According to CNN Health, the McNuggets sold in the U.S. (190 calories, 12 grams of fat, 2 grams of saturated fat for 4 pieces) contain a chemical preservative called tertiary butylhydroquinone (tBHQ) – a petroleum-based product. The Nuggets our U.S. McDonald’s sell also contain dimethylpolysiloxane which is an ‘anti-foaming agent’ that is commonly used in Silly Putty.

McNuggets sold in Britain (170 calories, 9 grams of fat, 1 gram of saturated fat for 4 pieces) contain neither tBHQ or dimethylpolysiloxane. Ruth Winter, author of A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, reports, “I would certainly choose the British nuggets over the [U.S. version].”

Lisa McComb, who handles McDonald’s global media relations, informs us that dimethylpolysiloxane is used in U.S. McNuggets for safety reasons – to keep the oils used in cooking from foaming. The chemical, a form of silicone, is quite common in cosmetics manufacture and Silly Putty. And, in fact, the World Health Organization completed a literature review of animal studies on dimethylpolysiloxane and found no adverse health effects with its use.

McDonald’s limits the amount of vegetable oils and animal fats in the McNugget to .02 percent – tBHQ is a preservative for these oils. This is not a significant amount, but according to A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, just one gram (1/13th of an ounce) of tBHQ can cause nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse. So maybe there is something to the health reports that filter in from parents of toddlers high on McNuggets…

McDonald’s reported that the minor differences we find are are due to taste tests performed in the U.S. and the U.K.. Americans seem to like their McNuggets coated, and then cooked, while Brits enjoy their Nuggets cooked and then coated. Not only does this ordering alter the flavor, but Britain’s Nuggets are also then able to absorb less oil and be processed with less fat.

“You would find that if you looked at any of our core food items, you’d see very little regional differences. We do taste testing of all our food items on an ongoing basis,” Lisa McComb recently reported in a news brief. McComb currently oversees the media relations for over 32,000 McDonald’s locations in 117 countries.

Some of the differences are subtle – for example, U.S. McNuggets are listed as including “spices” whereas the U.K. McNuggets specify that they include pepper and ground celery.

But what about the bigger differences? New York University professor and author of What to Eat, Marion Nestle, says the small amounts of butylhydroquinone and dimethylpolysiloxane in U.S. McNuggets are unlikely to pose any health risk. However, Nestle, like most other health-conscious food advisers, recommends not eating foods that include ingredients you cannot pronounce.

As most American’s with a television set in their home remember, McD’s launched their ‘all-white-meat’ McNugget in 2003 after a federal judge called the old Nuggets “a McFrankenstein creation of various elements not utilized by the home cook.” When the Nuggets changed, however, tBHQ and dimethylpolysiloxane stuck around. Cook’s Illustrated magazine founder and publisher, Christopher Kimball, suspects the chemicals are necessary for U.S. McNuggets to maintain their familiar shape and texture.

And when recent health/cook celebs like Jamie Oliver highlight the vast number of McNuggets consumed by U.S. elementary school children, one has to wonder if overdoing any particular food item — or just processed junk in general — leads to some of the epidemic health problems we find in the United States.

Oliver succeeded to some degree in the U.K. with his Ministry of Food… but were Brits ever as bad off as the S.A.D. (Standard American Diet) currently is? And what about our food quality in general? Kimball (like Oliver) reports that “The regulations in Europe, in general, around food are much stricter than in the U.S.”

As so many others have pointed out (Fast Food Nation, Diet For a Dead Planet, Food, Inc., In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Supersize Me, The Cove, The End of the Line) there seems to be a very big problem here, and it extends far beyond the U.S. chemical concoctions in McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets…

The amazing construction feat has been captured in a time-lapse video.

Chinese firm the Broad Group grabbed world attention last year when it built a 16-storey residential block in just five days.

The firm has done it again but this time on a more ambitious scale building a 180,000 sq ft hotel in the south-central Chinese city of Changsha.

The remarkable achievement was completed with no injuries to any worker.

The building has been designed to withstand magnitude 9 earthquakes and is claimed to be five times more energy efficient than standard towers, both in construction and materials used, and in the energy required to maintain and run the building.

All the key components were prefabricated off-site. The builders took just 46 hours to finish the main structural components and another 90 hours to finish the building enclosure.

And if you’re thinking the builders were working around the clock, think again. They downed their tools at 10pm every night. We’re seriously impressed.

Tape Generations from johan rijpma on Vimeo.

Johan Rijpma (1984) studied at the Utrecht School of the Arts (Faculty of Art, Media and Technology) in Hilversum. By making short films, music videos and animations, he studies his unpredictable environment.

Watch another Johan Rijpma video here.

Watch this  tennis ball boy make an astounding reflex catch during this years Australian Open semi-final between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer.

These pictures by British photographer Brian Cassey capture the misery of people – some estimates put the figure as high as 100,000 – who are forced to live in cages measuring just 6ft by 2 1/2ft.

Yan Chi Leung is mentally ill and lives in the 6ft by 2.5ft wire cage at the bottom of this stack of three

Kong Sui Kao, 64, sits in his home in a room with 19 other cages

The city is one of the planet’s most densely packed metropolitan areas, with nearly 16,500 people living in every square mile of the territory.

Unscrupulous landlords are charging around US$200 a month for each cage, which are packed 20 to a room, and up to three levels high.

Tai Lun Po, 79, has lived in the cage he is sitting in for an extraordinary 30 years

In The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution, Faramerz Dabhoiwala, an Oxford historian, argues It was the groovers, shakers and thinkers of 18th-century swinging London — including the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, philosopher David Hume and author William Godwin — who brought the light of reason into the nation’s sexual affairs and attitudes.

They were also more daring and more unconventional than their Sixties equivalents. The first revolutionaries had to make it up as they went along; the Sixties generation had a whole off-the-shelf radical lifestyle — complete with a look, music and ideas — that anyone from London to San Francisco could buy into.

What’s more, pre-liberation Britain wasn’t quite the depressing sexual desert it was always made out to be. Dominic Sandbrook, the historian, has argued that even during the 1950s “at least half the adult population engaged in sex before marriage”.

By contrast, the picture Dabhoiwala paints of Britain before the 1660s resembles something that today’s Taliban or Saudi moral police would admire. Family members, neighbours, the church courts and the law acted together to monitor and quash licentiousness. Punishments for sexual crimes were frequent and cruel.

For example, in March 1612 a judge ordered that Susan Perry and Robert Watson be “stripped naked from their waist upwards; and so tied to the cart’s tail and be whipped from the Gatehouse in Westminster unto Temple and there to be banished from the city”. Their crime? Having a baby out of wedlock.

The enemies of Sixties progressives, such as Mary Whitehouse and Malcolm Muggeridge, also had nothing on their predecessors. The first revolutionaries had to take on Judge Dredd-like characters such as John Disbrowe (Oliver Cromwell’s brother-in-law) and the writer Philip Stubbes, who argued that whores, fornicators and adulterers ought to be seared with hot irons on their cheeks or foreheads.

Weren’t the boomers the first generation to push boundaries and break taboos, introducing a new frankness to the discussion of sex? Not so. Dabhoiwala writes that sex was no longer the great unmentionable and by the 17th century “a whole range of sexual ideas, practices, within and without marriage was now discussed and celebrated”.

These included sexual pleasure as an end in itself, a growing acceptance of adulterous relationships and the formation of clubs devoted to sex, frequented even by clergymen.

I had thought we boomers were radical by embracing the works of Freud’s renegade pupil Wilhelm Reich, who argued that the good orgasm would lead to the good society. But the first revolution grew out of the Enlightenment, a body of ideas far more radical than any to emerge in the Sixties. This gave to Europe the most groundbreaking idea of all: that it was individual reason and not divine commandment that should determine how we live.

The first revolution has left us with the modern belief in personal liberty; the importance of the pursuit of individual happiness; the idea of a loving (as opposed to vengeful) God; a belief in toleration. All of these, writes Dabhoiwala, transformed our views on male and female sexuality and, eventually, provided the basis for the modern feminist critique.

There were also more practical reasons for the revolution. From the late 17th century the population began to move to the cities, making the policing of sexual mores all the more difficult and the opportunities of having sex much greater.

With that came radical ideas. In 1793 Godwin — Wollstonecraft’s lover — wrote “the institution of marriage is a system of fraud” and argued that women and men should be free to have sex with whomever they liked for as long as they liked. This was nearly 200 years before we boomers thought we were the first to question marriage.

Still, the two revolutions have plenty of things in common. Both were stimulated by growing levels of affluence and took off because of the role of an expanding media in the dissemination of ideas. People became fascinated by celebrities in the 18th century and a sign of the more liberated times was the emergence, writes Dabhoiwala, of “a new type of immoral female celebrity” who did not shy away from scandal.

In the Sixties we got Christine Keeler, whose sexual antics nearly brought down the government; in 1781 they had Mary Robinson, who threatened to publish the letters of her former lover, the Prince of Wales (later George IV).

How do the two revolutions compare in terms of achieving their aims?

The success of the first can be measured by the dramatic drop in the number of people arrested and punished for sexual practices that we now consider perfectly acceptable. The state capitulated to personal instinct in matters concerning private morality.

And the Sixties? Well, the great sexual utopia has yet to arrive. And nobody can deny the side-effects of the revolution: teenage pregnancies, the decline in family stability, the commercialisation of sex — to name but a few.

Like all great revolutions the victories tend not to go to everyone in society — at least not at first. This was as true of the first sexual revolution as the second. And, in both, it was men who got the best deal.

Even as ardent a defender of the Sixties as Jonathon Green, the historian, concedes in It: Sex Since the Sixties that the revolution “was almost wholly a male phenomenon . . . in the end the much-touted sexual revolution was shorthand for male self-indulgence”.

This closely resembles Dabhoiwala’s observation about the first revolution and its limited impact at the time: “It was primarily the heterosexual libido of the white, propertied men that was celebrated.” It seems that when it comes to sexual revolution, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Broadcast Jan 2011

Daily exposure to pollution can set us up for a lifetime of ill-health. And as cities become ever more crowded, these problems are only going to get worse.

The latest studies indicate that daily exposure to urban pollution can affect us before we are even born – leaving us prone to a lifetime of ill-health.

Scientists have discovered that babies born in cities are bigger and heavier – normally a good sign – than those born in the countryside.

But when they compared the placentas of mothers from a busy city and a quiet rural district, they found that the city mums had far higher levels of chemical pollutants called xenoestrogens in their blood – and in that of their unborn babies.

Xenoestrogens are industrial chemicals that affect our bodies in similar ways to the female hormone, oestrogen.They are found in petrol fumes and are more abundant in industrial areas than the countryside.

As well as causing excess foetal growth, they have been linked to fertility problems as well as obesity, hyperactivity, early puberty, and cancers of the lung, breast and prostate.

Maria Marcos, who led the study by the University of Granada, Spain,  says the toxic xenoestrogens seem to have a significant effect on the development of unborn children. Her report provides the latest evidence that city air can seriously hinder normal childhood development.

This report might also help to explain why infertility seems to be on the increase and why more and more couples are turning to IVF and other assisted conception methods.

Apple also said that it would halt sales of its latest phones from its own Apple stores in China, though the devices would still be available online or from the many licensed Apple vendors across the country.

The protest, which involved streams of verbal abuse and scuffles with security guards and police, is the latest debacle for Apple in its fastest-growing market.

Previous incidents have centred on the same Apple store in Beijing where the sheer weight of customers, the confined design of the shopping mall and overwhelming demand for products that quickly sell out has led to furious confrontations with shop staff.

“To ensure the safety of our customers and employees, the iPhone will not be available in our retail stores in Beijing and Shanghai for the time being,” Apple later said in a statement.

Tensions were especially high on this occasion, said shoppers, because a brand new iPhone 4S was rapidly shaping up as the most desirable gift for Chinese New Year, which begins in just over a week’s time.

As with previous product launches, the iPhone 4S mob was a mixture of genuine fans of Apple products who would do anything to lay their hands on each new gadget and immigrant workers paid RMB100 (£10) apiece to queue on behalf of scalpers and organised into platoons of 30 people. On any given day, about a dozen scalpers lurk outside the Apple store in Beijing offering genuine Apple goods at inflated prices to shoppers who have just discovered that their desired item is sold out.

Apple had promised to open its doors at 7am for the launch but witnesses said that the plaza in front of the shop had descended into chaos at least two hours before that. In the pre-dawn dark, a once-controlled queue had disintegrated into a swirling mob of at least 1,000 and any semblance of order was lost as fighting broke out between the gadget-hungry crowds and police. Judging that this was not the moment to open up, Apple staff told the crowd through a megaphone that the launch was cancelled and advised them to go home — a move that drew howls of disbelief and further brawling.

Witnesses long familiar with the Apple store in Beijing said that they had never seen the scalpers and their minions organised with such military precision. By 1am, most of the queue appeared dominated by migrant workers and students in the temporary employ of the scalpers, all acting with “an amazing sense of discipline”. Each team was defined by coloured armbands and led by someone carrying a similarly coloured balloon.

Although Apple’s phones, music players and tablet computers are mostly assembled in China, delays with the local licensing process means the products are usually launched here some months after their release elsewhere.

Thousands of iPhone 4S models have already been smuggled into mainland China — chiefly from Hong Kong — since the phone’s release last year, but that has merely served to whet the local market’s appetite even further.

This is what he would probably would do.