Throughout history, there have been stories and even photos of people who were victims of Spontaneous Human Combustion. One of these occurred in 1951, when Mary Hardy Reeser burned up. Little was left of her body?the chair she was sitting in was also destroyed, except for its springs, but her room had only smoke damage. According to her granddaughter Ernestine Reeser, “Grandma had burned up.?
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One of the joys of summer is being able to slap a steak on the charcoal grill. There’s only one problem: grilling meat can cause it to become cancerous.
Carcinogenic heterocyclic amines are created from the amino acids in the meat when it?s grilled. Actually, any kind of extreme heat does this: grilling, searing, pan roasting, frying. But grilling also creates unique compounds called polycyclic hydrocarbons, which come from the smoke.
One thing you can do to minimize the danger is precook food that takes a long time to grill by microwaving it or boiling it. This way, it will spend less time over the coals. Or you can fix food, like kabobs, that don’t take as long to cook on the grill as chicken and hamburgers.
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The United Nations World Food Summit met recently to decide whether genetically-modified crops will save poor countries from famine or will contaminate normal crops, presenting a danger to food supplies around the world.
Despite a ban on planting GM corn there, Mexican corn crops have been contaminated by the GM StarLink strain, and this contamination will probably never be eradicated. If it?s discovered that there is some health or environmental danger linked to StarLink in the future, Mexico will have the hard choice of continuing to grow and consume it or will facing starvation.
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We?re accustomed to seeing the faces of pitiful, starving African children staring out at us from advertisements. They?re emaciated, standing on parched and cracked earth, and appealing to us for aid. Now it turns out we may be the cause of their problem.
Emissions spewed out by power stations and factories in North America and Europe may have started the severe droughts that have afflicted regions of Africa. These droughts have been among the worst the world has ever seen, and led to the famines that killed thousands in countries such as Ethiopia in the 1980s.
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