Chris Howard's Blog, page 11
August 27, 2012
August 26, 2012
preventativepractices:
Top 10 Genetically Modified Foods
1....
Top 10 Genetically Modified Foods
1. Corn - Corn has been modified to create its own insecticide. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has declared that tons of genetically modified corn has been introduced for human consumption. Monsanto has revealed that half of the US’s sweet corn farms are planted with genetically modified seed. Mice fed with GM corn were discovered to have smaller offspring and fertility problems.
2. Soy - Soy has also been genetically modified to resist herbicides. Soy products include soy flour, tofu, soy beverages, soybean oil and other products that may include pastries, baked products and edible oil. Hamsters fed with GM soy were unable to have offspring and suffered a high mortality rate.
3. Cotton - Like corn and soy, cotton has been designed to resist pesticides. It is considered food because its oil can be consumed. Its introduction in Chinese agriculture has produced a chemical that kills cotton bollworm, reducing the incidences of pests not only in cotton crops but also in neighboring fields of soybeans and corn. Incidentally, thousands of Indian farmers suffered severe rashes upon exposure to BT cotton.
4. Papaya - The virus-resistant variety of papaya was commercially introduced in Hawaii in 1999. Transgenic papayas comprised three-fourths of the total Hawaiian papaya crop. Monsanto bestowed upon Tamil Nadu Agricultural University in Coimbatore technology for developing papaya resistant to the ringspot virus in India.
5. Rice - This staple food from South East Asia has now been genetically modified to contain a high amount of vitamin A. Allegedly, there are reports of rice varieties containing human genes to be grown in the US. The rice will create human proteins useful for dealing with infant diarrhea in the 3rd world. China Daily, an online journal, reported potential serious public health and environment problems with genetically modified rice considering its tendency to cause allergic reactions with the concurrent possibility of gene transfers.
6. Tomatoes - Tomatoes have now been genetically engineered for longer shelf life, preventing them from easily rotting and degrading. In a test conducted to determine the safety of GM tomatoes, some animal subjects died within a few weeks after consuming GM tomatoes.
7. Rapeseed - In Canada, this crop was renamed canola to differentiate it from non-edible rapeseed. Food stuff produced from rapeseed includes rapeseed oil (canola oil) used to process cooking oil and margarine. Honey can also be produced from GM rapeseed. German food surveillance authorities discovered as much as a third of the total pollen present in Canadian honey may be from GM pollen. In fact, some honey products from Canada were also discovered to have pollen from GM rapeseed.
8. Dairy products - It has been discovered that 22 percent of cows in the U.S. were injected with recombinant (genetically modified) bovine growth hormone (rbGH). This Monsanto created hormone artificially forces cows to increase their milk production by 15 percent. Milk from cows treated with this milk inducing hormone contains increased levels of IGF-1 (insulin growth factors-1). Humans also have IGF-1 in their system. Scientists have expressed concerns that increased levels of IGF-1 in humans have been associated with colon and breast cancer.
9. Potatoes - Mice fed with potatoes engineered with Bacillus thuringiensis var. Kurstaki Cry 1 were found to have toxins in their system. Despite claims to the contrary, this shows that Cry1 toxin was stable in the mouse gut. When the health risks were revealed, it sparked a debate.
10. Peas - Peas that have been genetically modified have been found to cause immune responses in mice and possibly even in humans. A gene from kidney beans was inserted into the peas creating a protein that functions as a pesticide.
THE WEEKENDER #1
Take a long walk with no way of writing anything down… I find I’m more likely to overflow with ideas if I can’t record any of them.
- The Weekender is an occasional musing on something I find useful when writing stories. Best digested while enjoying a coffee on a Sunday morning.
August 23, 2012
ROOTLESS AUDIOBOOK!!!
Listening to the first chapter of the ROOTLESS AUDIOBOOK right now….. WHOA! Surreal and amazing. And I guess it’s time to tell you that the amazing NICK PODEHL has narrated it. Nick’s done an incredible job bringing Banyan to life, and created awesome voices for each of the characters. Oh yeah… and I recorded music for the intro/outro, which is sounding pretty sweet, too! :) The AUDIOBOOK will be out, like the book, on NOVEMBER 1st, via Scholastic. BIG THANKS to the executive producer PAUL GAGNE, the director and producer BOB DEYAN, the narrator, NICK PODEHL, and to anyone else involved!
August 21, 2012
New ROOTLESS book trailer
Check out this awesome promo video that Scholastic put together for ROOTLESS…
August 2, 2012
I’m celebrating “3 months before the book’s out” by...
I’m celebrating “3 months before the book’s out” by launching this brand new website to help people begin to explore the world of ROOTLESS! I can’t wait for people to read the book this fall, and am so excited about this site. It’s awesome! I’ve been working with the brilliant team at VOLTAGE A+D over the last months, and they’ve really created something special. The website is an extension of the book, and helps build the world that you’ll experience in my debut novel. Each page is a work of art, suggesting the mood of the book and exploring some of its symbology and imagery. And there’s more! Located throughout the site are seven “easter eggs” – little visual clues that if you can find and click, take you further into the story. This is information that’s mostly not even in the book, so, rather than spoil anything, it simply sets you up to know more and more about a world that a young tree builder called Banyan calls home…
A huge shout out to the team at VOLTAGE for making this happen: Chris, Steven, Laura, Seth, and Eric!
May 29, 2012
Cover Story …
I’m so excited about the ROOTLESS...
Cover Story …
I’m so excited about the ROOTLESS artwork, and it’s been great sharing it with people and getting such awesome feedback. The cover is the work of Phil Falco, who’s been responsible for a lot of stunning book covers in recent years, and I love the original and very cool visuals he came up with… to me, the cover conveys the desolate world of the novel, as well as the beauty of the forests Banyan seeks to rebuild. It’s dark and psychedelic, and shot through with youthful optimism… not unlike the book itself!
Phil started working on the artwork late in 2011, and we went through various iterations along the way. I’m grateful to everyone involved in the design. Especially my editor, Mallory Kass, and, of course, to the artist himself… Cheers, Phil!
As for the cover reveal that happened last Friday… MG Buehrlen and I got in touch quite a few months ago and made plans for revealing the cover for the first time on the great YABC website. I’m a big fan of the site, and MG was brilliant - especially when things came right down to the wire!
So… ROOTLESS now has a cover for the ages. I can’t wait for people to read the book this November! CHEERS!
May 17, 2012
crazy corn …
4directions:
now this is awesome...
crazy corn …
now this is awesome corn.
npr:
Ooooo.
Genetics of the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn
Corn gone viral? You’re looking at an ear of a corn variety called “Glass Gem”, grown by Greg Schoen of Seeds Trust. This is real corn! How does it grow this way?
First you have to understand a few things about corn. Each corn kernel is actually a sort of unique plant. A corn plant’s male parts (the “tassels”) sit at the top of the stalk, and drop pollen downward. Unfertilized ears (the female parts) catch the pollen with the sticky ends of their corn silks. Each corn silk (I hate when that gets in my teeth) grabs a pollen grain, shuttles it allllllll the way down inside the ear, eventually creating one kernel for each pollen-silk-ovum combination. It’s one of the more interesting and inefficient breeding schemes I know of.
If you’ve taken genetics, you know that the parents’ genes will combine by chance, leading to certain ratios of inheritance in the offspring. This is the basis of Mendelian genetics (great Khan Academy video here).
With corn, we’ve simply carefully bred all the interestingness out of them. Native Americans were used to multi-colored corn, because corn plants held many varieties of color genes that could combine at random. Now all we are left with are one-color clones.
This “Glass Gem” corn is the other extreme of the spectrum, a combination of corn color hybrid genes and random pollination. It’s almost too pretty to eat!
(via Discover Magazine)
May 16, 2012
My first ever piece of visual art… it’s a flag I...
My first ever piece of visual art… it’s a flag I designed for the Army of the Fallen Sun. It’s connected to ROOTLESS… and it’ll be featured somewhere on my new website (coming soon) that is going to be AWESOME thanks to the great folks at VOLTAGE a+d. The site is really a piece of art in itself.
CHEERS!
The kids do Sabotage
This brilliant reworking of the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage video - made as a tribute to Adam Yauch - is, understandably, causing a stir on Twitter today. CS
