Fruits and pesticides

Are you consuming your daily recommended number of fruits?

Beware, you may also be consuming more than your daily allotment of PESTICIDES.

Peaches top the list of most pesticide-ridden fruits, with some combination of up to 53 pesticides found on all the peaches in the study...yikes. With their relatively thin skin, peeling and washing  can only do so much, so this one tops the list of fruits to definitely buy organic whenever possible.

An apple a day might keep the doctor away, but too many conventionally-grown apples might eventually send you to the doctor. Apples had 50 different pesticides found on them, so if you pick apples instead of gum to fight bad breath, pick organic apples.

With 97.3 percent of the samples testing positive for pesticides, nectarines are third on the list of fruits with a high pesticide load. 85.3 percent of the samples of the fruit known by some as  "peaches without the fuzz" had multiple pesticides on a  single sample -- the second-highest number, behind peaches.

With 38 different pesticides found, strawberries check in as the fourth fruit to buy organic whenever possible. And, without a skin, there isn't much between you and whatever has happened to accumulate on the berries.

Cherries are the next fruit on the list of the 12 most contaminated fruits, that, when combined with commonly pesticide-laden vegetables, will expose a person to about 10 pesticides per day, on average.

Imported grapes earned the spot as sixth-dirtiest fruit on the list; interestingly, grapes grown in the U.S. Also earn a spot, though further down the list.

Pears are next on the list, based on the six methods that each piece of  fruit was tested by: percent of the samples tested with detectable pesticides, and percent withn two or more pesticides; average number of pesticides found on a sample, and average amount (level in parts per million) of allpesticides found, maximum number of pesticides found on  a single sample, andnumber of pesticides found in total. Given  all that, that pears are in the middle of the pack.

Raspberries check in at number eight on the list. And what damage could a little pesticide on a little raspberry do? According to a study in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that people who had been exposed to even low levels of pesticides were found to be 1.13 times as likely to have Parkinson's disease as those who had never been exposed.

Plums round out the top 10. Like the other stone fruits on the list, they're tough to scrub, and aren't really receptive to quick 'n easy peeling, so going organic is your best bet for healthy, clean plums. And, while scientists from Israel have been able to genetically modify plums to deliver a huge payload of antioxidants, we still have to ask, is it worth the potential risk?

Oranges go to eleven on the list. Part  of the reason they're further down is that they have a thick rind that is often discarded  (or composted, though orange peels show surprising promise as feedstock for ethanol as  well) rather than eaten, as with stone fruits,  grapes, and other fruits with edible skins.  Still, ifyou like to cook with zest of the rind and want to minimize your risk from one of the most-consumed fruits, stick with organic oranges.

Rounding out the list are tangerines. Similar to an orange (and sometimes mistaken for them), the tangerine tends to be smaller, and many have thinner rinds than most oranges. That means a bit less real estate for pesticide-blocking.

Grapes are back on the list, thistime for those grown in the U.S. And, while grapes aren't regularly peeled before they're eaten, they should definitely still be washed, because washing does reduce levels of some pesticides. However, other pesticides are also taken up internally into the plant, are in the fruit, and cannot be washed off.

The World's Fastest Train By China - CRH380A

The World's Fastest Train By China - CRH380A 

China on Saturday launched the world's fastest train service covering a distance of 1,068 kms at the average speed of 350 kms an hour. The distance between Wuhan in central China and Guangzhou in the country's south was covered by the high-speed train in two hours forty five minutes. The train reached a maximum speed of 394.2 km per hour during trail runs that begun on December 9. Officially, on Dec. 26 the world's fastest train will be open for traffic on high-speed railway Wuhan-Guangzhou – for the longest in the world and is a “record” is also on the speed. Distance more than a thousand kilometers to be covered in three hours at an average speed of 340 kilometers per hour.

The Wikileaks Office in Sweden

Julian Assange’s Bond Style Bunker – The Wikileaks Office in Sweden

The Wikileaks Headquarters has surprised everybody with its extraordinary location and conditions. Pionen – White Mountain designed by Albert France-Lanord Architects is housed in a former 1,200 sqm  Cold War bunker (originally built as a World War II bunker); an amazing location 30 meters down under the granite rocks of the Vita Berg Park in Stockholm. This could be the most strong and ‘wonderful’ office that’s established in the past ten years. 

 
The Wikileaks Headquarters has surprised everybody with its extraordinary location and conditions.

The Turkey-based Internethaber website posted pictures of the Wikileaks office near Stockholm. The office was constructed during the cold war, and reconstructed by the Pionen company in 2008. 




 

WikiLeaks is an international non-profit media organization that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous sources and leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press.Within a year of its launch, the site claimed a database that had grown to more than 1.2 million documents.

The WikiLeaks website first appeared on the Internet in January 2007. The site claims to have been “founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa”.The creators of WikiLeaks have not been formally identified.It has been represented in public since January 2007 by Julian Assange and others. Assange describes himself as a member of WikiLeaks’ advisory board. News reports in The Australian have called Assange the “founder of Wikileaks” 

Wikileaks Hosting

WikiLeaks describes itself as “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking”. WikiLeaks is hosted by PRQ, a Sweden-based company providing “highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services.” PRQ is said to have “almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs.” The servers are spread around the world with the central server located in Sweden. Julian Assange has said that the servers are located in Sweden (and the other countries) “specifically because those nations offer legal protection to the disclosures made on the site”.