The Box

The organic Consumers organisation has an article referring to a May 22 headline news story in the London Independent that has rocked Monsanto and the biotech industry and fueled the controversy over the safety of genetically engineered food. According to the article, internal Monsanto documents, reviewed by EU scientists, show serious health damage to laboratory animals fed Monsanto’s new genetically engineered “rootworm-resistant” corn. Rats who consumed the mutant corn developed smaller kidneys and exhibited blood abnormalities. Scientists say these are “red flags” for immune system damage and/or cancer tumor promotion. Although the EU will now likely ban Monsanto’s new GMO corn, this same rootworm-resistant corn is already being grown and consumed on a major scale in the United States. Monsanto refuses to turn over its data to the media, claiming that the lab studies are “Confidential Business Information.”
Learn more and take action: Organic Consumers

It took a California company named OnTech seven years and $24 million to create the self-heating cans, which are activated by pushing a plastic button on the bottom. Water flows into a sealed inner cone filled with quicklime, which is mostly calcium oxide. A chemical reaction heats the coffee to a pleasant 145 degrees in six to eight minutes, the amount of time it might take to order, pay for and receive a latte from a barista.
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I just love the evening sky around here at this time of year – so clear and crisp!

An excellent series has appeared on flickr of the seven deadly sins portrayed through the use of gummie bears.Link

A man in North Carolina found a finger in a container of gourmet ice cream from Kohl’s Frozen Custard in Wilmington, North Carolina. Customer Clarence Stowers discovered the finger when he dug into his chocolate desert at home. The right index fingertip formerly belonged to an employee who severed it in a custard-dispensing machine accident.

From WWAY NewsChannel 3 in Wilmington:

“I said ‘Gosh this ice cream is good.’ Then I said, ‘Gosh, there’s something hard in my ice cream,” said Clarence, remembering the moments before he found the finger. Clarence said he wished he’d realized it was a finger before he tried to eat it. “I proceeded to put the object in my mouth. Got all the ice cream off of it, spit it in my hand, said ‘God, this ain’t no nut!’ So I proceeded in here to the kitchen, rinsed it off with water, and realized it was a human finger, and I just started screaming,” he said.
via BoingBoing

After 10 years of being brain-damaged, blind and barely able to speak, with little or no memory Donald Herbert astounded staff at the nursing home, where he has been in care, by looking up and announcing: “I want to talk to my wife.”
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There is a restaurant in taiwan that is themed around the toliet bowl including toilet bowl seats and plates.
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MIT students are holding a Time Traveler Convention on Saturday hoping that some visitors from the future might show up…

Great idea, I’d love to help! What should I do?

Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention.

You can also make an absolute commitment to publicize the convention afterwards. In that case, bring a time capsule or whatever it may be to the party, and then bury it afterwards.

Can’t the time travelers just hear about it from the attendees, and travel back in time to attend?

Yes, they can! In fact, we think this will happen, and the small number of adventurous time travelers who do attend will go back to their “home times” and tell all their friends to come, causing the convention to become a Woodstock-like event that defines humanity forever.

Unfortunately, we of the present (2005) don’t have time travel, and so we only have one chance at observing the convention.

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