Today, I find myself in Atlanta Georgia. I am attending the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s 2009 International Convention, representing the Biofortified blog, and I am also the Council for Biotechnology Information’s guest blogger. You can read about what I’ll be doing here at Biofortified, but first, how did I get here?

A few months ago, the Council for Biotechnology Information contacted me and invited me to be their guest blogger for the convention. They created a news blog to report on the agriculture-related talks and panels, and offered to cover my expenses to help them report on the conference.

I’ve never been to the BIO conventions, which host presentations on more than just ag biotech issues. It would also give me the chance to promote Biofortified, get exposed to the biotech zeitgeist, and meet some interesting people. I also saw a public benefit - I could help people learn about the things going on at this conference as I learn about them. So what’s the catch? Read More…

Well, victorious with two-second prizes. The Chlorofilms plant science video contest winners have been announced, and both my entries got second place! Read all about it at Biofortified.

Now I’m a “Three time award-winning producer”! That ought to help me get another grant to keep churning out this stuff for years to come.

I just took my Botany final this afternoon, and my hands are about ready to abscise. Luckily there wasn’t any Ethylene in the air to make that happen, and ironically enough there’s no need to worry about Abscisic Acid - it does not cause Abscision! An irony of the plant sciences - there’s now a compound named after something it doesn’t even do. We should probably change its name eventually. Seriously, we should. It would be one way to one-up the zoologists who still refer to tissues in Barnacles as if they were tissues in a mollusc, when they’re actually arthropods. I’m all-into newer and better nomenclature.

Now to finish up a relaxing evening filled with homemade chicken soup (four carcasses I carved up previously), and a little blogging. I’ve got a lot of stuff coming down the pipeline with my research, and several blog posts that I have to write (mostly my own imposition), and I’ll be doing some more filming tomorrow for my videos. It’s a busy life I got myself into! Still feels like a weekend today.

Stay tuned here and at Biofortified for some goodies this week.

The Onion, while lauded for its weekly satirization of pop culture and news headlines, has a less well-known component, its AV Club. While I do not often read much from this section, even though they are just down the street.

But now in anticipation of the new Trek movie coming out this weekend, The Onion’s AV Club put together an intelligent and funny review of the sociological commentary that Star Trek has provided over the years, whether written well or not. Read Space-Racism is Bad.

A few of my favorites are in there, such as a comment on the stupidity of the Borg Queen concept while talking about keeping perspective in First Contact, and some subtle lessons about both immigration and abortion rights in Up The Long Ladder. But the best part of the article was Read More…

(Hat tip to the Ethicurean.)

Daniel Engber writes in Slate about the campaign against High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). Delving deep into not only the science of sweeteners, but also the sociology of foodies, he concludes that HFCS is on the decline not because of what it is, but what meanings are imparted upon it.

Read Dark Sugar.

Here are some of my favorite parts:

There may be other reasons to blame obesity in the United States on high-fructose corn syrup. According to a critique popularized by Michael Pollan, the development of HFCS allowed cheap, subsidized corn to be converted into cheap, subsidized sugar. Food processors plumped up with empty calories, and America got fat. But it’s not clear we’d be consuming any less sweetener if corn weren’t so cheap and plentiful. Since the corn content of HFCS contributes less than 2 percent (PDF) to the cost of producing a can of soda, the effect of the subsidies amounts to just a few pennies in the retail price. And while the price of corn syrup is kept artificially low by farm subsidies, the prices of other sweeteners are artificially inflated by tariffs and quotas on imported raw cane sugar and refined sugar. In other words, if we wiped out all of our subsidies and trade restrictions, we’d still have plenty of cheap sugar around, and processed foods would be just as caloric. As Tom Philpott points out in Grist, you don’t need high-fructose corn syrup to rack up American-style obesity rates: Australia manages similar numbers with a food industry based largely on cane sugar.

And the following paragraph:

The unwholesome reputation of HFCS has no doubt been exacerbated by the general view that it’s less “natural” than other forms of sugar. The notion that anything natural is healthy—and anything artificial is not—seems especially silly when it comes to added sweeteners. If fructose is indeed the problem, we’d do well to avoid the all-natural sweeteners in health-food products and fruit drinks, which often include concentrated apple or pear juices. These are almost two-thirds fructose—and might be significantly worse for your health than HFCS. (Organic, raw agave nectar could be even more dangerous, containing 90 percent fructose.)

That’s one of the things that I’ve been telling people - if the fructose content of HFCS is a problem, then look out for the fruit juices sweetened by concentrates made from apple, grape, and apparently pear. Read More…