Taylor Farms Retail, Inc. of Salinas, California is initiating a voluntary recall of Organic Baby Spinach following a random test conducted on a finished package by the USDA that found salmonella.
Salmonella is a bacteria that can cause infection and symptoms, including diarrhea (sometimes bloody), stomach cramps and fever. Infection typically lasts a few days and most people recover without medical treatment but, because of that, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believe there may be as many as 30 times the 42,000 cases reported each year in the U.S. alone.
Usually "No Change in X" doesn't make a very splashy headline, but when the lack of change occurs over 160,000,000 years and X is squid ink, people get excited.
And with good cause.
This is the first time that ink from a fossil cephalopod has been analyzed chemically, and it turned out to be indistinguishable from modern cephalopod ink. One hundred and sixty million years. No change.
Skin cells, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), from heart failure patients have been reprogrammed to transform into healthy, new heart muscle cells that are capable of integrating with existing heart tissue, according to a new paper in the European Heart Journal.
My friend Benny (who produces
the Rationally Speaking podcast) really hates the word “skepticism.” He understands and appreciates its meaning and long intellectual pedigree (heck, we even
did a show on that!), but he also thinks — based on anecdotal evidence — that too many people apply a negative connotation to the term, often confusing it with cynicism.
Top quarks are most often produced in pairs at hadron colliders. The reason of this fact is that the strong interaction, which produces most of the reactions between the projectiles, is flavor-blind, and it cannot create a single new flavor of quarks out of nothing. In other words, physical processes mediated by strong interactions conserve the quantum numbers describing the difference between the number of quarks and antiquarks of any given kind: U, D, C, S, T, and B.
When forests are logged, managed or selectively trimmed so they’ll be less susceptible to raging fires, there are usually huge piles of stumps, branches and other wood debris left laying on the ground. Now a group of researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle is developing a portable technology to turn these waste piles into treasure troves by converting them into biochar; charcoal made from plant material that can be burned for energy or applied to soils, where it helps plants grow.
“The practice of having Ph.D. graduates employed by the university that trained them, commonly called ‘academic inbreeding’ has long been suspected to be damaging to scholarly practices and achievement ” says a 2010 report in the journal Management Science.
Sometimes you set out to test for antibiotics but get a bonus; in this case, diphenhydramine, arsenic, and fluoxetine.
Yikes.
Mike McRae's Tribal Science: Brains, Beliefs, and Bad Ideas is short, sweet, often humorous and to the point. It's also pithy and full of quote-worthy sentences:
"Since most of the face-like patterns Mary sees every day are indeed faces, her brain's gamble usually pays off. In addition, making the mistake of thinking there is the face of Jesus on her iron isn't costing her much (except a new iron. Nobody likes to do housework with the face of God)."
YiZRi LLC has unveiled VoiceSee, the world's first hands-free, eyes-free web navigation platform that uses mobile apps to read aloud recipes, digital newspapers and Wikipedia entries for the Android smartphone.
VoiceSee's flagship beta application, Culinary Pal, is a cooking web navigation mobile app that will follow your voice commands to search for recipes and choose the one you want. Sadie, the voice of VoiceSee, will then read aloud the ingredients list followed by preparation and cooking or baking instructions. She will pause at your command so you can finish each task before listening to the next one.
