,
Since the roots of the plants absorb the nutrients from the water, the leaves and fruits (the bits we eat) are clean,
with the leftovers from that process going to make animal feed. Some of it is transformed into fresh water by a solar-powered desalination unit.
Pics) What s for dinner? For that matter, what s to eat, full stop? In a few decades time, that second question may become pressing.
and for a time flourished in concert with the fields that provided their sustenance. Yet despite the invention of farming, eventually all of these early cities fell into disrepair,
The experimental buildings illustrated here often tend to be characterised by delicacy. They increasingly move from older forms of a static, rigid world into the dynamic and sensitive qualities of a living metabolism.
at least two billion people actively consume insects as part of their diets. In the Democratic republic of the congo, caterpillars are abundantly available all year round in markets.
Globally, beetles and caterpillars are consumed as much as all other edible insects taken together. But bees (as my brother can attest to),
The disconnect, perhaps unsurprisingly, stems from the westernisation of diets and cultures. Why do most of us find eating insects disgusting?
a form of malnutrition caused by protein deficiency in the diet, grasshoppers offered a welcome source of protein.
#Even more fascinating is that we are actually eating them as part of lunch and dinner. And the FDA knows all about it!
and especially for feed.##Why are insects so good? They have a high nutritional value, their cultivation is environmentally friendlier,
#That s a balanced diet for humans right there! And when used as animal feed, insect-based feeds are comparable to the popular soy-based or fishmeal formula,
currently used today. The Economist has a great graphic that showcases how#oegreen#insect cultivation exactly is as well.
A cow takes 8 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of beef, but only 40%of the cow can be eaten.
Crickets require just 1. 7 kg of food to produce 1 kg of meat, and 80%is considered edible.#
consolidate your diet and potentially pull people out of poverty? Photo credit: Signs of the Times Via Nature Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati t
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