Tag Archives: japan

Steak made from human poop passes taste test

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steak on the grill

Would you eat a steak made from human sewage? Believe it or not, this concept has already been taste-tested and approved.

If you prefer your steak to be cooked rare, you may want to reconsider that choice after hearing about the latest advancement in food technology to come out of Japan: an edible steak made from human feces, reports Discovery News. (Update: Discovery News is now unsure if the story is real and wondering if they were duped. It reminds us of  this “Yes Men” poop burger hoax.)

Take a moment to let that gag reflex subside. Now consider this: it’s already been taste-tested, approved, and could eventually become a practical solution to sewage treatment. Someday “bowel burgers” may even provide an easy source of protein for the hungry.

The steaks were first envisioned by Japanese researcher Mitsuyuki Ikeda after he was approached by Tokyo Sewage to come up with a solution for the city’s overabundance of sewage mud. Although “eating it” probably wouldn’t have occurred to most people, Ikeda recognized that the mud was chock full with protein-rich bacteria.
After isolating those proteins in the lab, Ikeda’s team then combined them with a reaction enhancer and put them in an exploder. What eventually came out was no filet mignon, but it was edible.
“Theoretically, there’s nothing wrong with this,” said Douglas Powell, a professor of food safety at Kansas State University. “It could be quite safe to eat, but I’m sure there’s a yuck factor there.”
To make swallowing the stool steaks a little bit easier, a nutty flavor was added using soy protein, and red food coloring was mixed in too, apparently to make the concoction look more like a juicy, bloody steak. A few brave researchers even took the plunge and taste-tested the product. (Apparently it tastes like regular beef.)
The official composition of the lab-grown steak is 63 percent proteins, 25 percent carbohydrates, 3 percent lipids, and 9 percent minerals. (Which sounds a lot better than 100 percent poop). According to Powell, the idea isn’t really all that much different than eating plants that have been fertilized with manure or other excrement.
The idea could even help to solve the world food crisis. By comparison, researchers have also proposed harvesting insect protein (i.e., “bug burgers”) as one possible way to help combat famine worldwide. Are “bowel burgers” really so much worse? They also take the ethic of recycling to its logical extreme.
Powell did offer one caveat to the future poo’d food revolution, though: because the steaks are made from human feces, there’s always a chance for contamination. If you’re brave enough to eat this, at least make certain that it’s properly cooked (as if you were going to eat one raw!).
When asked if he would ever consider eating one of the poop steaks if it wasn’t cooked, Powell responded matter-of-factly.
“I wouldn’t touch it,” he said.
IT GIVES THE EXPRESSION CRAP ON A BUN REAL MEANING

Eurozone risks Japan-style trap as deflation grinds closer

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The region’s core inflation rate – which strips out food and energy – fell to 1pc in March. This is far below expectations and leaves monetary union with a diminishing safety buffer.

“The eurozone is tracking the experience in in mid-1990s. there is a very high risk of a slide into deflation,” said Lars Christensen, a monetary theorist at Danske Bank.

While eurozone core inflation was slightly lower in the aftermath of the crisis, the current figure is distorted by the one-off effects of VAT increases and levies linked to austerity. Adjusting for these taxes, the rate is now running at 0.4pc.

“The [ECB] should be concerned. If there is another severe shock, the eurozone faces a much bigger risk of falling into a deflationary trap,” said Julian Callow, global strategist at Barclays. “The danger is when deflation combines with high debt and deleveraging and becomes toxic. That raises the risk of a debt-deflation spiral. There are already signs of this in southern Europe.”

Mr Callow said nominal GDP – tracked by monetarists as the key indicator in sovereign debt crises – fell 1.8pc in Spain and 1.2pc in Italy last year. This means that the debt burden is rising fast on a contracting base.

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Ex-Soros Advisor Sells “Almost All” Japan Holdings, War of lists’ chills US-Russia ties

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Ex-Soros Advisor Sells “Almost All” Holdings, Shorts Bonds; Sees Market Crash, Default And Hyperinflation

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Previously, we have pointed out why Japan’s attempt at reincarnating its economy, geared solely at generating a stock market-based “wealth effect”, and far less focused on boosting the country’s trade surplus or current account, is doomed to failure, namely due the drastically lower equity participation by the general population and financial institutions in the country’s stock market. Sure, foreign investors will come and go renting each rally for a period of time, but unless the local population participates in the “reflation attempt” (which has already sent the price of luxury goods, energy and food through the rood), or in other words change the behavioral patterns of two generations of Japanese in under two years, the inflationary shock will simply leads to a loss of faith in the government and ultimately Abe’s second untimely demise. Not surprisingly, 4 months after Japan set off on the most ludicrous economic experiment in history, and one week after the BOJ announced its plans to double its balance sheet, Abe’s approval rating has already begun sliding with a poll by Asahi just reporting that popular support of Abe’s cabinet is already down to 60%, down from 71% a month ago.

The reflationary reality has finally started to get official recognition with the very (who like in Europe and is behind this epic experiment in hidden taxation of consumers) asking how popular inflation would be in Japan, and answers:

How popular will inflation be in Japan? Assuming the is successful and inflation rates rise, one interesting dynamic will be the political support for ‘super-easy’ monetary policy. The majority of financial household assets sit in deposits, which until now have earned a positive real rate. While long-term inflation expectations move higher, the Yen and equities re-price rapidly but the negative impact on deposit returns from negative real rates will only be felt once inflation has actually started to materialise. This is clearly not an immediate concern as the government’s approval ratings remain high ahead of the Upper House elections this Summer. Still, PM Abe’s policy aim of beating deflation may become less popular at some stage because the implied distributional choices of higher inflation may become clearer for voters. For example, higher inflation would re-distribute real income from (older) savers to (younger) wage earners. But again it is worth thinking about the exact sequencing. By the time inflation in Japan becomes settled in positive territory the Fed may well be on the verge of hiking rates. In essence, any concerns about inflation in Japan and debate about a BoJ policy response will likely arrive at a stage when Fed tightening and JPY carry trades have already become the dominant theme.

In short, yes, Japanese inflation will destabilize the economy, and almost certainly lead to yet another political upheaval, but by then Japan will have served its purpose and injected some $1 trillion into the US stock market, thus supposedly allowing the US economy to become self sustaining. Or not. As to the consequences that the demographically-challenged Japanese population has to face as it suddenly finds itself holding worthless pieces of paper… who cares.

Which means that Abenomics will ultimately fail to fix Japan, but at least there is some hope it will last long enough to send the S&P to even more ridiculous highs – which, when one cuts out all the noise, it really what the whole experiment is all about.

For Japan, there is still some hope that the country will stop this ludicrous experiment merely serving to feed US risk assets before it is too late. Luckly, we are not the only ones seeing the writing on the wall. A month ago, it was “Mr. Yen”, former finmin Eisuke Sakakibara, himself, saying “Abenomics” is going to fail.

“In terms of two percent inflation, it [‘Abenomics’] will fail. Deflation is structural. Even at the time, when Japan was in the upward [growth] swing between 2002 and 2007, prices went down. It will be extremely difficult to get out of deflation,” said Sakakibara, also known as “Mr. Yen” for his efforts to influence the currency’s exchange rate through verbal and official intervention in the forex markets in the late 1990s.

According to Sakakibara structural deflation in the world’s third largest economy is largely a result of the integration between the Japanese and Chinese economies and hence near impossible to move away from.

“Cheap Chinese goods come into Japan and push down the prices. And a lot of Japanese companies go to China to manufacture goods — so it’s not going to change,” said Sakakibara, who is currently a professor at in .

According to Sakakibara, dollar-yen between 90 and 95 would be most favorable for the economy.

“I remember in 1998, 1999 — it [dollar-yen] did go to 150 — I was at that time in the government, I was terrified,” he said.

Moments ago, it was none other than Takeshi Fujimaki, Soros’ former advisor on all matters Japanese, who tripled down on the warnings, and told Bloomberg that the Bank of Japan’s “huge bet” by boosting quantitative easing won’t turn the economy around and is instead sending the nation toward default.

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War of lists’ chills US-Russia ties-US Russia uncovering secret tensions between superpowers.

The Russian foreign ministry’s blacklist include four former US officials who it alleges were responsible for “legalising torture” when they oversaw the US detainee programme during the height of the war on terror.

Tit-for-tat bans on US and Russian officials travelling between the countries have plunged relations between Moscow and Washington to a new low on the eve of a high-level US visit to Russia’s capital. Russia’s blacklisting of 18 US officials is a riposte to the US, which the Kremlin accuses of moralising without sufficient attention to its own lapses.

The rest of the US officials on the Russian list were accused by Russia of violating the rights of its citizens abroad – those who had participated in the overseas arrest of suspected Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout and, in a separate case, against a Russian pilot accused of drug trafficking

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Japan: Monetary Madness in Times of Unsustainable Deficits?

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Unsustainable debt. Depression-era fiscal policy. Monetary madness. Welcome to Japan. You may not live or invest in Japan, but your investments may well be affected by what is unfolding in the Land of the Rising Sun. Be prepared.Japan’s government has vowed to end deflation by pursuing both depression-era fiscal policy and aggressive monetary policy. We recently analyzed implications of Japan’s planned fiscal policies for the yen (see “How Low Will the Yen Go: Depression-Era Policies”). Since then, Bank of Japan’s (BOJ) new governor Haruhiko Kuroda has warned Japan’s debt is not sustainable. Indeed, the only reason why Japan’s debt has been sustainable may be because deficits have historically been financed domestically. However, Japan’s current account balance has been deteriorating: in our assessment, dynamics will be radically different once foreigners are expected to help finance the budget deficit. Already we can see that the yen no longer fulfills the role as a safe haven; that is, whereas the yen was a great beneficiary of the “flight to safety” in 2008, the currency’s status has been eroding in tandem with the country’s current account balance (for more on the yen as a safe haven, see our analysis “Is the Yen Doomed?”)As domestic investors may not be able to support the country’s deficit any further, and international investors may be unwilling to, the BOJ could step in and buy bonds to help finance the deficit. The valve then, in our assessment, has to be the currency. As the debt is monetized, there could be grave consequences for the yen.

While the yen has weakened of late, we may not have seen anything yet. That’s because unlike the BOJ’s reputation, the central bank there has actually been rather modest in its “quantitative easing” programs in recent years. Here is a chart comparing the amount of money select central banks have been “printing” (the colloquial term for monetary easing, even if no banknotes are physically printed)

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Is the Yen Doomed?Japan

Shocking Find In Mariana Trench

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An international research team announces the first scientific results from one of the most inaccessible places on Earth: the bottom of the located nearly 11 kilometers below sea level in the western Pacific, which makes it the deepest site on Earth.

Their analyses document that a highly active bacteria community exists in the sediment of the trench – even though the environment is under extreme pressure almost 1,100 times higher than at sea level.

The Mariana Trench or Marianas Trench is the deepest part of the world’s oceans. It is located in the , to the east of the Mariana Islands. The trench is about 2,550 kilometers (1,580 mi) long but has an average width of only 69 kilometers (43 mi). It reaches a maximum-known depth of 10.911 km (10,911 ± 40 m) or 6.831 mi (36,069 ± 131 ft) at the , a small slot-shaped valley in its floor, at its southern end, although some unrepeated measurements place the deepest portion at 11.03 kilometers (6.85 mi).

Location of Mariana Trench
File:Marianatrenchmap.png
Credit: WikipediaIn fact, the trench sediments house almost 10 times more bacteria than in the sediments of the surrounding abyssal plain at much shallower water depth of 5-6 km water.

Deep sea trenches are hot spots

Deep sea trenches act as hot spots for microbial activity because they receive an unusually high flux of organic matter, made up of dead animals, algae and other microbes, sourced from the surrounding much shallower sea-bottom. It is likely that some of this material becomes dislodged from the shallower depths during earthquakes, which are common in the area. So, even though deep sea trenches like the Mariana Trench only amount to about two percent of the World Ocean area, they have a relatively larger impact on marine carbon balance – and thus on the global carbon cycle, says Professor Ronnie Glud from Nordic Center for Earth Evolution at the .

The Pacific plate is subducted beneath the Mariana Plate, creating the Mariana trench, and (further on) the arc of the Mariana islands, as water trapped in the plate is released and explodes upward to form island volcanoes.
File:Cross section of mariana trench.svg
Credit:  WikipediaRonnie Glud and researchers from Germany (HGF-MPG Research Group on Deep-Sea Ecology and Technology of the Max Planck Institute in Bremen and Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven), Japan (), Scotland (Scottish Association for Marine Science) and Denmark (University of Copenhagen), explore the deepest parts of the oceans, and the team’s first results from these extreme environments are today published in the widely recognized international journal Nature Geoscience.

Diving robotOne of the team’s methods was to measure the distribution of oxygen into these trench sediments as this can be related to the activity of microbes in the sediments. It is technically and logistically challenging to perform such measurements at great depths, but it is necessary in order to get accurate data on rates of bacterial activity. “If we retrieve samples from the seabed to investigate them in the laboratory, many of the microorganisms that have adapted to life at these extreme conditions will die, due to the changes in temperature and pressure. Therefore, we have developed instruments that can autonomously perform preprogrammed measuring routines directly on the seabed at the extreme pressure of the Marianas Trench”, says Ronnie Glud. The research team has, together with different companies, designed the underwater robot which stands almost 4 m tall and weighs 600 kg. Among other things, the robot is equipped with ultrathin sensors that are gently inserted into the seabed to measure the distribution of oxygen at a high spatial resolution.

“We have also made videos from the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and they confirm that there are very few large animals at these depths. Rather, we find a world dominated by microbes that are adapted to function effectively at conditions highly inhospitable to most higher organisms”, says Ronnie Glud.

The remaining “white spots”

The expedition of the Mariana Trench took place in 2010. Since then, the research team has sent their underwater robot to the bottom of the which is approximately 9 km deep, and later this year they are planning a dive in the world’s second deepest trench, the 10.8 kilometers deep Kermadec- near Fiji in the Pacific.

“The deep sea trenches are some of the last remaining “white spots” on the world map. We know very little about what is going on down there or which impact the deep sea trenches have on the global carbon cycle as well as climate regulation. Furthermore, we are very interested in describing and understanding the unique bacterial communities that thrive in these exceptional environments. Data from multiple deep sea trenches will allow us to find out how the general conditions are at extreme depths, but also the specific conditions for each particular trench – that may experience very different deposition regimes. This will contribute to our general understanding of Earth and its development, says Ronnie Glud.

See the article “High rate of microbial carbon turnover in sediments in the deepest oceanic trench on Earth” in Nature Geoscience.  Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/NGEO1773