This story has recently been making the rounds in various news outlets.

Via Fox News:

Radioactive Boars Rampaging Through Germany
It sounds like the plot of a B-movie, yet it’s bizarrely true: Radioactive boars are on the loose and thriving in Germany’s forests.

A succession of mild winters has left Germany scrambling to deal with a skyrocketing wild boar population. Tales of swarming beasts rampaging through city streets and attacking citizens occur with alarming regularity.

The problem has been aggravated by the lingering effects of the Chernobyl disaster from twenty-five years ago; a large portion of the wild animals are contaminated by radioactivity.

Poisonous radiation leaves the beasts completely inedible (wild boar is considered a delicacy in Germany), and the phenomenon is becoming expensive for the German government. In the last hunting season, 650,000 boar were shot versus 287,000 in the previous year. And due to atomic energy regulations, the government must buy contaminated animals from hunters who catch them.

Berlin compensated hunters to the tune of over $500,000 in 2009, writes German newspaper Der Spiegel — quadruple the payment in 2007.

Though the Chernobyl explosion happened a quarter century ago, high levels of radiation remain in the region’s vegetation. And wild boars are especially susceptible because of their proclivity for mushrooms and truffles, which are especially efficient at absorbing radiation.

Sounds scary, doesn’t it?

It should be noted that despite the descriptions and headlines of boar “rampaging” or “storming” Germany, the hogs themselves are no more prone to rampaging or storming towns and cities than the non-radioactive variety (or rather less radioactive, since all animals are radioactive). They generally live in sparsely settled areas and, although the population of boar in central Europe has risen in recent years, they’re not tearing through homes and eating people alive or anything like that.    Boar can certainly be aggressive, nasty animals and their increase in population has lead to some concern over their damage to property or danger to people, but that is not a new concern and is not related to radioactivity.

There is no rampage.

The primary isotope that seems to be o concern is Cesium-137. With a half-life of 30.7 years, close to half the Cs-137 from the Chernobyl accident has already decayed away and it will continue to decrease, both due to radioactive decay and the continued dilution in the environment. As time goes on, sedimentation and erosion will tend to cover or wash away much of the Cs-137 from the area and make it less available to life forms.

Still, if the levels are high enough, it could be dangerous. Cs-137 is similar chemically to potassium and has a fairly high biological uptake in both plants and animals. It emits strong beta and gamma radiation and is produced as a fission byproduct. Today Cs-137 is the single largest contributor to gamma radiation left over from the Chernobyl accident, as most other fission byproducts have long decayed away.

How radioactive the Boars in question actually are:
(more…)

At the risk of being called an environmental blasphemer, I’d like to propose something shocking:  the extinction of a species, entirely due to human activity may not always be a bad thing.  In fact, it may be a very good thing.   We have come to be taught that all species deserve to exist (not sure where the “deserve” comes from) and as such, any species that reaches the point of being critically low in number may qualify for the designation endangered species, providing it with protection under both national laws and international conventions.

In many, perhaps most cases, this protection is well warranted.   Many species are enjoyed by humans for their unique properties or their place in nature.  Others are vital to the balance of ecosystems or play a vital role in nature.  Still others may provide vast amounts of data to science on matters of evolution, biology or even practical data, applicable to medical treatment or biological control of pests.   It would be unwise to slate any species for intentional extermination without first considering whether it might have such importance and perhaps preserving some specimens, yet this does not preclude the possibility that extinction may be the best thing for humanity and nature, at least with a few species.

Numerous species of plant, animal, fungus and microbe are, dare I say it:  useless and better off wiped off the face of the planet.  Pathogens rank high here as do some parasites, such as intestinal worms, which are not prey or food for any species and play little role in the ecosystem, other than occasionally causing extreme pain, disease and death, often to humans.  Disease vectors, such as some breeds of mosquito also may be best off being dispensed of, if it is possible to do so.

If this makes me sound a bit human-centric, I have no apologies.   I happen to be a human and I also like my species quite a lot.  I have no problem dispensing with little nasties that cause my fellow main to suffer or die.

So to the Rocky Mountain Locust and the Small Pox virus I say only this:  Good riddance!

Extinct, believed extinct (no recent sightings) or critically near extinction and not really missed:

(more…)

Recently, a study published in the Journal Pediatrics has been getting a huge amount of press for indicating a possible relationship between organophosphate levels and ADHD (but interestingly NOT ADD.)   Organophosphates are commonly used as pesticides and trace levels are found in a minority of food in the US.  Most fruit and vegitables sold in the US do not have levels of organophosphates that are high enough to be detected by standard analytical methods, but up to 25-33% do have detectable, albeit small, amounts.   Thus many people do have small but detectable amounts of these compounds in their bodies.

Organophosphates can be quite dangerous to humans and their application may require protective measures, however they tend to break down fairly quickly and when used properly the amount that remains in the end product is small and has never been conclusively linked to any health effects.   Their relatively short time to breakdown has lead to their widespread adoption.  Organochloride insecticides, such as DDT tend to present less danger of acute toxicity to humans, but may linger in the environment longer than organophosphates.

The study raises some interesting questions, but the way it is being reported makes it sound like it has presented far more conclusive evidence than it really has.    It is already being used by “organic” agriculture groups as proof of the superiority of organic products.  It is also causing a lot of fear and confusion for parents.   Even personal injury attorneys are already all over it! The news reports indicate that higher body burdens of organophosphates are linked to ADHD , but in reality the study’s data and conclusions are far less black and white.

Thankfully, you can download the entire study in PDF format for FREE here.

Issues with the study:
(more…)

It seems that there has been yet another outbreak of foodborne illness outbreak has happened, this time it’s linked to alfalfa sprouts.   The pathogen responsible is all natural salmonella bacteria.

Via CNN:

Salmonella outbreak in 10 states prompts sprouts recall

Federal public health officials are investigating a salmonella outbreak that has infected 22 people in 10 states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday.

The infections are linked to the consumption of raw alfalfa sprouts, the CDC said.

California-based Caldwell Fresh Foods is recalling all alfalfa sprouts manufactured under three of its brands because they may be contaminated with salmonella, the company said Friday. Caldwell said its alfalfa sprouts have been associated with the outbreak.

There have been no deaths reported from the outbreak, but four of those infected have been hospitalized, Caldwell Fresh Foods said in a statement Friday.

CDC is collaborating the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and with state public health officials to investigate the salmonella outbreak, the CDC said in a statement Friday.

One of those infected was an infant hospitalized in Oregon, an Oregon Department of Health official told CNN. The baby had been eating alfalfa sprouts, said Paul Cieslak, manager of the state health department’s communicable disease section.

CDC is collaborating with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and state public health officials to investigate the strain, called Salmonella Newport, the CDC said in a statement Friday.

The initial investigation traced the implicated raw alfalfa sprouts to a single sprout processor in California, the CDC said, though it did not name Caldwell Fresh Foods directly. The CDC did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.

(more…)

Organic food:  It’s supposed to be a whole different way of growing food to make it a lot better for you, but really it’s just a set of restrictions which limit growers to using fertilizers and insect control methods that are deemed as somehow being “natural.”   Of course, the food is basically the same, other than the fact that organic foods tend to take more energy, water, land and effort to grow and are often slightly lower in proteins or other nutrients.

Via the Salt Lake Tribune:

Study: Songbirds prefer conventionally grown wheat to organic

Increasingly each year, humans foraging in American supermarkets select organically grown food. Not so with wild songbirds searching for sustenance in the gardens of England.

Given a choice between organically and conventionally grown wheat, they opt for the conventional stuff — which is higher in protein — 55 to 60 percent of the time, a study has found.

The findings, which were published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture on Tuesday, raise yet again the question of which is healthier: organic or conventional food.

The research team, based at the school of biology at Newcastle University in England, didn’t expect the birds to prefer conventionally grown wheat, said lead researcher Ailsa McKenzie. Earlier lab studies had reported that hens and rats preferred organically grown beetroot and wheat over conventionally grown.

But the problem with earlier preference studies, said McKenzie, is that none tested animals for longer than seven days, which meant that the animals did not have time to establish a preference.

“Birds learn,” she said. “They need to associate what they’re eating with where it is to learn a preference.”

In the Newcastle study, researchers positioned two feeders — one stocked with organic wheat and another with conventionally grown wheat — in 36 English gardens. Then over a period of six weeks in 2008, they measured how much wheat birds ate by gauging every two days how much food was consumed from each feeder.

The scientists conducted a second test in early 2009, this time studying 15 gardens over eight weeks. They also tested preferences among canaries in the laboratory.

…
All three trials found a preference for the conventionally grown food. In the 2008 trial, for example, the birds consumed 58,954 grams of wheat, 45 percent of it organic and 55 percent conventional.

The higher protein content of the conventional wheat — about 10 percent greater than the organic wheat’s — “most likely” accounted for the birds’ liking it better, the scientists wrote.

Conventionally grown crops are usually treated with fertilizers that deliver higher levels of nitrogen to plants than organic fertilizers do, in a form that can be processed more quickly. Plants use nitrogen to produce protein.

What the findings mean for humans is unclear.

“Our results suggest that the current dogma that organic food is preferred to conventional food may not always be true, which is of considerable importance for consumer perceptions of organically grown food,” the report concludes.

Advocates of organic farming beg to differ.

“For a team of scientists to extrapolate from a modest difference in what birds selected to make a statement that consumer perception should change is ludicrous,” said Charles Benbrook, chief scientist at the Organic Center, a research organization in Boulder, Colo., that promotes “the conversion of agriculture to organic methods,” according to its website.

The results are interesting, although they don’t really prove anything new. In fact, they’re pretty much what you would expect. The ratio of 45% to 55% suggests that the birds really didn’t have a huge preference one way or the other, but in general perfected the more protein-rich food.

It is interesting, however, to find that the birds preferred the slightly higher protein from conventional wheat, as it suggests that birds are capable of detecting protein levels. This says more about bird behavior and biology than organic farming, of course. One would expect that if the two samples had been closer in protein content, such as in a crop that was less dependent on nitrogen fertilizer, the ratio would likely be closer to 50/50.

The best conclusion that can be drawn from this is that birds, are generally not capable of reading and therefore are not enticed by the marketing material produced by organic farming advocates.  They may need to consider some more bird-oriented publicity programs.

Not sure if all readers will feel the same, but recently I’ve come across a few news items that really just made me feel like tearing my hair out.   They’re so dead wrong, misleading and ridiculous and yet are reported in otherwise credible news outlets as if they were meaningful.
(more…)

Via the New York Times:

Rise of the Superweeds
DYERSBURG, Tenn. — For 15 years, Eddie Anderson, a farmer, has been a strict adherent of no-till agriculture, an environmentally friendly technique that all but eliminates plowing to curb erosion and the harmful runoff of fertilizers and pesticides.

On a recent afternoon here, Mr. Anderson watched as tractors crisscrossed a rolling field — plowing and mixing herbicides into the soil to kill weeds where soybeans will soon be planted.

Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.

To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.

“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years. “We’re trying to find out what works.”

Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.

“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.

The first resistant species to pose a serious threat to agriculture was spotted in a Delaware soybean field in 2000. Since then, the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn.

The superweeds could temper American agriculture’s enthusiasm for some genetically modified crops. Soybeans, corn and cotton that are engineered to survive spraying with Roundup have become standard in American fields. However, if Roundup doesn’t kill the weeds, farmers have little incentive to spend the extra money for the special seeds.

What we have here is yet another tired attack on genetically modified crops in general because just one of them has some minor secondary issues. Genetically modified crops come with numerous engineered traits. Some are modified to absorb nutrients more efficiently, others are modified to resist fungus or attacks by insects while others are modified to better withstand drought. The particular kind of genetically modified crop that this applies to are so-called “Roundup Ready” crops. These are crops which are resistant to the herbicide known as Roundup (Glyphosate).

(more…)

It’s never a good idea to hotlink someone’s  image by putting an embedded image in your own blog or website.  That’s especially true these days with so many free hosting sites and hosting so cheap to begin with.   Still someone got lazy and apparently found an image I had up.   It was only a tiny image that was actually downscaled from an Associated Press story.

There’s another issue with hotlinking images.  When someone else runs the server, they can find out when there’s traffic coming from an image like that.  They can also change the image if they want, since it’s their hosting account.

Here, an assclown decided to use the little image I had in a post while posting some anti-science propaganda against modern agriculture.

It looked something like this:

(more…)

Today is the American holiday Thanksgiving.   It’s a day for family and to give thanks for what we have, especially for food and other basic needs.   Normally, it is God who is cited as the one to give thanks to, but I’d like to thank some others.

Although the following individuals are no longer with us, I still would like to offer thanks, if only to their memory and legacy.  Although they may not be here to appreciate it, others can:

John Deere, who revolutionized agriculture with the invention of the cast steel plow and the mass production of steel agricultural implements, something whose revolutionary improvements in effeciency are lost on most today.

Fritz Haber, whose development of synthetic ammonia and thus the establishment of the modern fertilizer industry has so improved life and saved so many that it far eclipses his work on chemical warfare.

Carl Bosch, whose work with Haber and with BASF turned Haber’s laboratory process into a viable industrial scale system for producing large amounts of fertilizer.

Paul Hermann Müller, Who first discovered the insecticidal properties of DDT and promoted its use.  Although DDT has since fallen from favor, it was the first “modern” insecticide in many respects and paved the way to the widespread use of organochlorides in pest control.

Norman Borlaug, for his tireless promotion of modern agriculture, including synthetic fertilizer and genetic engineering.  His contributions are felt more in the poorest areas of the world than the richest, where his work is credited with saving hundreds of millions, if not over a billion lives.

Seawell Wright, for not only helping to establish modern evolutionary genetics, but for enormous contributions to the understanding of domestic crop and animal genetics and breeding, helping to turn selective breeding and inbreeding into a true science and paving the way for genetic modification of crops and livestock.

To all others who helped establish and improve modern agriculture, including the “Factory Farm,” something most see as a negative term, ignoring the fact that factories the method of producing lots of product at a low cost.   Today the quality, bounty, reliability and economics of our food supply are greater than ever in human history.   Even those just a few generations back would be stunned by the great progress made.  What remains is the hope of extending this progress and bounty to all people of the world.

Final note:  I realize that all those named above are men.  I’m not trying to be sexist, but the fact of the matter is that few prominent scientists and industrialists were women until fairly recently in Western history.  There certainly have been women who have contributed, although their names may have been lost to history, in some circumstances.   However, I should also thank my mom and aunt, who have slaved over a hot stove for most of today and much of yesterday!

If you happen to be a farmer who grows sugar beets, you could be in for some trouble if you plan on doing so on public land.   On the other hand, if you’re a company like ADM that makes sweeteners from corn, you might be hearing some very sweet news.

Via the Associated Press:

BOULDER, Colo. — Famuer Rasmussen Jr. and five other farmers filed what they thought was a routine request to grow genetically modified sugar beets on public land in Colorado’s Boulder County. The county already had allowed genetically altered corn.

But the farmers got an earful.

Complaints from residents and organic food activists concerned about the crops’ safety and local businesses hoping to maintain Boulder as a center for natural and organic products prompted county commissioners to reassess their genetically modified crops policy.

…

Aurora Organic Dairy Chairman Mark Retzloff opposed the altered corn six years ago, but said a lack of public awareness may have led the county to allow it.

“Many of us decided this time we needed to be proactive,” he said. “Last time, it wasn’t made an issue to the public.”

…

“This is all theater for opposition to biotech,” Markwart said.

In September, a federal judge in San Francisco overturned regulatory approval of Roundup Ready sugar beets and ordered a U.S. Department of Agriculture agency to study their environmental impact after the Port Townsend, Wash.-based Organic Seed Alliance and others filed a lawsuit.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White found the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service violated environmental law by failing to take a hard look at whether the beets could share their genes with other crops through cross-pollination. The agency is reviewing the ruling.

…

Organic food interests plan to ask White at an Oct. 30 hearing to bar new plantings of the crop, but Boulder County commissioners are thinking beyond sugar beets.

“Our questions are bigger,” county commissioner Ben Pearlman said. “Do we allow GMO at all? If so, under what circumstances and what do we want grown?”

….

Local farmers say they’ve been waiting for Roundup Ready sugar beets for decades, after having to yank rope-like weeds from sugar beet fields by hand.

“When we were kids, I remember pulling weeds. Sometimes we were glad to go back to school,” joked 54-year-old Boulder County farmer Paul Schlagel, whose family is in its 100th year of harvesting sugar beets.

Though farmers might pay Monsanto $50 an acre on technology fees for Roundup Ready beets, they can save on herbicide and labor while boosting yields, Schlagel said.

“To us, it’s a no-brainer,” he said. “You use less chemicals, less fuel.”

County commissioners now hope to craft a new policy for any GMO in time for the 2011 growing season.

“We want to make sure our open space land is farmed to help us deal with weeds and overall stewardship of the land,” Pearlman said. “We also want management of open space land to be consistent with our environmental stewardship values, which we hold close to our hearts.”

(more…)