A Rose by Any Another Name ....

I've run for years and successfully convinced myself that I need sugar (candy bar, donut, brownie) for fuel. Now too many years past 30, it's caught up with me. I've anecdotally linked my sugar fetish to a number of minor health issues and like many have drawn a line on what and how much sugar I will eat. For example I put down any item in a store if it has the dreaded "high fructose corn syrup" on the label.

So I don't think many of us were too surprised when the Corn Refiners Association, the lobbying group and manufacturing association that represents makers of high-fructose corn syrup - - noting sales are at a 20 year low -- decided to fight back in an extraordinary way. If consumers like myself put back say ketchup if the item has HFCS then, don't list it. Fraud? No not really. Earlier this week the AP reported that the association has petitioned the FDA for permission to identify high-fructose corn syrup on food packaging as corn sugar.
 
One could say this is brilliant - - Business Insider says the re-branding is shear genius - - or that the corporate morals of the nation's major bankers have wafted over to the farmers and the food manufacturers. Never mind obese American kids, the billion dollar diet industry and a broken health care system over-burdened with chronic victims of diabetes, high blood pressure and coronary heart disease. The bottom line for a tiny minority is all that matters.

For anyone interested in the science, high fructose corn syrup is a blend of glucose and fructose. But for anyone who took a biology or O-chem course, you know sucrose "the good sugar" is also glucose and fructose. The thing is, in the latter. the mix is 50-50. Not so for HFCS ... it's usually 58-42 with additional additives.

Studies indicate the body metabolizes HFCS differently from table sugar in a way that increases the risk of diabetes, liver disease, and obesity. In an article on sixwise.com it was revealed that researchers from the University of California, Davis compared glucose and fructose consumption among 32 overweight or obese people and found they resulted in very different health changes.Read more. 



To read more about the debate and the bigger issue of agribusiness, and corn farm subsidies go to Care2's website and read a few articles then take their  High Fructose Corn Syrup Challenge.

Read My Mind, Hear My Voice

How many seconds does it take a word  to go from thought to audible speech?

Last year researchers clocked it at an amazing 50 milliseconds or .5 of a second. Research teams in Utah and Massachusetts have been working on decoding the neural pattern of speech into sound and managing the lightening speed that naturally occurs in humans.

I mentioned Dr. Hawking in the previous post. He is the renowned British scientist who suffers from a form of Lou Gehrig's disease and is one of thousands "locked in" or cognitively active but disabled from speech or speaking. Dr. Hawking communicates now, at age 68, communicates by twitching one muscle in his right cheek. The action sends an infrared beam to a computer that translates his signals into words. In article published today it is estimated that in 2to 3 years he should be able to do what most do now without a second thought: think a thought and then hear it spoken..


I recommend two good articles. The first one was published almost a year ago in December of 2009. It documented how researchers in Boston implanted electrodes in the temporal lobe, the area where speech takes place. As most know, playing in any area of the brain is extremely risky and could cause irreperable damage if the surgeon is off a millimeter.

Enter the 2010 team. A second article published today documents how researchers in Utah have gotten even more sophisticated placing electrodes near, but not in the brain itself, vastly improving safety.

For a quick overview on the first set of research, scientists embed an electrode in a subject's brain. That electrode then amplifies the person's neural signals which are converted to FM radio waves. These waves  are then transmitted wirelessly across the head and over to two coils serving as receiving antennas.Then these signals are routed into a system that digitizes, sorts and decodes them. The results are fed into a program that synthesizes speech which runs on desktop or laptop computer.