Does this food contain genetically modified organisms?

That’s what many consumers, including overseas trading partners, want to know about the food they’re buying.

A prime example of that is the recent initiative in California, dubbed the ‘Right to Know’ campaign, which calls for food manufacturers in the Golden State to identify genetically engineered ingredients on the labels of food products sold in that state.

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With almost as many as 1 million signatures gathered on the petition in time for the April 22 deadline, organizers predict that the measure will appear on the Nov. 6 ballot. (The state requires just over a half million valid signatures for an initiative to qualify to be on the ballot.)

On a global level, 40 countries, including all of Europe, Japan and China, require labeling of foods, or of certain foods, containing GMOs. The U.S. has resisted labeling, and in 1992 the Food and Drug Administration established a policy declaring there is no substantial or material difference between genetically engineered foods and foods that haven’t been genetically engineered.

Sleuthing for GMOs

The question arises: How in the world do scientists determine if foods contain GMOs?

There are technologies that can do that, of course. But the […]

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Cows are a red herring. The most dangerous potential source for methane release lies underneath thinning permafrost and glaciers in the Arctic. Ecologists have just mapped the seeps where methane is bubbling up, and they found more than 150,000 of them.

Methane is a seriously potent greenhouse gas. Compared to a single molecule of carbon dioxide, methane is 25 times stronger, according to Katey Walter Anthony, an aquatic ecosystem ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who led the new mapping research. She and her colleagues just published their findings in Nature Geoscience (abstract).

You might know Walter Anthony from YouTube videos, where she and her students illustrate methane release by stabbing pockets frozen in an Alaskan lake and setting the gas on fire. That lake thaws every summer and then winter ice covers the gas bubbles, trapping them. Far thicker caps have been trapping methane year-round in the Arctic, but little was known about how they were holding up. Until now.

Walter Anthony and her colleagues combined Arctic aerial survey data with ground-based measurements to document widespread methane seeps along melting glaciers and permafrost for the first time. They looked at both superficial methane seepage from shallow lakes and wetland, as well […]

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Very few topics have received as much attention as the student loan/debt bubble.

The size, scope, and impact of this problem is an enormous anchor weighing down our next generation and our nation’s economy.

Make no mistake, this anchor is not only impacting thousands of students and families but is also having an equally burdensome impact on colleges and universities nationwide.

Embedded within a very recently released Bloomberg commentary is a study by Richard Kneedler, President Emeritus of Franklin & Marshall College. In light of the economic crisis that hit our shores and continues to envelop our nation, in early 2009 Kneedler released a very granular review of the economic condition of close to 700 private colleges and universities. For anybody with even a passing interest in this issue, Kneedler’s work, is a MUST read. What do we learn?

1. Using this post-crash model (and may it not be ‘mid-crash’), 207 colleges and universities-31% of the 678 institutions in the database- have, under at least some circumstances, more debts than cash and marketable investments. In the model these 207 inadequate-capital institutions have projected net financial asset balances ranging from a negative few hundred thousand dollars to nearly a negative $400,000,000. More than half of […]

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It turns out that when we eat may be as important as what we eat. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have found that regular eating times and extending the daily fasting period may override the adverse health effects of a high-fat diet and prevent obesity, diabetes and liver disease in mice.

In a paper published May 17 in Cell Metabolism, scientists from Salk’s Regulatory Biology Laboratory reported that mice limited to eating during an 8-hour period are healthier than mice that eat freely throughout the day, regardless of the quality and content of their diet. The study sought to determine whether obesity and metabolic diseases result from a high-fat diet or from disruption of metabolic cycles.

‘It’s a dogma that a high-fat diet leads to obesity and that we should eat frequently when we are awake,’ says Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor in the Regulatory Biology Laboratory and senior author of the paper. ‘Our findings, however, suggest that regular eating times and fasting for a significant number of hours a day might be beneficial to our health.’

Panda’s team fed two sets of mice, which shared the same genes, gender and age, a diet comprising 60 percent of its calories […]

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New research has shown that exposure to commonly used chemicals causes changes in rats that are passed down through multiple generations.

‘We are now in the third human generation since the start of the chemical revolution, since humans have been exposed to these kinds of toxins,

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