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After becoming somewhat used to food scares from China, now we have sleazy operators in Europe too.
From the ABC News article:
Authorities have arrested at least 66 people in a European food scam which sold horse meat unfit for human consumption.
European Union police coordinating organization Europol announced Sunday that eight nations cooperated in the operation. In Spain, 65 people face a series of charges relating to public health, money laundering and animal abuse.
The operation took several months and the chief suspect, a Dutch businessman, was arrested in Belgium in April.
Spain's Civil Guard said that the criminal ring acquired horses in Spain and Portugal that were "in poor shape, old, or had been designated 'not apt for consumption.'" After falsifying paperwork and substituting microchips used to identify the horses, the animals were slaughtered and the meat shipped to Belgium.
The Civil Guard said that the profits from the illegal meat could reach 20 million euros ($23 million) a year.
The case was linked to a 2013 scandal when Irish authorities detected beef burgers containing horse meat.
Is it still safe to consume Soylent?
Additional details at CNN.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 17 2017, @06:05PM (13 children)
Are we outclassed? Millions of Functional Human Cells Can be Created in Days With OPTi-OX [soylentnews.org]
You could interpret that as just another application of existing Mother Nature processes but it looks like we can do some natural things at an unnatural pace. I'll also be interested to see if we can do crazy stuff like apply the cultured meat approach to vegetables or fruits. Grow a mushy substance that is ready to be put into smoothies or baby food or whatever.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @06:18PM (11 children)
Soylent is no fun if it's not made of real living breathing thinking humans that are scoped up off the street, tell me how could vampire and proto cannibal peter teil feel good about that?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 17 2017, @06:32PM (9 children)
Maybe there is a libertarian approach to cannibal-vampirism. Invite the poor to voluntarily board a seastead libertarian utopia, eat them alive and pay their families some blood money. But your family will be paid based on the median or poverty line income in your country, so less money to Indians, Vietnamese, Ethiopians, etc.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @06:37PM (8 children)
You've been watching the strain haven't you?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 17 2017, @06:45PM (7 children)
I think I only saw S01E01 but there was probably some similar stuff in True Blood. Maybe I'll get back into it; I like del Toro.
And you don't have to look to fiction to guess this could happen. There's gotta be some rich libertarians out there harvesting transplantable organs to keep themselves alive. Maybe all parties in a transaction like that can feel that they've won.
We definitely know that rich couples (including gay couples) are using surrogate mothers in poor countries:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-28679020 [bbc.com]
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/05/dwindling-options-for-surrogacy-abroad/484688/ [theatlantic.com]
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @07:04PM (6 children)
Sorry perhaps you missed my reference to Peter Thiel that is a known vampire
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/peter-thiel-wants-to-inject-himself-with-young-peoples-blood [vanityfair.com]
so it's not a long jump to long pig
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 17 2017, @07:11PM (5 children)
Naw, I know about it. It's one of aristarchus's favorite memes after all.
I don't really think much of it. If you can culture meat, you can probably reproduce whatever junk in blood that might be causing the effect, which is not that well studied. Thiel is better off chucking some more money at Aubrey de Grey and nibbling on low calorie meals.
It does say a lot about Count Thiel that he would not only jump on such an unproven "treatment", but admit it to the press.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @07:31PM (4 children)
Goes to my larger point about VC's but the question still stands, despite seemingly promising results and seemingly understood biology Where is my vat steak?
Your dog wants vat steak but can't have it because ??
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 17 2017, @07:43PM (3 children)
It is an admittedly immature technology, and it also needs to scale up to compete with established cattle/livestock production. The processes may eventually produce higher quality meat than is possible by using livestock (you may be able to create marbled [wikipedia.org] "cuts" or weird "cuts" that have never existed in nature), but the easiest meat to produce will probably be ground meat, even in the case of chicken [aidells.com]. So maybe another year or two before your dog can get a firm vat steak. And it's not clear to me that these companies are going to be growing cuts of meat with bones in them.
It may also face regulatory hurdles and consumer ick factor that simply aren't felt by meatless vegan alternatives like Impossible, Boca, Morningstar, et al. Obviously, your vegan food can still be contaminated by E-Coli and other nasties, but vat meat is going to face USDA scrutiny.
I will note that PETA has shown support for the technology. In fact, they've been funding [peta.org] it [peta.org].
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @08:06PM (2 children)
So your saying hamburgers are easy? well
That'll do pig that'll do
Where's my beef?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 17 2017, @09:07PM (1 child)
I dunno mane
The headline
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @10:18PM
Mang, the headline tells me nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:47AM
OPTi-OX is real, living human brain cells. Who's to say it doesn't think?
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Monday July 17 2017, @07:29PM
That notwithstanding, I'd say we're completely outclassed. I must admit that I'm not fully up on neurogenesis development timelines, but this sped things up in vitro. Though functional, the cells haven't been integrated into working tissues, which I'm guessing would be one of the slow factors in natural neurogenesis (the cells have to migrate from where they started to differentiate to where they are needed. This is one of the hypotheses for part of the reason most antidepressants take so long to work.)
I work at a university and many of the talks I go to impress me with just how little of what's going on in the cell we really understand. We know many of the proteins/RNAs involved, say ribosome assembly, but we are only just beginning to understand how they are assembled on the fly into the complexes that do the work, and then fall apart and get organized for the next round. (Disclaimer, I'm not a biochemist, my background is physics, but I have a fair idea of where the general state of the art is just from all the research groups I work with.)
And it's not just synthetic chemistry. It's just about everything.
It's true, there are a lot of things humans do much faster than nature "usually" does them. Earthmoving for example. A bulldozer can do in a few minutes what would take hundreds of years due to the normal slumping and erosion of a slope. But, on the other hand, when Mom gets down to work, we still just can't compete. I give you the example of the catastrophic eruption of Mount Saint Helens. In less than a minute more earth was moved that all the bulldozers and earthmoving equipment in the world could have done in a much longer time.
We pride ourselves on being so powerful, but the universe is big, the energy flows enormous, and many of the time scales are much faster than we work on. Think about a supernova. That's just a firecracker pop in terms of the universe.