Health & Science

What’s for dinner? Cloned meat

Meat and milk from cloned animals may soon be on supermarket shelves—and you won’t even know you’re buying it. After reviewing more than 700 studies, the Food and Drug Administration has announced that food from cloned animals is “as safe as food we eat every day.” The FDA asked producers to continue a voluntary moratorium on sales of meat and milk from clones while it tries to convince the public of their safety, but the ruling may mean that grocery stores won’t even be required to label packages that contain cloned foods. Consumer and animal-rights group have fought hard to prevent cloned animals from entering our food supply, but in the end, “we found nothing in the food that could potentially be hazardous,” FDA food safety chief Dr. Stephen Sundlof tells the Associated Press. “It is beyond our imagination to even find a theory that would cause the food to be unsafe.” Since it’s expensive to create a cloned cow or sheep, it’s unlikely that the clones themselves will be butchered and sold. Instead, breeders will use the DNA of cows with the best meat or milk production to create offspring with similar characteristics, so we’ll be eating the descendants of clones, not the clones themselves. Consumer advocates argue that it’s only been a decade since science cloned the first animals, and that there just isn’t enough evidence to prove that clones or their offspring are safe to eat. “If we discover a problem with cloned food after it is in our food supply and it’s not labeled,” says U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), “the FDA won’t be able to recall it.”

Fooled by expensive labels

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A $90 bottle of wine really does taste better than a $10 bottle—even when it’s actually a $10 bottle in disguise, a new study has found. The study found that higher prices prime the brain to expect pleasure, fooling people into what they actually experience. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology asked 20 subjects to taste a selection of wines. When wine drinkers sipped a $5 bottle of wine, they rated it much higher when it was disguised with a $45 price tag. Drinkers also enjoyed a $90 bottle much more than when it was priced at $10. Brain scans showed that the pleasure centers of the wine drinkers had lit up when they saw the high price, so that their tongues mistook value for quality. “Subjects believe that more expensive wines are likely to taste better,” economist Antonio Rangel tells Science. “These expectations end up influencing their actual experience.”

Columbus’ other discovery

Christopher Columbus returned from his voyages with news of a New World and samples of exotic species never seen by Europeans. Now, says the Los Angeles Times, he’s being blamed for bringing back syphilis, too. Historians have long suspected that Columbus’ crew introduced syphilis to Europe, because the first outbreak of the disease occurred in Naples in 1495, shortly after his crew returned there. The sexually transmitted disease spread like wildfire through Europe. Now, a study has found that venereal syphilis is genetically very similar to a strain of treponematosis bacteria from a remote tribe in Guyana. Of the 23 bacterial strains from all over the world that scientists studied, Guyana’s most closely resembles the syphilis bacteria. “The movement of diseases between Europeans and Native Americans is often seen as a one-way street, with Europeans bringing germs such as smallpox and measles,” says Emory University evolutionary biologist Kristin Harper. “But syphilis seems to be an example of a disease that went the other way.”

A real Frankenstein heart

With parts collected from dead and baby rats, scientists have built a heart in the laboratory and brought it to life, says The New York Times. The researchers, from the University of Minnesota, took the valves and other structural tissue of a dead rat’s heart, using it as a “scaffold.” They then coated it with living cells extracted from the hearts of infant rats, and left it in a nutrient-rich solution to grow. Two weeks later, they had grown a fully functional heart, and it began to beat on its own. “We just took nature’s own building blocks to build a new organ,” says researcher Doris Taylor. The study is a major step toward creating customized, implantable organs for humans. It’s possible that doctors could one day inject a person’s own stem cells into a scaffold prepared from a human cadaver, growing them a personalized organ to replace a damaged one. Such lab-grown organs, scientists say, are at least a decade away.

Bad air may cause birth defects

Air pollution isn’t just bad for our lungs. The toxins in factory fumes and car exhaust, a new study finds, can reduce the quality of male sperm, and perhaps lead to birth defects. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore housed two groups of mice in a facility downwind of steel factories and right next to a major highway. One group breathed the polluted air, while the other breathed air cleaned by a HEPA filter. After several weeks in the lab, researchers examined the mice’s sperm, and found that the sperm that had been grown in polluted air had 60 percent more mutations. What’s more, some of the mutations took place in germ line cells, the precursors to sperm, rather than just in the short-lived sex cells. This means that pollution causes mutations that could be passed down for generations.