Science News

Artificial food coloring ingredients (food dye) contain plenty of chemicals. Many are derived from highly toxic sources and can cause many different diseases, disorders, and mutations in humans. Although it seems unlikely that a trivial amount of food coloring in a piece of a candy you eat (like liquorice) would have any harmful effect on you, you would be wrong, because it does.

Artificial colors look great. They make food look vibrant and appealing. The majority of food colors are made with petroleum. They are a derivative of Petrochemicals and Coal tar. These chemicals are in no way made to be ingested by humans or any other animal. In fact, food dye is pulled off of the market regularly because of health concerns. Yellow #2 food dye will likely be the next to go. It’s be shown to cause ADHD, multiple types of cancer, male sterility, and many other issues.

Artificial Colors aren’t just in junk food or sodas. Some salmon farms actually add red food dye to their salmon to make them appear more appetizing. It works. When looking for fish a customer always wants the freshest they can buy. A pink/red salmon is much more appealing to eat than one that’s gray or just darker.

There have been petitions to ban these chemicals and dyes, but most of them still remain on the market. It will really take a lot more research and widespread awareness to ban these chemicals from making their way into our food.

Australia’s Koalas are being threatened by rising carbon dioxide pollution in the atmosphere. Their survival is at stake because the Eucalyptus leaves they feed on are losing their nutrients from the worsening air quality.

In fact, rising carbon dioxide are making the plants become toxic because they start producing “anti-nutrients” which interfere with the digestion of regular nutrients. Some species of Eucalyptus contain a high protein content, but when higher levels of anti-nutrients are present they bind to them and make digesting protein not possible by the Koalas.

Koala’s only eat the leaves from about 25 Eucalyptus species out of the 600 species in Australia. If carbon dioxide emissions continue to be released in the atmosphere at the current rate then there will be a significant loss in Australia’s Koala population within 50 years.

A magnitude 6.8 earthquake off the coast of Japan hit Tokyo early Wednesday morning.

Seismologists said the epicenter of the quake was 100 miles northeast of Tokyo, and struck at 16:45 GMT. A half an hour later a second quake hit the same area with a magnitude of 5.3.

No injuries have been reported, and power/communication lines are all running normally.

Yahoo unveiled a new feature today that will improve the security of searching the Web. The service is called “SearchScan”. It’s a combination of McAfee’s SiteAdvisor technology and Yahoo Search.

Basically while browsing with “SearchScan” a warning sign will pop up next to malicious links identified by McAfee. Once marked as dangerous or harmful, Yahoo will block that Web site from showing up in their search results. If a website is not blocked, warning labels will appear next to the links to caution people before clicking through.

This may eventually eliminate the need for browser-based plugins that monitor the net from your pc (and also slow down your connection).