How cool is that? Next time I have cravings, I am so using this website.
From Reuters: U.S. Plans to Bring Food to Games:
Ooh, burn! This from the country that puts bleach in their food.BEIJING -- The U.S. Olympic Committee has disappointed the head of food services at the Beijing Olympics with a plan to bring its own food to the Games.
Wary of food quality in China following recent incidents of tainted products and reports of the heavy use of drugs and insecticides in food production, the Americans are planning to transport tons of meats and other foods to a training camp at Beijing Normal University.
"I feel it's a pity that [the Americans] decided to take their own food," Kang Yi, head of the Food Division for the Beijing organizing committee, said Thursday. She said the U.S. hasn't officially notified her department of the plan.
The U.S. delegation will number more than 600, and many will eat their daily meals at the training camp rather than at the Athletes Village. The village will house about 17,000 athletes and officials during the Aug. 8-24 Games and can serve 6,000 meals simultaneously.
"We have made lots of preparations to ensure that [the athletes] can get together at the Olympic Games," Ms. Kang said at a news conference on food safety. "If the American delegation is not at that gathering, it's a pity."
Another official said there was no evidence that drugs and growth stimulants used in meat production could trigger positive doping tests.
From BBC: Israeli MP blames quake on gays:
Omg. Awesome. So Malaysian politicians aren't the only ones saying stupid shit like that. What's sad is that even Israel is more liberal than us. Come to think of it, Israel seems more liberal than America, too. Who would've thunk?An Israeli MP has blamed parliament's tolerance of gays for earthquakes that have rocked the Holy Land recently.
Shlomo Benizri, of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, said the tremors had been caused by lawmaking that gave "legitimacy to sodomy".
Israel decriminalised homosexuality in 1988 and has since passed several laws recognising gay rights.
Two earthquakes shook the region last week and a further four struck in November and December.
He called on lawmakers to stop "passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyway brings about earthquakes".
Israeli court rulings in recent years have granted inheritance rights to gay couples and recognised same-sex marriages performed abroad.
Last week, Israel's attorney general ruled same-sex couples could adopt.
From BBC: Vietnam 'baby-smugglers' arrested:
On the one hand, what they're doing is placing a value on human life, which is inherently wrong. On the other, they're essentially taking the children away from what promises to be a life without love and care, and placing them with people who really do want to take care of them. Since they're desperate enough to buy a child, logic has it that they must really, really want one. And now, they're back in the arms of mothers that never wanted them in the first place.Vietnamese authorities have arrested three women and a man for allegedly smuggling newborn babies to China.
The suspects were detained with two baby boys, aged one month and one week old, in Hanoi and Ha Tay provinces.
Hanoi police said they had also detained an eight-month pregnant woman who confessed to agreeing to sell her unborn baby to the gang.
The woman was being transferred to China, where she is expected to give birth to the child.
All the babies were sold for eight million dong ($500) each.
The police said they would be offered for adoption to couples in China for around $2,000 each, because they were boys.
Girls would be sold for half the amount, according to investigators.
This is the first time the Vietnamese police have uncovered the smuggling of unborn babies.
One of the boys has been returned to his birth mother, while the other is being looked after at a children's hospital in Hanoi.
I believe it was YY who said that sharks aren't endangered. Ya. Sure. From BBC: Hammerhead in need of protection:
There you go. A damned good reason to not eat shark's fin soup. It isn't that great, anyway.Over-fishing and demand for shark fins, an expensive delicacy, have pushed one of the world's iconic animals towards the brink of extinction, say experts.
The scalloped hammerhead shark is to be added to the official endangered species list this year, under the heading "globally endangered".
The observation takes account of new research that shows hammerhead and great white sharks patrol fixed routes in the ocean, gathering at hotspots to mate or feed.
Dr Julia Baum, a marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, US, and a member of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), said excessive fishing was putting many of the ocean's "most majestic predators" at risk of extinction.
They say demand for shark fins as an expensive delicacy is greatly increasing the pressure on shark populations.
They want a meaningful ban on the practice of shark finning, which involves a shark's fins being removed before the rest of the animal is thrown back into the ocean to die.
Hammerheads are among the most commonly caught sharks for finning. A large shark fin can fetch over £50 a kilo.
Previous research by Dr Baum's team has found that sharks are declining rapidly in parts of the Atlantic Ocean.
All species they looked at had declined by over 50% since the early 1970s.
For many large coastal shark species, the drop in numbers was much greater: tiger, scalloped hammerhead and dusky shark populations have fallen by more than 95%.
A total of 233 shark species are currently on the IUCN Red List, 12 of which are classified "critically endangered".
Nine, including the scalloped hammerhead, have been added or will be added this year.
Among them are three species of thresher shark and the shortfin mako shark. These are considered "vulnerable to extinction".
Yesterday was such an awesome day for science. First there was the self healing rubber (from BBC: Self healing rubber bounces back):
And then there was this, from BBC: Female G spot 'can be detected':A material that is able to self-repair even when it is sliced in two has been invented by French researchers.
The substance, described in the journal Nature, produces surfaces when cut that retain a strong chemical attraction to each other.
Pieces of the material join together again as if never parted without the need for glue or a special treatment.The French researchers are already making kilogramme quantities in their Paris laboratories and say the process is almost completely green, and could be completely so with a few adjustments.
This is recommended reading for everyone. How awesome is that? Should have detected this article yesterday but I was too busy.The mysterious G spot - supposedly a route to female sexual satisfaction - can be located with ultrasound, claim Italian scientists.
Some women say stimulating a certain part of the vagina triggers powerful orgasms, but medicine has not been able to pin down the exact location.
Researchers told New Scientist magazine they found an area of thicker tissue among the women reporting orgasms. The existence of the G spot has remained controversial since the 1980s, when the term was coined as a way to explain why some women were able to achieve orgasm through vaginal stimulation, while others were not.
The latest research, published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, was carried out the Dr Emmanuele Jannini at the University of L'Aquila, and involved just 20 women.
Ultrasound was used to measure the size and shape of the tissue beyond the "front" wall of the vagina, often suggested as the location of the G spot.
I've mentioned this to various people in locations ranging from the depths of Kuala Lumpur to the Andaman Sea. There is a giant garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean. And I hope you don't think I'm exaggerating by calling it giant, because this is what it looks like:
That's right. It's rubbish soup. It's twice the size of the United States. I'm not kidding. It stretches from Hawaii to Japan. It was discovered in 1997 by Charles Moore, and ten years on, people apparently still haven't done anything about it. Personally, I'm not quite sure how this didn't make front page news. Although I suppose people losing money and markets crashing probably buried it in the back pages.
As to what it actually consists of, from The Independent: The world's rubbish dump: A garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan:
The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.
It's dangerous to humans and to animals, both aquatic and non-aquatic. The reason it's all clumped up there is because of the currents that swirl around the area, bringing trash from other parts of the ocean and keeping it there.
Want to know more? Here:
NB: The reason the date says 'Monday' is because I was drafting out this entry on Monday but didn't have time to finish it until today. Yes, I had work to do. No, don't ask.
