"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will."
- George Bernard Shaw
Received this in an email forward, and thought I’d share it here. All credit goes to the originator, whoever that may be.
Carrots
A sliced Carrot looks like the human eye. The pupil, iris and radiating lines look just like the human eye…and YES science now shows that carrots greatly enhance blood flow to and function of the eyes.
An article on the Bhopal campaign written by AID Boston volunteer Somnath Mukherji appeared in the Statesman, December 1 2006. The full-text is reproduced below.
The author is an electrical engineer based in Boston.
(Click here if you’re wondering what this is about)
On 26 July, 2006, 34-year-old Sunil Verma hung himself from the ceiling of his room. He was wearing a T-shirt which said: “No more Bhopals”. It was 22 years ago on the intervening night of 2-3 December that a cloud of lethal gas from Union Carbide’s (UC) pesticide factory took the life of his parents and five of his siblings. Sunil was one of many victims that the world’s worst industrial disaster continues to claim after more than two decades. Today, 150,000 people continue to live with mental and physiological damage besides the 20,000 who have succumbed to them.Was Sunil’s death a tragedy? The editor of a local newspaper in Boston had objected to my usage of the phrase “Bhopal gas tragedy”. Tragedy, he had said, connotes a sense of inevitability, a mysterious hand of destiny and fate. I stood corrected. There was nothing inevitable about either the gas leak of 1984, or Sunil’s death. The seeds of the disaster were sown the day the site of UC’s plant was chosen in the midst of a densely populated poor neighbourhood despite the large amounts of lethal chemicals needed during the manufacture of Sevin. Storing inordinately large amounts of methylisocyanate (MIC) in the plant, cutting corners in safety mechanisms, importing unproven technologies and a general neglect due to less than desired profits, precipitated the disaster on that wintry night…
China launched the first seed-breeding satellite of its kind from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center today, carrying 215 kilograms of seeds of plants and fungus, the largest-ever such payload since 1987. The mission is part of a plan to help develop space-enhanced produce to feed the country’s 1.3 billion people. The country has been researching the effects of cosmic radiation and microgravity on seeds for many years, giving rise to the theory that fruit, vegetables, and grains such as rice and wheat cultivated from seeds exposed to space offer increased yields. A rapid decline in farmland due to industrialization is a significant problem in India as well, which increases the importance of following the findings from this research effort even more closely. While food irradiation as a method of preservation has been adopted for a long time now, the potential health risks that might be associated with vegetables treated with cosmic radiation need to be strongly investigated.
It seems certain that in the not too distant future, Earthgrains will witness a completely different breed of competitors (Spacegrains?) lining the shelves at Wal-mart.
The BBC reports that there are more overweight people across the globe today than the malnourished ones. The ratio stands today at 1.25:1, with about 1bn obese individuals compared to about 800m hungry people.
It is interesting to note that the biggest increases are being seen in parts of Asia - a continent whose people are not generally envisioned as being obese. In India, for example, fitness and weight loss is on more resolution lists than it is on schedules. This is probably true in the West as well, but to a lesser extent. The findings in the article suggest cheaper foods in the US as a dominant factor contributing to obesity, which is widely accepted as a lifestyle related disease. This also reminds me of Dr. Nikhil Dhurandhar’s studies that strongly suggest that obesity may be caused by a virus.
I saved the BBC article caption because of a typographical error, that made me wonder what the ratios might be, in terms of collective weight in pounds.
