Consumer Reports bought whole chickens from 100 different stores to test for their study.
(Photo courtesy of the USDA)
A Consumer Reports study finds
most of the chickens bought at
the grocery store are contaminated
with bacteria that can cause you
to get sick. Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
A Consumer Reports study finds
most of the chickens bought at
the grocery store are contaminated
with bacteria that can cause you
to get sick. Lester Graham reports:
Consumer Reports bought whole chickens from 100 different stores.
Dr. Urvashi Rangan says they tested them for two different strains of bacteria.
“Salmonella and campylobacter infections can give people serious diarhea, abdominal cramping for sometimes days, even weeks at a time.”
Two-thirds of the chickens they tested were tainted.
Rangan says the U.S. government’s guidelines are pretty loose for the chicken processors.
“Each company is basically allowed to script their own hygeine plan. And, clearly, there aren’t enough standards or standardidization among them that has allowed them to achieve a decent rate of cleanliness.”
The chickens that were cleanest were organic air-chilled chickens. The Consumer Report’s study is available online and will be published in the January issue of the magazine.
At least 200 million, but maybe as many as one billion frogs are eaten every year (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)
Frog legs are showing up on more menus all over Europe and North America. Biologists say this is just more bad news for frogs. Frogs are already in serious trouble from habitat loss and a fatal disease caused by a fungus. Rebecca Williams reports:
Transcript
Frog legs are showing up on more menus all over Europe and North America. Biologists say… this is just more bad news for frogs. Frogs are already in serious trouble from habitat loss and a fatal disease caused by a fungus. Rebecca Williams reports:
It’s hard to know exactly how many frogs we eat. Only a fraction is reported in global trade numbers. So, at least 200 million but maybe as many as one billion frogs are eaten every year.
Ian Warkentin has been looking at our appetite for frog legs. He’s the lead author of a new study in the journal Conservation Biology.
He says some frogs are raised for food. But most of the frogs are taken from the wild.
“There was a harvest in North America and a harvest in Europe that depleted those stocks. The source then became India and Bangladesh and now we’re moving to Indonesia and Southeast Asia. And our concern is, well, we’re just going to harvest them to the point where there no longer is a viable harvest any more.”
He’d like to see better oversight on wild frog harvests, and more commercial frog farming. But, until that happens, he says you might want to take a pass on the frog leg platter.
The brace can crank up to 20 watts with each step - that means ten minutes of walking can power a laptop for a half hour.
(Photo courtesy of Bionic Power, Inc.)
When you think about alternative energy
sources, you probably don’t include people on your
list. But Ann Murray reports that scientists are
tapping into bionic people power:
Transcript
When you think about alternative energy
sources, you probably don’t include people on your
list. But Ann Murray reports that scientists are
tapping into bionic people power:
Today, we really do have bionic technology.
(Opening of the “Six Million Dollar Man”) “Gentleman, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.”
Okay, maybe not to turn you into
the Six Million Dollar Man. But how about a mobile power plant?
Let’s start with the back story.
About 15 years ago, a couple of young
scientists, Doug Weber and Max Donelan, worked together. Donelan wrote
his grad school dissertation on the energy people create when they walk.
He asked Weber, now a biomedical engineer at the University of
Pittsburgh, to run with his idea.
“He approached me with the idea of building a wearable device that could actually harvest
that energy. And not only generate electricity but potentially make it easier
to walk.”
Weber and Donelan put together a rough prototype in his garage. A lab
tested version of their early demo was just published in the journal Science.
The bionic gizmo looks pretty much like a knee brace with a power pack
attached. Weber calls up a video on YouTube to show me how it works. On
the screen, a guy with a brace on each leg is walking on a treadmill.
“With each step he takes on the treadmill power is generated when the
knee is swinging in extension. It’s during that extension phase that we turn
on the generator and as the traces below the video show, generate large
peaks in power.”
Those peaks in power show up as the hamstring muscle “brakes” to keep
the leg from going too far forward. That’s when the bionic brace kicks in. It
grabs that potentially wasted energy and turns it into electricity.
The brace can crank up to 20 watts with each step. That means ten
minutes of walking can power a laptop for a half hour. No other lightweight
people-powered generator can top that.
Yad Garcha’s betting that people
will be intrigued. He’s the CEO of Bionic Power, a company formed to
market the brace. With some product tweaking, he envisions a world of
alternative energy possibilities. Especially for people who have to depend
on batteries or don’t have much access to electricity. His list includes
millions of people in developing countries, amputees, and soldiers.
“It is a green product primarily for the military because of the number of
batteries that they throw away.”
Garcha says, for example, Canadian soldiers carry up to 20 pounds of
disposable batteries.
“And these throw-away batteries cost a lot of money for them to get them into the
theatre or wherever they’re doing their fighting.”
Garcha’s already been talking to Canadian military reps about field tests.
But the brace probably won’t be ready for another year or two. The
prototype still needs to be quieter, lighter, and more efficient before it makes
its way into the hands – or rather, the legs – of consumers. Better move over
Steve Austin!
Odd animal behaviors have been noted in some birds, fish, and frogs. Researcher Ethan Clotfelter believes it may have something to do with exposure to toxic chemicals. (Photo by Sean Okihiro)
Toxic chemicals can sometimes be fatal to wildlife. Some researchers are now looking for more subtle signs of contamination. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush explains:
Transcript
Toxic chemicals can sometimes be fatal to wildlife. Some researchers are
now looking for more subtle signs of contamination. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Mark Brush explains:
Researchers are looking for birds that have a hard time standing up
straight, fish that are unusually aggressive, or frogs that seem a little
confused. These are signs that the animals might be affected by low-level toxic
contamination.
Ethan Clodfelter is a researcher at Amherst College. He studied data that looked at the behaviors of animals from all over the world. He says toxic chemicals that persist in the environment might explain why these animals are behaving oddly.
“What we really are trying to do is to come up with behavioral measures that
are good, sort of, early warning indicators. Because behaviors are very
highly variable kind of thing, and so you expect that even very small levels
of contaminants could induce changes in behavior long before you see six
legs growing out of frogs.”
Clodfelter says people, such as amateur bird watchers, have helped wildlife
officials identify odd animal behavior.
His review was published in the British research journal Animal Behavior.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mark Brush.
The Duluth Seaway Port Authority's bulk cargo dock is typical of many in the port. Officials are troubled by corrosion appearing on the docks in the harbor - the steel is corroding much faster than normal. (Photo by Bob Kelleher)
A piece of steel that has been removed from a dock
wall, showing extensive pitting. (Photo by Bob Kelleher)
Engineer and diver Chad Scott (left) discovered the dock corrosion in the late 1990's, and suspects a microbiological connection. Jim Sharrow (right), Duluth Seaway Port Authorities Facilities Manager, is hoping for some fast answers. (Photo by Bob Kelleher)
Corrosion is eating away at the steel walls that hold one of the Great Lakes’ busiest harbors together. The corrosion is unlike anything known to be happening in any other Great Lakes port. But other port officials are being encouraged to take a closer look at their own underwater steel. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Bob Kelleher reports:
Transcript
Corrosion is eating away at the steel walls that hold
one of the Great Lakes’ busy harbors together. The
corrosion is unlike anything known to be happening in
any other Great Lakes port. But other port officials
are being encouraged to take a closer look at their own
underwater steel. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Bob Kelleher reports:
Some kind of corrosion is eating away at the Duluth
Seaway port’s docks. The docks are those long
earth-filled metal rectangles where ships from around
the world tie up to load and unload. Those docks are
lined with sheets of steel, and the steel is rusting
away. Jim Sharrow is the Duluth
Seaway Port Authorities Facilities Manager.
“It’s corroding quickly – much faster than people expect
in fresh water. And our main concern is that we’ll lose
the integrity and the strength of the dock long before
expected, and have to do steel replacement at $1,500 or
more per lineal foot, much earlier than ever would have
been expected.”
Corrosion should be a slow process in Duluth’s cold
fresh water. But, Sharrow says, there’s evidence it’s
been happening remarkably quickly for about thirty years.
“What we seem to see here is corrosion that started in
the mid 1970s. We have steel that’s 100 years olds
that’s about as similarly corroded to steel that is 25
to 30 years old.”
It’s a big problem. There’s about thirteen miles of
steel walls lining docks in the harbor that serves
Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin. There’s half
again as many feet of wooden docks, held together with
steel pins. There’s corrosion on the legs of highway
bridges and the giant
steel ore docks that ship millions of tons of taconite
– a type of iron shipped to steel mills in Gary,
Indiana and Cleveland, Ohio.
“We characterize this as a 100-million dollar problem in
the harbor. It’s a huge problem, and what is so odd
about this is that we only see it happening in the
navigational area of the Duluth-Superior Harbor.”
The harbor links the St Louis River with Lake Superior.
Go a few miles up the river and there’s little corrosion
. So it doesn’t seem like the problem’s there. But, back
in the harbor, at the current rate of corrosion, Sharrow
says, the steel will fail quickly.
“I figure that in about 10 years at the current rate,
we will have to start replacing steel.”
“Particularly marginal operators could decide rather
than repair their docks it would be better for them to
go out of business, and we’re hoping that that isn’t
the case here.”
While the cause is a mystery, there’s no shortage of
theories. It could have something to do with stray
electrical voltage; water acidity; or the kinds of
steel manufactured in recent years. Chad Scott
discovered the corrosion in the late 1990’s. He’s an
engineer and a diver. Scott suspects
a micro-biological connection. He says there might be
something growing in small round pits that form on the
steel.
“We cleaned up the water. That’s the main thing –
that’s one of the main changes that’s happened since
the 70s, is we’ve cleaned up our water. We’ve cleaned
up our harbor, which is a good thing. But, when we
cleaned things up we also induced more dissolved oxygen
and more sunlight can penetrate the water, which tends
to usually promote more growth – more marine
microbiology growth.”
A team of experts met in Duluth in September to share
ideas. They came from the U.S. Navy, The Army Corp of
Engineers, and Ohio State University. And they agreed
there’s something odd going on – possibly related to
microbes or water chemistry. They also recommend that
other Great Lakes ports take a closer look at their
underwater steel. Scott says they at least helped
narrow the focus.
“We have a large laundry list right now. We want to
narrow that down and try to decide what is the real
cause of this corrosion. And these experts, hopefully,
will be able to get us going on the right direction,
so we can start doing testing that will identify the
problem.”
With the experts recommendations in hand, port
officials are now planning a formal study. If they
do figure out the cause, then they’ve got to figure
out how to prevent it. They’re in a race with
something, and right now they don’t even know with
what.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Bob Kelleher.
Consumer Reports bought whole chickens from 100 different stores to test for their study. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)
