Interesting, Non Political News

Melted down
If there was an option to have your body dissolved down to liquid and poured on plants when you die, would you be interested? A handful of people have already chosen alkaline hydrolysis, as it's known, for their mortal remains in New South Wales — the only state where it's currently available. Their bodies were put in a stainless steel drum filled with hydrogen peroxide and water, and heated to around 93 degrees Celsius. Similar to traditional cremation, after a few hours their bones were the only solid things left.

Freeze-dried and shattered?
But if going out as a liquid isn't your style, there are other green options to consider. Like having your body snap frozen in liquid nitrogen and smashed into little pieces. It's been successfully tested on pigs, which are anatomically similar to humans, and actually makes a lot of sense once you can get past the '90s sci-fi film connotations.

Step one of promession as it's known, involves blasting the body with liquid nitrogen at minus 190 degrees Celsius. Step two sees your frozen-solid, crystallised corpse shattered by ultrasonic vibrations into tiny pieces. Those pieces are then freeze dried, removing the large amount of water that comprises our bodies. Mercury and other foreign objects are then separated from the remains before they're transferred to a biodegradable vessel and shallow buried.

The buried remains become soil within about 12 months, said Swedish biologist Susanne Wiigh-Masak, who founded the promession process. Also it's a low emission process!

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PepsiCo has come under intense fire after it sued a group of Indian farmers who the company alleges grew a patented potato variety used in its Lays chips without the company’s permission. The American food, snack, and beverage corporation initially demanded $143,000 in damages from each of the four farmers. PepsiCo said they illegally sourced and sold the FL-2027 strain of potato which it says it has owned the exclusive rights to since 2016.

One of the farmers sued by PepsiCo, Bipin Patel, told Reuters, “We have been growing potatoes for a long time and we didn’t face this problem ever, as we’ve mostly been using the seeds saved from one harvest to plant the next year’s crop.” Defending the four farmers, activist Kapil Shah told the publication, “It’s a question of India’s seed sovereignty, food sovereignty, and country sovereignty. It’s spreading panic among the farmers.”

PepsiCo currently has a collaborative potato farming program, which allows farmers who take part to receive supplies of the potato variety as long as they then sell the produce back to them at a fixed price. The company has argued that the four farmers growing the FL-2027 strain are infringing PepsiCo’s rights under Section 64 of the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act 2001.

However, farmers’ groups have cited Section 39 of the same act which states that a farmer can “save, use, sow, resow, exchange, share, or sell his farm produce including seed of a variety protected under this Act,” if he or she does not sell “branded seed,” The Hindu reported. “These farmers are small, holding around 3-4 acres on an average, and had grown a potato crop from farm-saved seed after they accessed the potato seed locally in 2018,” part of the letter read.

PepsiCo which owns Pepsi, as well as other brands such as Lays, Gatorade, and Quaker Oats, offered to drop the lawsuit if the farmers become part of its collaborative potato farming program. The farmers would have to purchase the potato seeds from PepsiCo and subsequently sell the produce back at predetermined prices, the company said. “In case they do not wish to join this program, they can simply sign an agreement and grow other available varieties of potatoes,” PepsiCo said, according to USA Today.

The farmers’ lawyer said they will take time to consider the company’s offer, and the next hearing has been set for June 12. “We will fight it out, no matter how big the company,” Shah told CNN. “Pepsi has made a huge mistake.”

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