Organic Food - A Benifit less Stuff

For the past five years Margo O’Neill has chosen to live on a diet consisting almost entirely of organic food. Although she admits her £200-a-week shopping bill would be lower if she bought ordinary fare, O’Neill insists the benefits outweigh the costs.

“The food tastes better and it gives me more energy,” said O’Neill, a grandmother from Hampstead, north London. She is a firm believer that organic food is healthier. So she was more than a little vexed when the Food Standards Agency (FSA) published a report last week saying the opposite.

The government body claimed a comprehensive review of scientific evidence showed that people who believe organic food — which, on average, costs 60% more than ordinary food — is healthier are wasting their money. “There is no evidence of additional health benefits from eating organic food,” declared Gill Fine, the FSA’s director of dietary health.

The controversial findings touched a raw nerve. Within hours of the report’s publication, hate mail began to flood into the author’s e-mail inbox. Organic industry experts took to the airwaves to brand the FSA’s methodology “flawed”; and the Soil Association, which represents organic farmers, accused the FSA of “following the dogma of the conventional food industry”.

Richard Corrigan, an Irish chef who runs two central London restaurants, was even blunter. “As a professional cooking food for 33 years,” he said, “I can tell you that anyone who says organic food tastes worse than the stuff you get on a supermarket shelf needs to put his head in my deep-fat fryer.”

Rather than sweeping away misconceptions, the report appeared to entrench people’s existing beliefs. “I don’t care what they claim,” said O’Neill, sitting outside a bustling Planet Organic supermarket in central London. “It’s never going to change my mind.”

In contrast, Keith Lewis, a 43-year-old telecoms engineer, felt his long-standing scepticism about organic food had been vindicated. “I’ve always suspected there was something dubious about the organic claims, mainly because it costs so much more,” he said.

“It’s primarily an appearance thing, where if you pay that extra price you’re somehow proving you’re doing your bit for the world.

“Well, here [the report] is and it says organic food is a load of rubbish — it’s an emperor’s clothes moment, I hope.”

Who is right? And even if organic food is no more nutritious than other produce, does that comprehensively torpedo the case for buying it?

FOR centuries food was produced largely without intensive industrial methods and artificial chemicals — in other words, organically. Only during the later 20th century did farmers start regularly to use new, and often untested, synthetic chemicals to increase crop yields.

In the 1980s, as public disquiet grew over animal welfare and the use of fertilisers, demand grew for a return to a more ecological style of farming. Organic food production increased by about 20% a year, far ahead of the rest of the industry. In the past five years sales of organic food in Britain almost doubled, from less than £900m in 2003 to about £2 billion last year, although they are believed to have dipped in the recession.

The backing of celebrity chefs, as well as the Prince of Wales and his Duchy Originals range, took the movement into middle-class homes. But evidence for its health benefits has been mixed, with a number of studies reaching contradictory conclusions. It led David Miliband, then environment secretary, to say in 2007 that buying organic was a “lifestyle choice that people can make”.

The purpose of the FSA study was to clear up the confusion once and for all. Led by Alan Dangour, a public health nutritionist from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, researchers sifted some 50 years of studies into organic food, analysing nutritional reviews of fruit, vegetables, dairy products and meat.

However, Dangour’s analysis was narrower than its scope at first appears. Of 162 relevant studies identified, only 55 were deemed to be of “satisfactory quality”. While the 55 studies did show that organic food had higher levels of acidity and phosphorous, and conventional food had more nitrates, Dangour concluded that these results were irrelevant.

“There is no shortage of phosphorous in our diet and acidity is about taste. Neither have any relevance to public health,” said Dangour. The FSA concluded that the analysis turned up no “statistically significant” differences between organic and non-organic food for 20 of 23 nutritional categories.

The organic industry was swift to disagree. Other experts greeted the results with a combination of fury and disbelief. Peter Melchett, policy director of the Soil Association, said: “I’ve read the report and the devil is in the detail. The detail clearly shows there are real differences in nutrition.”

The FSA researchers do acknowledge higher levels of some beneficial nutrients in organic compared with nonorganic foods. In organic vegetables the research recorded 53.7% more beta-carotene — which is believed to help protect against heart disease and cancer — as well as 38.4% more flavonoids, 12.7% more proteins and 11.3% more zinc.

The FSA insists these were not relevant because of the overall level of statistical error in the research. Melchett retorts that Dangour selected unreliable reports. “They included ‘shopping basket’ studies [analyses of items people have bought without taking account of factors such as date of harvest], which are very variable and unreliable,” said Melchett.

“If you include such studies, you get lots of variation, allowing you to declare the whole thing statistically insignificant. It is supposed to be a report, not an opinion piece. But it is designed in a way that almost guarantees they are able to claim there is no difference.

“They also excluded all the most recent science. The European Union has just commissioned the biggest research project in the world to look into the differences between organic and non-organic.

“I’m angry and perplexed. We genuinely expected the FSA to report the facts. That’s their job. I’m deeply disappointed that they haven’t. I think it’s outrageous.”

One study that Dangour excluded from his report is an EU-funded four-year study by Carlo Leifert, professor of ecological agriculture at Newcastle University. Leifert’s paper, which was peer-reviewed, found that organic milk contained 60% more antioxidants and healthy fatty acids than normal milk. Results from his crop studies suggest vitamin levels are up to a fifth higher in organic tomatoes, wheat and onions.

Last week Leifert claimed that the FSA study was misleading. “They have ignored all the recent literature as well as new primary research which shows the heath advantages of organic,” he said. “They admit in their own research that some compounds are 50% higher in organic. How can you call that a non-significance?”

He added: “I’m not happy and I intend to rip their study apart in scientific journals.”

MANY consumers and the organic lobby are also bemused that the FSA study takes no account of pesticides and fertilisers. Even if organic food had no nutritional benefits, they say, it would still be better for your health because it uses far fewer pesticides and fertilisers.

Peter Kindersley, co-founder of the publisher Dorling Kindersley and who runs the 2,250-acre Sheepdrove organic farm in Berkshire, said: “Everyone I talk to just dismisses the FSA. They’ve taken a very narrow view of the issue — the nutrition debate. There is a much wider issue here — pesticides, the environment and sustainability. If the FSA really wanted to do something about nutrition they’d be shouting loudly that we need to go organic and move away from fertilisers.

“Studies have shown these chemicals have an effect on people but the truth is we simply don’t know the full long-term impact. Nobody wants to fund research. It’s a deplorable system that the FSA are trying to shore up.”

Simon Wright, a food consultant for Organic Fair Plus, said concern over the long-term health impact of pesticides and hormones contained in conventional foods is one of the main reasons why people buy organic. “It’s a cocktail effect,” he said. “A variety of pesticides and other chemicals are applied at legal levels but interacting in a way impossible to predict.”

Dangour acknowledges the point, admitting that “the herbicide and pesticide issue is probably worthy of further research”.

However, whether such concerns justify paying the price of organic food is a moot point. As public attitudes have changed, so has the conventional food industry. Several toxic pesticides have been banned and standards of animal husbandry have improved, chipping away at the advantages that organic produce is supposed to have.

There have also been concerns that not all organic food is as free of chemicals as claimed. A recent EU report, which included the UK, found pesticides in some organic products. Most of the organically grown cereals, fruit and vegetables tested contained traces of pesticides below or at the legal limit, but 1.24% were contaminated with toxic residue above the limit, with a potential threat to health.

Amid all these claims and counter-claims, critics suggest that the organic label has become a marketing device as much as a sign of distinctive standards. Instead, they say, the real issue is choosing between well farmed food, organic or otherwise, and bad food created by cheap, industrial farming methods.

A A Gill, the Sunday Times restaurant critic, said: “Organic has no more meaning than a marketing tool.”

In a world that loves branding, the organic label has become a social issue, he suggested: “What I really mind about all this is that organic is making food into a class issue.

“Organic brings back this pre-war system of posh, politically correct food for Notting Hill people; and filthy, rubbish chemical food for filthy, rubbish chemical people. Either you are a nice organic person or you are a filthy, overweight McDonald’s person. I find that really obscene. It has very little to do with food and a lot to do with weird snobbery.”

The real point now is quality, not whether food carries the organic label, he says.

“Most farmers, if they go to the bother of getting a Soil Association accreditation, do it because they can charge more. The organic industry is driven by commercialism,” Gill said.

“The truth is, if you are blindfolded you cannot tell the difference. The real difference is between food produced by good farming and bad farming.”

It is a view with which Dangour, who declined to say whether he buys organic food, appears to have some sympathy. “You know, I make my choices based on health and I’m a nutritionist,” he said. “I do all the cooking and all the shopping at home and I choose what’s healthy for me and my family.”

After all, whichever side you take over the conflicting claims, it is worth remembering that for healthy eating you are probably better off with a non-organic apple than a 100% organic beef burger.

What counts as organic?

To qualify for organic status, farmers must adhere to strict limits on artificial fertilisers and pesticides. Instead, pests and diseases are controlled using wildlife and, typically, clover is grown to boost nitrogen in the soil in place of fertilisers. High standards of animal husbandry must be adhered to and all poultry must be free-range. Drugs, antibiotics and wormers are allowed only in emergencies and genetically modified animal feed is banned.

KNOWING YOUR ONIONS

How much more expensive is organic produce?

According to a study by Which? magazine, organic food on average costs 60% more than ordinary produce. But there are huge variations, depending on the product: it may be as little as 10% more, or as much as three times the price.

The higher prices are due to weaker economies of scale. Organic produce is generally grown on smaller farms and often needs to be transported separately. Limits on the number of animals per acre also bump up prices and the lack of fertilisers means yields are between 10% and 50% less than conventional farming.

Is free-range organic?

Not necessarily. Free-range animals are allowed more space and movement; but to qualify as organic, hens must be fed certified organic feed.

Will organic produce get cheaper?

The industry says the price gap will shrink as economies of scale improve and the cost of conventional food rises. It says nitrogen fertilisers and pesticides derived from oil are bound to become more expensive.

How big is the organic industry now?

Farms run on organic lines take up 4% of the UK’s agricultural land but supply a substantial market. Sales of organic food reached £2 billion in the UK last year and, according to the Soil Association, 90% of households bought some form of organic product.

source: timesonline.co.uk

Iron enriched Super Rice

Zurich researchers have developed a variety of rice containing up to six times more iron than normal white rice grains by adding in two extra genes.

The team at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich hope that their rice will help combat iron deficiency – a major global health problem – in developing countries.

According to the World Health Organization, iron deficiency anaemia is one of the most important contributing factors to the global burden of disease. Pregnant women and children are particularly vulnerable.

One of the most common causes is lack of iron in the diet. Rice, a food staple for around half of the world's population, contains iron, but mostly in the outer layers of the rice kernel. This causes a problem, said Christof Sautter, the Zurich project leader.

"In the tropical and subtropical climate the outer layers of the kernel become rancid very quickly during storage and are therefore removed by polishing. The rest of the kernel, which is eaten, contains largely starch and very little else," he told swissinfo.ch.

Scientists have been trying to increase the iron content in the rice kernel. But traditional breeding techniques have so far not worked.

Genetic modification, using a single gene to either improve iron storage or iron transportation in the rice plant, has also been tried with unsatisfactory results. So the Zurich scientists transferred two genes.

Six-fold increase

"We combined both transport and storage improvement with the result that we can now have up to six fold more iron content in the centre of the kernel," Sautter said.

The results of the research led by Sautter and Wilhelm Gruissem were published on July 20 in the online edition of the Plant Biology Journal.

The scientists are pleased about the new rice variety. The prototypes grown in greenhouses behave normally and show no negative effects on the environment, including the iron content of the soil, they say.

"The goal is to offer these plant lines at the end of development to small-scale farmers for free," Sautter said. There won't be any patent fees.

Distribution to farmers is, however, still many years away, as the prototypes are not yet suitable for agricultural development.

The next steps will need to be taken by a body such as the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines or industry, explained Sautter.

Next steps

First the genes would have to be transferred to local varieties. "And then because it's a genetic engineering approach, there are all the safety studies which are required for deregulation and that's a time-consuming task. From the Golden Rice we know that it takes at least five to ten years," he added.

Vitamin A-rich Golden Rice, announced in 2000, was developed by another Federal Institute team and Freiburg University in Germany. The first field trials started in 2004 and are ongoing.

Many countries have regulatory requirements for testing genetically modified organisms. Furthermore, some non-governmental organisations have raised concerns about the possible effects of GMOs on health and the environment.

Sautter believes that people will increasingly accept GMOs. And although the rice's iron content is already nutritionally relevant, the team plans to increase it by 12-fold in the future, so that enough iron can be consumed in one meal.

Nutrition benefits

Those working in nutrition are aware of the benefits of biofortification – the name given to the process whereby plants are bred to have higher nutrient levels in the edible parts, either through conventional breeding and/or modern biotechnology.

Among them is the WHO, which has a programme working against iron deficiency anaemia and other micronutritional deficiencies such as vitamin A and iodine deficiency. The WHO's Micronutrients Unit is headed by Juan Pablo Pena-Rosas.

Pena-Rosas told swissinfo.ch via email that, in theory, biofortified crops and other methods, such as industrial fortification or supplementation, would improve the micronutrient status of those suffering a nutrient deficiency.

He added that those people would need to consume enough of the foodstuff to cover the nutritional gap between their food intake and individual requirements.

"However, much more work still needs to be done before the efficacy and effectiveness of these foods, such as the Zurich rice, are proven to reduce iron deficiency and iron deficiency anaemia."

According to WHO figures, 1.62 billion people are affected by iron deficiency anaemia worldwide, making it the most common global nutritional disorder.

The Zurich scientists hope that their rice could therefore offer a glimmer of hope in combating this far-reaching problem.

source:swissinfo.ch

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Burma Warning on Suu Kyi protests

Burma's military rulers have warned supporters of jailed pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi not to protest when her trial verdict is announced.

A verdict is expected on Friday in her trial for breaching the terms of her house arrest by allowing an uninvited US man stay in her home in Rangoon.

State media cautioned against protests, saying "we have to ward off subversive elements and disruptions".

Despite international calls for her release, a guilty verdict is expected.

The official New Light of Myanmar newspaper said: "Look out if some arouse the people to take to the streets to come to power. In reality they are anti-democracy elements, not pro-democracy activists."

'Vision warning'

Ms Suu Kyi faces five years in jail if she is convicted.

She is accused of allowing American well-wisher John Yettaw to stay in her lakeside home after he swam there, evading her guards.

He has said he swam to her home to warn her he had a vision that she would be assassinated.

Lawyers for Ms Suu Kyi have not disputed the events, but say she had no control over the situation and that the guards around her home should have kept Mr Yettaw away.

Her lawyers have also argued that the law she has been charged under is part of a constitution abolished 25 years ago.

The trial had initially been expected to last a few days, but has now dragged on for more than two months. Defence lawyers gave their final statements on Tuesday, in response to the prosecution's closing arguments the day before.

Analysts say the Burmese junta may use this trial to make sure the popular pro-democracy leader is still in detention during elections planned for early next year.

Her lawyer, Nyan Win, said Ms Suu Kyi was "preparing for the worst", stockpiling books and medicines.

Ms Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won elections in 1988 but was never allowed to take power.

The 64-year-old has spent nearly 14 of the last 20 years in detention, much of it at her Rangoon home.

Unusually, diplomats from Japan, Singapore, Thailand and the US were allowed to attend the trial in its closing stages.

Analysts suggested that signalled belated recognition on the part of the government at the level of international anger over Ms Suu Kyi's prosecution.

Sony is inFAMOUS

Studio in talks to adapt the electrifying game.

In the continued onslaught of game-to-film adaptations, the PS3 exclusive open-world superhero-action title infamous has been tapped for the big-screen treatment. Sony Pictures is currently bidding for the rights to the game, a no-brainer since the title was published by Sony Computer Entertainment.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Avi and Ari Arad will produce the film – to be scripted by Sheldon Turner – which involves an everyday bike messenger named Cole MacGrath who is transformed into a lightening-powered bad-ass in the wake of a mysterious explosion. The game, which allows the player to skew good or bad, follows Cole as he takes down three of the city's most nefarious gangs and uncovers a conspiracy of comic-book proportions.

"What excited me most about the game was it was the first of which I've come across that had a big idea and a character arc," Turner said. "It is, I believe, the future of gaming. The game, while big and fun, is at its core a love ballad to the underachiever, which is what our hero, Cole McGrath, is."

Turner is currently scripting a comic-book himself, Warrior, for Top Cow and is best known as the screenwriter of The Longest Yard and the Texas Chainsaw Massacreprequel film. Avi and Ari Arad are currently working on another videogame film, the adaptation of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune.

Source: IGNinsider

Jupiter gets a Black Eye

We sometimes forget that the universe is a violent place.

This week, astronomers in Hawaii recorded an exceedingly rare event. An amazing photograph revealed a comet or asteroid, probably no more than a mile across, plowing into Jupiter’s atmosphere. The impact created a fireball roughly the size of the planet earth.

The good news is that Jupiter was just doing its job, cleaning out the solar system of stray comets and asteroids. Jupiter, 318 times more massive than the earth, acts like a cosmic vacuum cleaner, sucking in or deflecting debris left over from the solar system’s birth 4.5 billion years ago. If it weren’t for Jupiter’s colossal gravitational field, we wouldn’t be here, since the earth would be hit with deadly comet and meteor impacts every month or so. Most of the U.S. would just be an empty graveyard of bleak craters.

The bad news is that a comet impact could happen to us. A black eye for Jupiter would be a body blow to the earth. We got a taste of this back in 1908, when something the size of an apartment building plowed into Tunguska, Siberia. This “city-buster” flattened 100 million trees with the force of a hydrogen bomb. But this recent Jupiter comet, much larger and coming in at perhaps 100,000 miles per hour, would have unleashed the power of hundreds of H-bombs. It might have engulfed most of the East Coast in a huge firestorm, triggering a massive tsunami and destabilizing the weather.

According to Hollywood, we can always send our astronauts on a space shuttle to intercept a comet and blow it up with H-bombs. Wrong. Blowing up a comet with nuclear bombs creates chunks of debris, increasing the area of destruction. So we are sitting ducks to a potential impact from deep space.

So what’s the lesson from all of this?

Maybe Mother Nature has a sense of humor. An impact like the recent one in Jupiter happened 15 years ago, in late July, after the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet broke up into 20 pieces, each of which plunged into Jupiter, creating a dazzling display of cosmic fireworks. Scientists used to believe that these collisions took place once every few thousand years, not 15 years. So perhaps Mother Nature was just trying to show what little scientists really understand about these cosmic collisions.

But it also happened on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. So maybe Mother Nature was reminding us that the universe is, after all, a violent place—that we may one day need a new home. The earth lies in the middle of a cosmic shooting gallery. The proof comes out every night when we gaze at the moon.

When viewing the film of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bobbing among the barren craters of the moon, we are reminded that each crater was gouged out by a titanic impact.

In addition, there are more than 5,000 so-called near-earth objects, carefully tracked by telescope, that can cross near the orbit of the earth. One of them, the asteroid Apophis, is about the size of the Rose Bowl. It will graze the earth in 2029 and again in 2036, passing below some of our satellites.

But there are also many unnamed comets outside the solar system whose orbits are totally unknown and unpredictable. They would give us little warning and catch us totally off-guard, like the comet that just hit Jupiter.

So in the long term, perhaps we should look at the space program as an insurance policy. Not only has the space program given us a bonanza of benefits (such as weather satellites, the Global Positioning System, telecommunications, etc.), it also provides a gateway to the stars. Over the course of the next few centuries, maybe we should use that gateway to plan to be a “two planet species.” Life is too precious to place in one basket.

In August, President Barack Obama will receive a major report from the U.S. human space flight plans committee about the future of space travel, which could be a turning point for NASA in the 21st century. He should remember the Jupiter hit as he considers the report.

Gaint Leaps of Moonstruck Dreamers

FORTY years ago Monday, Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the Moon. But for millennia before him people had been imagining that giant leap in fiction, fables and film. They flew to the Moon in rocket ships, winged chariots and projectiles fired from huge guns. There they met giants, insect-men, Nazis and topless women.
Although pre-1969 stories of lunar voyages were often silly or satirical, Frederick I. Ordway III, a former NASA researcher, argues that they played a critical role in inspiring the scientists who actually put men on the Moon.
“They all read H. G. Wells and Jules Verne," Mr. Ordway said recently. “Science fiction got us all started in the early days, I think without exception.”

Growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the 1930s Mr. Ordway devoured science-fiction pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, some 900 of which he would later donate to the Harvard College Library. In the 1940s he was a student member of the American Rocket Society, a space enthusiasts’ organization that built and test-fired small rockets in New York and New Jersey.

After graduating from Harvard in 1949 with a degree in geosciences, Mr. Ordway went to work for Reaction Motors, which built engines for the X-1 and X-15 experimental rocket planes. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s he worked in Huntsville, Ala., with the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and then at the NASA George C. Marshall Space flight center.

In 1965, at the author Arthur C. Clarke's suggestion, the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick hired Mr. Ordway as the scientific consultant on "2001: A Space Odyssey." Mr. Ordway has also written and edited more than two dozen books about spaceflight real and imagined.

He said that the earliest known Moon voyage in written history is by the satirist Lucian of Samosata of the second century A.D. Lucian begins his “True History” with a disclaimer that it’s all lies. He goes on to describe sailing on a ship that’s carried to the Moon by a giant waterspout. He finds the Moon inhabited by men who ride three-headed vultures and giant fleas, and are at war with the inhabitants of the Sun.

In the 16th century Ariosto’s epic poem "Orlando Furioso" depicts the Moon as the repository of all things misplaced on Earth. The knight Astolfo ventures there in a chariot pulled by four magical horses, to look for mad Orlando’s lost wits.

The development of the telescope in the 17th century spurred much speculation about the Moon and its possible inhabitants. There was even an early space race, on paper at least, as English patriots exhorted their countrymen to colonize the Moon before other nations could.

The astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote his lunar speculations as fiction. In “Somnium”("Dream"), published posthumously in 1634, a young man is carried away by Moon demons. Kepler’s descriptions of a harsh lunar surface are quite accurate, even if he does inhabit it with giant snakes and other creatures. Domingo Gonsales (actually Francis Godwin, the bishop of Hereford) flies to the Moon in a chair pulled by geese in his 17th-century best seller, “The Man in the Moone.” He finds it to be “another Earth,” peopled by giants.

In his satirical “Voyages to the Moon and the Sun,” the poet and wit Cyrano de Bergerac first attempts a lunar flight carried by vials of rising dew but only makes it as far as Canada. He later succeeds, propelled part of the way by rockets, a conveyance that seems to have occurred to very few writers before the 20th century.

In the 18th century Baron Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Munchausen told such tall tales about himself that others joined in, fictionalizing him in his own lifetime. They had him traveling to the Moon once by a giant beanstalk and once in a sailing ship carried, like Lucian’s, by a storm. There he meets the king with a detachable head — depicted by Robin Williams in Terry Gilliam's film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" (1988).

Mr. Armstrong had barely set foot on the Moon when a conspiracy theory spread that the lunar landing was a hoax. In "The Sun and the Moon" (Basic Books, 2008) Matthew Goodman describes an earlier Moon hoax perpetrated in the summer of 1835 by The New York Sun. It was a series of articles purported to recount the lunar observations of an actual British astronomer, John Herschel, whose giant telescope allegedly brought him images of shaggy bison, one-horned goats and the “Vespertilio-homo, or man-bat.” The anonymous author, a journalist named Richard Adams Locke, so skillfully blended the scientific and the fantastic that many readers were taken in. Herschel, whose observatory was in South Africa, was not party to the hoax.

“There was tremendous interest in astronomy that year because Halley’s Comet, last seen in 1759, was on its way that fall,” Mr. Goodman said.

One disgruntled reader of Locke’s jest, Mr. Goodman added, was Edgar Allen Poe. That same summer The Southern Literary Messenger published Poe’s own Moon hoax, “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” to little notice. By 1844 Moon hoaxes were so common that The Messenger ran a parody, “Recollections of Six Days’ Journey in the Moon. By an Aerio-Nautical Man.” The narrator tells of floating to the Moon using “a new and hitherto unknown science, called Aeriotism, or the faculty of self-suspension in the air.”

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source: nytimes

Swami Vivekananda - 19

Swami Vivekananda’s contribution to the religion of India can be summed up as follows:

1. God is "impersonal" so far as an ultimate analysis of His being is concerned, for since, in his essence, He is superior to spatial limitation or temporal sequence, He cannot be located in space or limited by time. At the same time, to the individual believer, who has focused his attention on some aspect of His Being, in his desire to visualise His nature and let it be a source of inspiration for his personal needs, God is "personal". But this is a lower degree of "realisation". To the initiated the Divinity is the Reality that pervades the whole Universe and is operative in human thought as well as in the evolution of the Universes. In that mighty consciousness slumbers the mysteries of the worlds and the secrets of human development.

2. Being and Becoming are different aspects of the same reality and are only relative to our intelligence. Man has the promise and potentiality of divine realisation, of spiritual perfection and therefore is God in the making, for even his humanity is intelligible only if regarded as an individualised self-expression of God. It is derogatory to human nature, therefore, to attribute sin to man. Besides, God being the sole and supreme Reality, how could a foreign element like sin invade the sanctuary of being? "The Hindus refuse to call you sinners'. Ye, divinities on earth, sinners! It is a sin to call man so! It is a standing libel on human nature" (from the Swami's address at the Parliament of Religions). On another occasion he wrote: "The sages who wrote the Vedas were preachers of principles. Now and then their names are mentioned, but that is all. We do not know who or what they were. At the same time, just as our God is an impersonal and yet a personal one, so our religion is a most intensely impersonal one, and yet has an infinite scope for the play of persons".

3. The claim of Hinduism to be the universal religion is that it preaches principles and does not demand loyalty to persons. As for religions that have gathered round the personality of some individual, "smash the historicity of the man, and the religion tumbles to the ground. The glory of Krishna was not that he was a Krishna, but that he was a teacher of Vedanta."

4. Since God is all and all is God, the world perceived by the senses is of an illusory nature, the only true world or state of being is that of intuitive realisation of spiritual reality, which is the recognition of the soul's identity with the Ultimate Reality called Brahma. According to this hypothesis the Ideal and the Real merge into one and all discriminations are brushed aside between Being and Becoming. It falls beyond the scope of this book to offer criticisms of the above statements. We can only say in passing that side by side with vigorous and bold thinking, there is serious confusion of issues and impatience with reducing the ideas to a system. The Swami's ideas have not been reduced to a coherent system, but are brilliant flashes of genius alternating with mere verbal jugglery and empty flourishes of rhetoric.

5. The East is profoundly spiritual and religious, the West profoundly practical and political, but in the main, irreligious and materialistic. Both have to learn a great deal from each other. The Swami's great ambition was to set up a commerce in ideas between the East and the West, analogous to the exchange of commodities between the nations. He would say: "Send a ship-load of doctors and teachers out to India, and we shall send you missionaries of religion." He would also say: "For clear thinking and sound idealism the Greeks ; for efficiency, business reliability and the love for personal and national freedom the English ; but for audacity in religious thinking and for philosophical acumen the Indians".

6. He had a bold vision of a spiritual federation of humanity, heedless of caste, colour and creed. He was grievously disappointed at the treatment meted out to the African Americans in America.

7. The fundamental unity of mankind he perceived in the central fact of the common relation all bore to the Immanent Life. He had great veneration for Christ and spoke of Him as "a disembodied, unfettered soul." He would ever and anon speak of the "Christ in you," the kingdom of heaven in your hear" and so on.

8. But finally his lasting achievement was to infuse a spirit of active philanthropy and social cooperation into an individualistic scheme of abstract philosophy. He called it "practical vedantism" or New Vedantism, the idea being that reunion with the Divine Life is best accomplished through selfless service and devotion to man.

Toyota and Mazda in talks over hybrid technology

Toyota Motor Corp. is considering sharing its hybrid technology with Mazda Motor Corp., a move that would help the Toyota system become the industry standard in the eco-car market, sources said Thursday.

A senior Toyota executive said the company is in talks with Mazda and has received requests from other automakers for tie-ups concerning its hybrid technology.

Toyota, the world's largest automaker, let Ford Motor Co. use its patented hybrid technology in 2004. The Japanese automaker started providing its hybrid system to Nissan Motor Co. in 2006.

If an agreement is reached with Toyota, Mazda, which plans to introduce hybrid vehicles in the first half of the 2010s, will be able to catch up with other automakers in the field.

For Toyota, such tie-ups bring economy of scale and reduce the costs of its own hybrid vehicles.

Moreover, the spread of its technology will help Toyota's hybrid system become a dominant force in the eco-car market, where various kinds of technology exist.

Toyota's hybrid system combines a gasoline engine and an electric motor. It is energy efficient because it converts energy that arises when a vehicle slows down into electricity, which is stored in a battery and used as motive power.

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Organic Tomatoes

Reducing our food down to its micronutrients is the most unromantic way to look at food we’ve come up with yet. Gone are the descriptions that tempt us and make our mouths water. We’ve tossed out the sweet, tang of a tomato on our lip and replaced it with the cancer fighting attribute of lycopene. But replace we must. In order for science to recognize the health benefits of food and specifically, the differences between organic and conventionally farmed food, they need definite benchmarks to note. Of course, time and time again science does find that organically raised and grown meat and produce are healthier and contain less toxins.

The scientists at the University of California, Davis conducted a 10 year study of tomatoes to find out if organically grown tomatoes were truly more nutritious than their conventionally grown counterparts. The study found that the mean levels of various micronutrients were between 79 and 97% higher in the organic tomatoes versus the conventional tomatoes. Additionally, they found that flavonoid levels continued to increase in the organic samples, whereas these same flavonoid levels remained the same in the conventionally raised crop.

Tomatoes are the second most highly consumed vegetable (although it is technically a fruit) in the USA, second only to the potato. They contain high levels of vitamins C and A, lycopene, and flavonoids (quercetin, kaempferol, and naringenin).

One last thing to keep in mind when deciding whether to eat organic tomatoes, there are more genetically modified (GMO) tomatoes on the market today than ever before. And sadly, our producers are not regulated to note if a product contains any GMO materials. Organic foods are not allowed to contain GMO content. Sneak Peek: More about GMO to come. Stay tuned.

But all of this talk about the science of tomatoes doesn’t account for it’s popularity. Most of us have been enjoying these tangy fruits since long before we even knew what lycopene was. There are various flavors, colors, sizes and uses for tomatoes that span all cuisines. From sauce to fried, to salads and casseroles, tomatoes are delicious, versatile and nutritious.

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Source: Examiner