Additive used in sausages and burgers may cause cancer

An E number used to make commercial sausages and burgers pink may cause cancer. Scientific studies suggest Red 2G, or E128, causes tumours in rats and mice and might have the same effect on people.

After reviewing the experiments, the European Food Safety Agency (Efsa) said it could set no safe limit for the additive.

The European Commission is expected to ban its use within a fortnight, but products containing the additive on the shelves are not likely to be withdrawn.

Efsa has been reviewing the safety of colourings, many of which were approved for use 30 years ago. In a statement yesterday, the agency said its scientific panel on food additives, flavourings, processing aids and materials had reviewed several evaluations of Red 2G since 1999. It found the E number, one of a band of controversial "azo-dye" colourings, converted in the body into a substance called aniline.

"Based on animal studies the panel concluded that aniline should be considered as a carcinogen," Efsa said, adding that it was not possible to state that the cancer had developed because of the genetic structure of the animal cells.

"It is therefore not possible to determine a level of intake for aniline which may be regarded as safe for humans," it added. "The panel therefore decided that Red 2G should be regarded as being of safety concern."

The European Commission is "reflecting" on the assessment and is expected to act at a meeting with member states on 20 July. A spokesman said Red G was used in Britain and Ireland but was not used in Scandinavia.

Yesterday it was found that several British companies selling sausages and burgers with Red 2G on the internet. Many supermarket products are unlikely to contain it, however, because many chains have been removing E numbers amid public concern at the effect of additives.

Ian Tokelove, of the pressure group the Food Commission, said there had been concerns about Red 2G going back decades and it was suspected of being a carcinogen in the 1980s. "Our general view is that additives are totally unnecessary," he added. "We don't need them in our food. They're there to disguise the quality of the food and in this case to make meat products look fresher and meatier than they are."

Red 2G is permitted for use in breakfast sausages with a minimum cereal content of 6 per cent and in burgers with 4 per cent of vegetables or cereals. It gives meat a reddish-pink appearance that turns brown on contact with heat.

Source : Belfast Telegraph

New toothpaste can regrow teeth

The $3 billion global market for toothpaste is on the verge of a shake-up as new biotechnologies come through that not only curtail sensitivity problems but will also enable teeth to re-grow to fill in small cavities. Today’s toothpaste comes in a plethora of flavours and can of course whiten teeth but from a medical viewpoint, little has progressed in the 40 years since fluoride was added to fight decay.
Now though scientists in various countries have developed differing technologies that produce similar results to deaden sensitivity and recalcify the teeth, problems that have increasing significance as populations age. Researchers have found fluoride ceases to be as effective with older people. That’s because the elderly have more difficulty generating the large amounts of saliva – loaded with calcium and phosphate - necessary to combine with fluoride to resist the demineralisation of teeth. Also, said Richard Bernholt, managing director of west London-based dental care company Periproducts: “The older you are the more likely you are to have gums receding and sensitivity problems because of what you eat.”
Periproducts, which sells Retardex products in the UK, has licensed NovaMin technology from a Florida firm of the same name and hopes to be the first company to have it formulated in a retail brand in the UK later this year. Periproducts plans to launch its new toothpaste in October at the British Dental Trade Association exhibition at NEC Birmingham. The company wants to get its as-yet-unnamed toothpaste with dentists and into the retail chain before the big names in oral hygiene – Colgate-Palmolive, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Unilever and Procter & Gamble reformulate their products with NovaMin or competing calcium phosphate compounds.

Source : Bahrain Tribune

Science Forgeries and Frauds

Greed for money and fame. Here are just a few. Year: 1939 Originally appeared in: "Thunder in his Footsteps" by Roland T. Bird in Natural History Now appears in: "History of Science: Fossil Proboscidians and Myths of Giant Men" by James L. Hayward in Transactions of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences (Also discussed in Quest for the African Dinosaurs by Louis Jacobs) The worst thing about this hoax is how many people still fall for it. In the 1930s, American Museum paleontologist Roland T. Bird paid a visit to the Paluxy River limestone beds near Glen Rose, Texas, to see a spectacular dinosaur trackway. Bird's visit came during the Depression, and some locals decided to sell tracks from the region in hopes of making some much needed cash. They quickly figured out it would be easier to carve footprints than dig up the real things, and that it would be more interesting to carve giant human footprints than dinosaur tracks. A fraud is a glowing success when it tells people what they want to believe, and many biblical literalists embraced this so-called evidence that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Truth is, we missed each other by about 65 million years.
Year: 1845 Con artist: "Dr." Albert Koch Originally published in: Hydrarchos Now appears in: Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis This illustration accompanied Albert Koch's description of a "gigantic fossil reptile" 114 feet long. In truth, Koch pieced together the bones of five fossil whales, then showed the specimen in the U.S. and in England. The hoax was exposed on both sides of the Atlantic.
Year: 1997 Con artist: Unidentified Chinese fossil collector (who might not have known he was defrauding anyone) Originally published in: National Geographic Magazine, November, 1999 issue For more information: National Geographic Magazine, October, 2000 issue (Photo by O. Louis Mazzatenta), Nature Magazine, February 17, 2000 issue, Unearthing the Dragon by Norell and Ellison In 1997, a Chinese farmer found an exquisite birdlike fossil with faint feather impressions. A couple yards away, he found a lizardlike fossil tail. He took these and other finds home, glued the pieces together, then sold the result to a local dealer. To the farmer, it looked like a nice, complete fossil, which would bring him a little more money than shattered pieces. To less-than-careful eyes, the composite looked like a missing link between dinosaurs and birds. Over the next two years, the composite fossil made its way into the hands of a loose association of amateur dinosaur enthusiasts, professional paleontologists and National Geographic editors. With unprecedented achievement in lousy communication, various members of this group purchased the fossil for $80,000, insured it for $1.6 million, proudly announced the new species Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, then eventually wished they'd never seen the little fossil. Added to the embarrassment was the near certainty that it had been illegally smuggled out of China, a fact which — to its credit — National Geographic insisted be remedied before it agreed to publish the find. (The fossil was eventually repatriated.) The original plan was to describe the fossil in a peer-reviewed publication — a contingency that National Geographic gambled on — but after the paper was rejected by both Nature and Science, National Geographic didn't have time to pull the article. The magazine ignored its policy of awaiting publication in a peer-reviewed paper and announced the find. Just a few months later, Xu Xing, a collaborator in the research announced the bad news, and confirmed what a few others had quietly suspected: The fossil was a composite. In fact, it was a composite of 88 pieces. Finger pointing ensued. Creationists loved it. But as paleontologist Mark Norell has pointed out, the fossil never passed peer review, and the scientists involved revealed the forgery.
Year: 1842 Con artist: P.T. Barnum Originally published in: New York Herald Now appears in: Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis (Also discussed in The Feejee Mermaid by Jan Bondeson) P.T. Barnum's skillful manipulation convinced thousands to see his "Feejee Mermaid." It was displayed for "positively one week only!" at a concert hall on Broadway. Years later, Barnum recounted with amusement how he had lured the crowds to see an "ugly, dried-up, black-looking specimen about three feet long . . . that looked like it had died in great agony." A generation earlier, on the other side of the Atlantic, the mermaid enjoyed similar notoriety. An American captain named Samuel Barrett Eades purchased the mermaid in 1822, paying for the prize by selling the ship he was supposed to sail. The ship's real owner, Stephen Ellery, was hardly amused. Ellery hired William Clift, a talented anatomist and zoologist, to examine the specimen. Clift found the mermaid was a skillful forgery incorporating the head on an orangutan, the teeth of a baboon, artificial eyes, and likely the tail of a salmon. Eades didn't welcome this news, and later hired his own "experts" to assure him the mermaid was genuine. After entertaining crowds of Londoners, the mermaid fell into obscurity for two decades before Barnum bought it.
Now appears in: Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy and The Floating Egg by Roger Osborne For many years, the ground in the village of Whitby, England was strewn with baffling objects vaguely resembling coiled snakes. Local legend explained that years earlier, the area was crawling with snakes which St. Hilda (Abbess of the Whitby Abbey) beheaded and turned to stone. This coat of arms of the town of Whitby recalls that legend. In less benign tributes to the legend, locals "found" the original snake heads and reattached them to the snakes, then (not surprisingly) sold them. In fact, the heads were skillfully carved from stone. And the snakes? They are really fossil ammonites that went extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs		.
Year: 1726 Con artists: J. Ignatz Roderick and Georg von Eckhart Originally published in: Lithographiae Wirceburgensis Now appears in: The Lying Stones of Marrakech by Stephen Jay Gould In the early 18th century, Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer, a professor and physician from Wu"rzburg, published a book documenting "fossil" finds from a nearby mountain. His finds included everything from spiders on their webs to lizards with their skins intact. Legend has it that Beringer was the object of a joke by his students, but he was actually defrauded by two of his colleagues. When Roderick and Eckhart learned that Beringer intended to publish his finds, they nervously warned him that the fossils were fake, but by then Beringer was a man with a purpose. Although Beringer mistakenly assumed the fossils were natural, not carved, he refused to speculate any further, instead publishing his finds for others to analyze. Based on today's understanding of fossils, Beringer's mistake seems remarkably stupid. In his time, however, the process of fossilization was poorly — if at all — understood. Whether fossils were organic in nature or the results of the same forces that made rocks themselves was not yet known.
Year: 1911 Originally appeared in: Several hundred publications Now appears in: Human Origins: The Search for Our Beginnings by Herbert Thomas (Discussed in detail in The Piltdown Forgery by J.S. Weiner) Perhaps the best known case of scientific fraud, the Piltdown Man was believed to be the earliest-known human from Western Europe. In fact, it was the jaw of an ape (with filed teeth) paired with a human skull. Amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson collected a skull fragment in 1911, and claimed that workmen digging in the gravel pit where the fragment was found had given him another piece years earlier. More excavations turned up more material. Skeptics who suspected that the skull and jaw came from two different animals were flummoxed at the 1915 find of a second individual (Piltdown II) two miles away. Many (planted) animal fossils from the area corroborated Piltdown Man, the most ridiculous being a "bone tool" that proved to be a cricket bat. And yet the Piltdown forgery was far from amateurish; the perpetrator(s) understood human and ape anatomy, fossils of "contemporary" fauna, and even the gravel beds where the fossils were collected. It wasn't until 1953 that three scientists (Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, Kenneth Oakley and Joseph Weiner) uncovered the hoax. Even now, the perpetrator is unknown. Besides Dawson, suspects include English anatomist Sir Arthur Keith and British Museum employee Martin Hinton. Some speculation has even fingered Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame. Exposure of the Piltdown fraud helped pave the way for acceptance of genuine hominid fossils, such as Raymond Dart's Australopithecus africanus, whose implications (evolution of bipedalism before big brains) had been "disproven" by Piltdown.
Year: 1613 Scientist/artist: Ulisse Aldrovandi Originally published in: De Piscibus Now appears in: Merchants and Marvels edited by Smith and Findlen In his posthumously published book on fish, Aldrovandi didn't carry out a hoax, but instead showed how it could be done. This illustration showed a ray cleverly modified to look like a dragon. In fact, some collectors actually prized creations like this, even when they were known to be forgeries.
Years: 1874-1918 Con artists: Ha*kan Dahlmark, Halvar Friesendahl, Carl Erik Hammarberg and Rudolf Granberg Now appears in: The Historical Preservation Society in Medelpad This cross between a female hare and a wood grouse cock was allegedly shot by Dahlmark in 1874. On his birthday in 1907, Dahlmark's housekeeper asked her nephew, Friesendahl, to paint a picture of it. Before his death, Dahlmark donated the painting to the historical society. Inspired to create a "real" skvader, the society's new director, Hammarberg, contacted Granberg, a talented taxidermist, and Granberg obliged him by making a stuffed specimen. In 1918, Hammarberg wrote an article in the local newspaper about the rare skvader, which, thanks to the sale of 3,000 postcards, would soon develop a worldwide reputation. Although some visitors to the historical society's museum are disappointed to find the skvader isn't genuine, few people have taken it very seriously. Source : iScience Journal

Candle Burn in Micro Gravity?

Unexpected spiral-shaped flames on Earth. By studying these peculiar flames, researchers hope to mitigate fire hazards on spacecraft and gain new insights about complex systems in nature.

The forms of flames on Earth are familiar to everyone. We all know what a burning match, candle, fireplace or blowtorch look like -- or a burning building, or rocket ignition blast. The presence of gravity and the effects of air or gas movement, plus the type of fuel and oxidant, determine everything from a flame's shape and temperature to burn rate, burn pattern, soot production and deposition and how fast it will or won't be extinguished.

"But in the microgravity of space, we are not dealing with just another old familiar flame," says Dr. Vedha Nayagam of NASA's National Center for Microgravity Research on Fluids and Combustion at the Glenn Research Center (GRC) in Cleveland, OH, where the nature of combustion in space is being studied intently by teams of scientists.

Above : On Earth, gravity-driven buoyant convection causes a candle flame to be teardrop-shaped (A) and carries soot to the flame's tip, making it yellow. In microgravity, where convective flows are absent, the flame is spherical, soot-free, and blue (B).

"The tall spear-shaped flame on a candle, or the "roaring hearth" look of bonfire-type flames, or the forced-air look of a rocket or furnace flame are very different indeed in the absence of gravity," Dr. Nayagam states. "Soot production, burning rates, completeness of combustion, exhaust products and other characteristics all change radically in space.

"The absence of gravity's effects on convection aboard the Space Shuttle, a space station or other space vehicle makes flames behave in ways that can be either beneficial -- as a test bed for research -- or very dangerous in the case of a fire in materials, chemicals or electrical devices. It is vital to know what makes flames start and stop in low gravity, and how flames behave while burning. The safety of NASA's space crews and vehicles can depend on our knowledge of combustion in space."

Watching the Flame Go 'Round

Recently, Dr. Nayagam and Dr. Forman Williams of the University of California at San Diego, a co-investigator in NASA/GRC's microgravity combustion science program, came upon some startling discoveries about flames on Earth that could help scientists understand how flames behave in microgravity.

Nayagam and Williams ignited a plastic disk a little bigger than a CD with a blowtorch and then spun it slowly (2 to 20 revolutions per second) in still air. They expected to see flames burning as a horizontal disk. Instead, the flame burned in a flat spiral pattern, with the spiral moving in the direction opposite to the disk's spin. As the flames lessened their tips exhibited a strange meandering motion from side to side.

Right: Flames on top of a disk slowly spinning in a clockwise direction burn in a spiral headed counterclockwise. Vedha Nayagam and Forman Williams are studying this phenomenon, which occurs both on Earth and in microgravity, in the hopes of fully explaining the pattern with basic physics principles.

Starting a fire at the center of a still disk is like dropping a stone in a quiet pond, says Nayagam. It produces a flame front that moves outward in a circle, fading as the fuel (the disk) is consumed. If you spin the disk, then the circular disk flames become spiral flames under some conditions.

"Under slow spin conditions ... just before circular flames extinguish, [the flames] break symmetry -- and spirals appear in the center hole of the flames and propagate outwards in a spiral instead of in a circular wave front," he explained.

"Spiral burning could be common in the slow, swirling flows that we can establish in a microgravity environment -- but these results were very unexpected in normal Earth gravity," added Dr. Williams. "We plan to explore further what causes the spiral flame pattern, and what causes the tips to follow a [chaotic] meandering path."

Left : At NASA's Johnson Space Center, there is a microgravity research aircraft used to fly parabolas to investigate the effects of "zero" gravity. The KC-135, typically used by the USAF for aerial refueling, is the military version of the venerable Boeing 707airliner.

Nayagam says it's an advantage to be able to generate these flames in the lab under normal gravity, where it is easier and less expensive to study them than on the Space Shuttle. The investigators plan to conduct further tests with spiral flames on board the Johnson Space Flight Center's KC-135, which can create brief microgravity conditions in parabolic flight.

Why Set A Spinning Disk On Fire?

"We need to discover how and why flames propagate in microgravity, and under what conditions flame propagation changes. Hopefully the studies will also explain turbulent combustion, as the swirling flow is vital to understanding the phenomenon called fire whorl," says Dr. Nayagam.

"Understanding these surprising phenomenon may enable scientists to predict flame extinction and to help mitigate fire risks on Earth and in microgravity," states Dr. Nayagam. "The initial and on-going basic reason for NASA's combustion studies is to learn about spacecraft fire safety. We need to answer questions such as: what is the worst condition for fire in a microgravity environment, and under what conditions a fire will increase its burn rate or be extinguished. Our goals include learning under what conditions materials in a spacecraft will or won't support fire."

"The bottom line," Dr. Nayagam says, "is that this simple system of flames on a spinning disk under variable controlled conditions illustrates more complex systems on Earth, in spacecraft, and in the human body."

Source : Nasa Science Journal - 2000

Scientists crack lost lake mystery

Chilean scientists have confirmed suspicions that the missing lake which went awol in the Magallanes region of Patagonia simply drained away though a crack, Reuters reports.

The lake, when last seen back in March, boasted a surface area of around four to five hectares (10-12 acres or around 10 soccer pitches). When a team from Chile's National Forestry Corporation CONAF paid a visit in May they were surprised to find it had "completely disappeared".

The truth has now been revealed. Scientists yesterday told Chilean media that "a build-up of water opened a crack in an ice wall along one side of the lake", and the contents then "flowed through the crack into a nearby fjord and from there into the sea, leaving behind a dry lake-bed littered with icebergs".

Glacier expert Andres Rivera, who visited the site as part of a "missing lakes" investigative team, happily reported: "It looks like it's slowly filling up with water again." He did, however, offer the traditional warning that the lake's escape was "evidence of the effects of global warming".

Source : theregister.co.uk

Global Warming Map Animation

NASA has produced an animated map that illustrates changes in global temperatures between meteorological years 1891 and 2006. This animated map is an .mp4 file that can be viewed using a QuickTime player. Each frame in the animation represents a one year increment of the ten year mean temperature anomaly. This animation begins with a historic ten year (1891-1900) mean meteorological year temperature anomaly map and ends with a recent (1997-2006) ten year mean meteorological year temperature anomaly map. The animation clearly illustrates a global warming trend over the time interval.


First Frame of the Global Warming Map Animation by NASA



Last Frame of the Global Warming Map Animation by NASA


You can view the animation or read details at the NASA website.

Strange Orbits

Like toy cars chasing each other on a looped racetrack, three stars can, in principle, trace out a figure-eight orbit in space. This surprising pattern of motion arises from the force of gravity acting on three bodies of equal mass. The movements are timed so that each body in turn passes between the other two. Moreover, such coordinated movements aren't the only intricate maneuvers possible when several bodies attract one another gravitationally.

Newton's laws provide a precise answer to the problem of determining the motion of two bodies under the influence of gravity. If the solar system consisted of the sun and a single planet, for example, the planet would follow an elliptical orbit. When the system consists of more than two bodies, solving the relevant equations of motion gets very tricky.

For three interacting bodies (described as the three-body problem), mathematicians have found a small number of special cases in which the orbits of the three masses are periodic. In 1765, Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) discovered an example in which three masses start in a line and rotate so that they stay in line. Such a set of orbits is unstable, however, and it would not be found anywhere in the solar system.

Three gravitationally interacting bodies of equal mass: Euler configuration (left) and Lagrange configuration (right).

In 1772, J.L. Lagrange (1736–1813) identified a periodic orbit in which three masses are at the corners of an equilateral triangle. In this case, each mass moves in an ellipse in such a way that the triangle formed by the three masses always remains equilateral. A so-called Trojan asteroid, which forms a triangle with Jupiter and the sun, moves according to such a scheme.

Subsequent work by Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) and others demonstrated that, in general, it's impossible to obtain a general solution, expressed as an explicit formula, to the three-body problem. In other words, given three bodies in a random configuration, the resulting motion nearly always turns out to be chaotic. No one can predict precisely what paths those bodies would follow.

In 1993, Cris Moore, now at the University of New Mexico, added to the sparse list of exceptions. He discovered, via computer calculations, that three equal masses can chase each other around the same figure-eight curve in the plane.

In 2000, mathematicians Richard Montgomery of the University of California, Santa Cruz and Alain Chenciner of the Université Paris VII-Denis Diderot rediscovered the figure-eight orbit found by Moore, working out an exact solution to the equations of motion for three gravitationally interacting bodies. Montgomery described the discovery in the May 2001 Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

Three equal masses (red, blue, and green), shown at five equal time intervals, chase each other around a figure-eight-shaped curve. Initially, the three masses are in a straight line. Courtesy of Michael Nauenberg

Computer simulations by Carlès Simò of the University of Barcelona demonstrated that the figure-eight orbit is stable. The orbit persists even when the three masses aren't precisely the same, and it can survive a tiny disturbance without serious disruption.

"What stability means physically is that there is some chance that the [figure-eight orbit] might actually be seen in some stellar system," Montgomery noted.

The chance that such a three-body system exists somewhere in the universe, however, is very small. Numerical experiments suggest that the probability is somewhere between one per galaxy and one per universe. Nonetheless, advanced imaging techniques and the recent discovery of unusual extrasolar planetary systems are providing new space-time venues in which such motions could occur.

The existence of the three-body, figure-eight orbit prompted mathematicians to look for similar orbits involving four or more masses. Joseph Gerver of Rutgers University, for instance, found one set in which four bodies stay at the corners of a parallelogram at every instant, while each body follows a curve that looks like a figure-eight with an extra twist.

Using computers, Simò found hundreds of exact solutions for the case of n equal masses traveling a fixed planar curve. "They are not stable, except for the original figure-eight case," Montgomery noted. Nonetheless, "they make beautiful patterns: flowers, chains, and so on." For examples, see http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~charlie/3body/.

In the latest development, Moore and Michael Nauenberg of the University of California, Santa Cruz have unveiled a slew of new, periodic n-body orbits. Whereas previously discovered orbits were confined to the plane, the new orbits are three-dimensional. For a glimpse of these orbits, see http://www.santafe.edu/~moore/gallery.html.

One striking example (below) has 12 equal masses following four, roughly circular, interlocked orbits. Topologically, these orbits form the edges of a cuboctahedron.

Moore

Nauenberg gives additional examples of these three-dimensional orbits at http://physics.ucsc.edu/~michael/ (see section on recent publications). Even in the case of three bodies, it's possible to have intriguing nonplanar, figure-eight orbits.

Somewhere in the universe, triple stars and weird planetary systems may be doing crazy eights—and more! It would certainly be heavenly choreography.

Source : ScienceNews Journal