*chortle*

Another recall

Proctor&Gamble Sunday recalled a small number of Iams Proactive Health Indoor Weight & Hairball Care dry cat food bags, which were recently sold in one or two Loveland, Colorado, stores.

Read more: http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2010/08/iams_recall.html#ixzz0yCXRcmof

New = scary

So funranium gets to write lots of rants about media ignorance and the ever terrifying "radiation." I get to rant about ignorance about "genetic modification" and "mutation". For whatever reason, all of the above send people into totally unwarranted tizzy fits.

The FDA is preparing to consider whether to allow Atlantic Salmon modified to grow faster into the US food chain. On the pro side: the only thing changed is growth rate; faster growing fish lead to more fish available to stores and restaurants, and since those fish would be farmed, it would decrease pressure on wild populations currently being heavily fished. On the con side: concerns about effects on ecology should these fish escape into the wild, and OHMYGOD!!!!!! if I eat a genetically modified fish, won't that screw up MY DNA too?

Now, the concerns about escape I think are valid. Historically, humans have not been terribly great about keeping animals in captivity with no escapes (feral cats and horses in the US, transport of squirrels from east coast to west in US, feral cats and rabbits in Australia...I'll stop here, but you get the point that it's a long list).
However, abject terror and horror-movie visions of ingestion of modified DNA causing mutations all up the food chain are unfounded bullshit.
When you eat it, the modified DNA, along with all the other DNA of everything you have ever eaten is digested, broken down to component parts, and re-used in bit pieces. It is not miraculously absorbed whole and inserted into your own DNA. Do you begin to grow feathers after eating chicken? Instantly acquire a double-muscling mutation after eating beef? Didn't think so.

Opponents like to throw out comments such as "side effects from eating such fish are also unknown, with little data to show it is safe." Never mind that they cannot produce a whit of evidence that it is UNsafe, and that while there is little tested evidence of safety in salmon, that's in large part because there haven't been a lot of opportunities for testing. We have, however, been in large part eating GM plant crops (GM soybeans, corn, and tomatoes have been widely sold in US markets for years) with no food safety issues resulting. All theoretical evidence and comparative analysis of the GM salmon points to no difference in the meat from non-GM salmon.

Also keep in mind that every single thing you buy from the store or grow at home IS genetically modified. But that's okay, because it was done the old fashioned way, by repeatedly breeding a desirable mutation, which somehow is less scary than engineering and inducing the desired mutation. Or something.

Things to Enjoy

While trying to source a quote in a comment on a previous post, I happened upon the wonderfuls site You Fail Biology Forever, which discusses overdone TV tropes and contrasts them to real life.

It is a thing of beauty! Enjoy, enjoy!

In reality, many closely related Earth species share over 99% of their DNA, but cannot produce viable offspring (and those that do are often sterile). This makes it extremely unlikely that creatures of different planets would be able to interbreed, but then again, Mars does need women.

In fictions, human beings can conceive children with any intelligent species in existence. Demons, elves, aliens, vampires, you name it — not only will a human sleep with it, they'll engender children.