McDonalds removes chemical ammonium hydroxide from hamburger recipe

(http://documentarylovers.com)After Chef Jamie Oliver showed how McDonald's makes its hamburgers, the franchise announced that it will change its recipe.

According to Oliver, the fatty parts of beef are "washed" in ammonium hydroxide and used in the filling of the burger. He says, "Basically, we're taking a product that would be sold in the cheapest way for dogs, and after this process, is being given to human beings."

Besides the low quality of the meat, the ammonium hydroxide is harmful to health. Oliver calls it "the pink slime process."

"Why would any sensible human being put meat filled with ammonia in the mouths of their children?" asked the chef, who wages a war against the fast food industry.

In one initiative to get kids to eat healthier, Oliver demonstrated the process of how McDonald's makes its chicken nuggets. After selecting the best parts of the chicken, the remains (fat, skin, and internal organs) are processed for these fried foods.

Fast food companies Burger King and Taco Bell have already abandoned their use of ammonia in food products in the United States. Ammonium hydroxide is used in the food industry as an anti-microbial agent in meats, allowing them to sell what would otherwise be "inedible meat."

Because ammonium hydroxide is used as a "component in a production procedure" and not an official ingredient, companies are not required by the USDA to let consumers know when it is used in their food.

McDonalds has denied a link between James Oliver's campaign and their decision to change their recipe.

Source: Natural News

Burger grown from cow stem cells in laboratory put to taste test in London

For $332,000, you might expect a burger to come with fries and a shake.

But it's no ordinary hamburger that two volunteer taste-testers tucked into in London on Monday. The meat was grown in a laboratory, from cattle stem cells.

The perfectly round patty was pan fried in sunflower oil and butter and then sampled by Josh Schonwald, author of The Taste of Tomorrow, and food scientist Hanni Rutzler.

It was "close to meat," according to Rutzler, but she said she expected it to be softer and as the petri-dish beef contains no fat, it wasn't very juicy.

Schonwald also noted the absence of fat, which translated into a lesser flavor, "but the bite feels like a conventional hamburger"

Mark Post, whose team at Maastricht University in the Netherlands developed the burger, hopes that making meat in labs could eventually help feed the world and fight climate change.

Monday's taste test, coming after five years of research, is a key step toward making lab meat a culinary phenomenon.

"For the burger to succeed it has to look, feel and taste like the real thing," Post said.

Post and colleagues made the meat from the muscle cells of two organic cows. The cells were put into a nutrient solution to help them develop into muscle tissue, growing into small strands of meat.

It took nearly 20,000 strands to make one 5-ounce patty, which for Monday's taste test was seasoned with salt, egg powder, breadcrumbs, red beet juice and saffron. The project cost $332,000.

"I'm a vegetarian, but I would be first in line to try this," said Jonathan Garlick, a stem cell researcher at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine in Boston. He has used similar techniques to make human skin but wasn't involved in the burger research.

Experts say new ways of producing meat are needed to satisfy growing carnivorous appetites without exhausting resources. By 2050, the Food and Agriculture Organization predicts global meat consumption will double as more people in developing countries can afford it. Raising animals destined for the dinner table takes up about 70 percent of all agricultural land.

The animal rights group PETA has thrown its support behind the lab-meat initiative.

"As long as there's anybody who's willing to kill a chicken, a cow or a pig to make their meal, we are all for this," said Ingrid Newkirk, PETA's president and co-founder. "Instead of the millions and billions (of animals) being slaughtered now, we could just clone a few cells to make burgers or chops."

If the burger doesn't taste right, some scientists say the flavor can easily be tweaked.

"Taste is the least (important) problem since this could be controlled by letting some of the stem cells develop into fat cells," said Stig Omholt, director of biotechnology at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Adding fat to the burgers this way would probably be healthier than getting it from naturally chunky cows, said Omholt, who was not involved in the project.

Post and his colleagues have tasted the meat in the lab, and he said they cooked a test burger on Sunday.

Even if tweaks improved the taste of the lab-grown meat, it would be years before such burgers hit the market.

"The first (lab-made) meat products are going to be very exclusive," said Isha Datar, director of New Harvest, an international nonprofit that promotes meat alternatives. "These burgers won't be in Happy Meals before someone rich and famous is eating them."

Poisoned By Plastic

Fukushima Emergency: Plant leaks 300 TONS of radioactive water daily – World’s oceans at risk

The Japanese Prime Minister has ordered the government to step in and help contain ongoing radiation leaks from the Fukushima power plant. Tepco – the company that runs the facility that was crippled in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake – has been unable to prevent contaminated groundwater from breaching a barrier and pouring into the ocean. Nuclear energy expert Malcolm Grimston joins RT to discuss.

The Sun's Magnetic Field is About to Flip

Something big is about to happen on the sun. According to measurements from NASA-supported observatories, the sun's vast magnetic field is about to flip.

"It looks like we're no more than 3 to 4 months away from a complete field reversal," says solar physicist Todd Hoeksema of Stanford University. "This change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system."



The sun's magnetic field changes polarity approximately every 11 years. It happens at the peak of each solar cycle as the sun's inner magnetic dynamo re-organizes itself. The coming reversal will mark the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24. Half of 'Solar Max' will be behind us, with half yet to come.

NASA

Radioactive Water From Fukushima Is Systematically Poisoning The Entire Pacific Ocean

Right now, a massive amount of highly radioactive water is escaping into the Pacific Ocean from the ruins of the destroyed Fukushima nuclear facility in Japan.  This has been going on all day, every day for more than two years.

The enormous amounts of tritium, cesium and strontium that are being released are being carried by wind, rain and ocean currents all over the northern Hemisphere.  And of course the west coast of the United States is being hit particularly hard.  When you drink water or eat seafood that has been contaminated with these radioactive particles, they can stick around for a very long time.  Over the coming years, this ongoing disaster could potentially affect the health of millions upon millions of people living in the northern hemisphere, and the sad thing is that a lot of those people will never even know the true cause of their health problems.

For a long time, the Japanese government has been trusting Tepco to handle this crisis, but now it has become abundantly clear that Tepco has no idea what they are doing.  In fact, the flow of radioactive water has gotten so bad that authorities in Japan are now calling it an “emergency”…

Highly radioactive water seeping into the ocean from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is creating an “emergency” that the operator is struggling to contain, an official from the country’s nuclear watchdog said on Monday.

This contaminated groundwater has breached an underground barrier, is rising toward the surface and is exceeding legal limits of radioactive discharge, Shinji Kinjo, head of a Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) task force, told Reuters.

The amount of water that we are talking about is absolutely enormous.  According to Yahoo, 400 metric tons of water is being pumped into the basements of destroyed buildings at Fukushima every single day…

The utility pumps out some 400 metric tons a day of groundwater flowing from the hills above the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the basements of the destroyed buildings, which mixes with highly irradiated water that is used to cool the reactors in a stable state below 100 degrees Celsius.

Tepco is trying to prevent groundwater from reaching the plant by building a “bypass” but recent spikes of radioactive elements in sea water has prompted the utility to reverse months of denials and finally admit that tainted water is reaching the sea.

And of course all of that water has to go somewhere.  For a long time Tepco tried to deny that it was getting into the ocean, but now they are  finally admitting that it is…

Tepco said on Friday that a cumulative 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium had probably leaked into the sea since the disaster. The company said this was within legal limits.

Tritium is far less harmful than cesium and strontium, which have also been released from the plant. Tepco is scheduled to test strontium levels next.

40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium have gotten into the Pacific Ocean?

And that is what they are publicly admitting.  The reality is probably far worse.

And all of that tritium is going to be around for a very long time.  You see, the truth is that tritium has a half-life of about 12 years.

But strontium is even worse.  Strontium can cause bone cancer and it has a half-life of close to 29 years.

And now Tepco is admitting that extremely dangerous levels of strontium have been escaping from Fukushima and getting into the underground water.  And of course the underground water flows out into the Pacific Ocean…

Tepco said in late June that it had detected the highly toxic strontium-90, a by-product of nuclear fission that can cause bone cancer if ingested, at levels 30 times the permitted rate.

The substances, which were released by the meltdowns of reactors at the plant in the aftermath of the huge tsunami of March 2011, were not absorbed by soil and have made their way into underground water.

Subsoil water usually flows out to sea, meaning these two substances could normally make their way into the ocean, possibly affecting marine life and ultimately impacting humans who eat sea creatures.

Cesium has an even longer half-life than strontium does.  It has a half life of about 30 years, and according to samples that were taken about a month ago levels of cesium at Fukushima have been spiking dramatically…

Samples taken on Monday showed levels of possibly cancer-causing caesium-134 were more than 90 times higher than they were on Friday, at 9000 becquerels per litre, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) revealed.

Levels of caesium-137 stood at 18 000 becquerels per litre, 86 times higher than at the end of last week, the utility said.

“We still don’t know why the level of radiation surged, but we are continuing efforts to avert further expansion of contamination,” a Tepco spokesperson stated.

When cesium gets into your body, it can do a tremendous amount of damage.  The following is an excerpt from a NewScientist article that described what happens when cesium and iodine enter the human body…

Moreover the human body absorbs iodine and caesium readily. “Essentially all the iodine or caesium inhaled or swallowed crosses into the blood,” says Keith Baverstock, former head of radiation protection for the World Health Organization’s European office, who has studied Chernobyl’s health effects.

Iodine is rapidly absorbed by the thyroid, and leaves only as it decays radioactively, with a half-life of eight days. Caesium is absorbed by muscles, where its half-life of 30 years means that it remains until it is excreted by the body. It takes between 10 and 100 days to excrete half of what has been consumed.

And it is important to keep in mind that it has been estimated that each spent fuel pool at the Fukushima nuclear complex could have 24,000 times the amount of cesium that was produced by the nuclear bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War 2.

Overall, the Fukushima nuclear facility originally contained a whopping 1760 tons of nuclear material.

That is a massive amount of nuclear material.  Chernobyl only contained 180 tons.

And of course the crisis at Fukushima could be made even worse at any moment by a major earthquake.  In fact, a magnitude 6.0 earthquake hit northern Japan on Sunday.

This is a nightmare that has no end.  Every single day, massive amounts of highly radioactive water from Fukushima is systematically poisoning the entire Pacific Ocean.  The damage that is being done is absolutely incalculable.

Please share this article with as many people as you can.  The mainstream media does not seem to want to talk about this, but it is a matter that is extremely important to every man, woman and child living in the northern hemisphere of our planet.

Source: Activist Post

Researchers: malware aimed at unmasking Tor users sent data to IP address belonging to NSA or FBI

Malware aimed at uncovering the anonymous identities of Tor users reportedly sent information to an IP address that belongs to the National Security Agency (NSA), routed through Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

Tor, an anonymity network originally short for The Onion Router, was developed with contributions from individuals who worked for the Navy and the NSA. This latest revelation comes as the NSA is under increasingly intense scrutiny around the world for their data harvesting activities.

It also comes on the heels of a report stating that the FBI regularly employs hackers to develop malware and an earlier report which stated that the US government is the world’s largest buyer of malware.

The NSA link was uncovered by researchers from Baneki Privacy Labs, a group of Internet security researchers, along with Cryptocloud, a VPN provider.

The IP address, hardcoded into the JavaScript exploit, was discovered by Cryptocloud but a Baneki source told Ars Technica that they reached out to other researchers in the malware and security community to identify the source.

The exploit specifically targeted FireFox Extended Support Release 17 for Windows, the same browser that was released as a part of the Tor Project’s Tor Browser Bundle.

The vulnerability exploited was patched by Mozilla in June of this year and the patched version is part of the new Browser Bundle.

However, Ars points out that, “the TBB configuration of Firefox doesn’t include automatic security updates, so users of the bundle would not have been protected if they had not recently upgraded.”

Early investigations traced the IP address back to SAIC, which incidentally provides support to the Department of Defense in the areas of information technology and Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR).

The IP address was specifically tracked to the SAIC facility in Arlington, Virginia, though further analysis turned up that it went beyond the defense contractor.

Research using Robtex, a DNS record tool, found that the IP address was part of one of many blocks of IP addresses which have been permanently assigned to the NSA.

Ars Technica points out that this discovery is one of two things: a laughable mistake by someone working for either the NSA or SAIC, or “an intentional calling card as some analyzing the attack have suggested.”

An individual posting on Cryptocloud’s discussion forum speculated, “It’s psyops—a fear campaign… They want to scare folks off Tor, scare folks off all privacy services.”

Kevil Poulsen, writing for Wired’s Threat Level, on the other hand, believes that “the FBI is the prime suspect.”

“It just sends identifying information to some IP in Reston, Virginia,” Vlad Tsrklevich, a reverse-engineer, said to Wired. “It’s pretty clear that it’s FBI or it’s some other law enforcement agency that’s U.S.-based.”

They note that if Tsrklevich and others are correct, it could be the FBI’s computer and internet protocol address verifier (CIPAV).

CIPAV is a piece of law enforcement spyware first covered by Wired back in 2007, though it has reportedly been in use since 2002.

SAIC has not responded to attempts by Wired to get a comment on the story, and Poulsen notes that SAIC is a contractor for the FBI.

The discovery of the exploit came soon after the FBI reportedly sought to extradite Eric Eoin Marques, 28-year-old founder of Freedom Host, on child pornography charges.

It also came after individuals involved with the Tor Project reported the disappearance of numerous so-called “hidden service addresses” that were used by Freedom Hosting.

“The confluence of the three events has prompted speculation that the de-anonymizing exploit is the work of the FBI or another organized group targeting child pornographers,” Ars Technica reports.

“Because this payload does not download or execute any secondary backdoor or commands it’s very likely that this is being operated by an LEA [law-enforcement agent] and not by blackhats,” Tsrklevich wrote, according to Ars.

It seems that the evidence indicating that the IP address is linked to the NSA is quite strong, though if that is the case, they almost certainly provided information to the FBI in relation to the Marques case mentioned above.

Source: End the Lie