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I don’t know how I missed this one, given that it’s over two weeks old, but I did. Since yesterday was a holiday in the US and I had done a long post the day before because something that happened on Friday had really irritated me, I figured I might as well take a stab at this because it represents one of my “favorite” quack apologists at his most over-the-top quackiest. More importantly, it won’t take too much brain power to deconstruct, but could be entertaining nonetheless. I’m referring, of course, to Mike Adams, the “Health Ranger,” of NaturalNews.com. Of course, nothing by Mike Adams is usually that difficult to deconstruct. Normally his screeds usually only come to my attention when he delves into pure despicable rhetoric, as when he tried to blame the Sandy Hook shootings on psychiatric medications last year, or when they are just so downright hilarious.

This is one of those hilarious times.

What I’m referring to is Mike Adam’s breathless announcement that he had found fibers—yes, fibers!—when he examined McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets under a microscope. If you want to get a whiff of the true hilarity of his article, just look at the title of the two articles he wrote about it, McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets found to contain mysterious fibers, hair-like structures; Natural News Forensic Food Lab posts research photos, video and More Chicken McNugget ‘strange fiber’ photos released by Natural News Forensic Food Labs. Besides the sheer facepalm-level silliness of Adams referring to anything he does at NaturalNew.com as being a “forensic food lab,” the articles are a treasure trove of unintentional humor for anyone who is the least bit knowledgeable about science or microscopy, although unfortunately the science-challenged think it’s slam-dunk evidence of how evil McDonalds is. In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve been known to eat at McDonalds every so often, although probably less than once every month or two. When I do go there, Chicken McNuggets just aren’t my thing. I tried them once and didn’t particularly like them. So I don’t really have a dog in this hunt, as they say, other than the amusement I derive sometimes from watching Mike Adams make a fool of himself. If someone somewhere had done credible science showing horrific things in Chicken McNuggets, I’d probably be inclined to accept it.

Mike Adams does no such thing.

What drew my attention back to these articles, though, was a hilariously inept attempt at “humor” from Mike Adams (pretty much all his attempts at humor are spectacularly inept) entitled Actual female zombie attacks McDonald’s drive-thru window, unleashes living dead rampage for Chicken McNuggets. What is Adams’ damning evidence? Well, just take a look at this video:

Adams is alarmed, saying that “microscopic photos reveal an alien-like landscape with weird shapes and fibers.” He sounds like someone who’s never looked at common every day objects under a microscope before. Pretty much every object, if you magnify it enough, will reveal an “alien-like landscape with weird shapes” and, possibly, depending on what you’re looking at, fibers. Yet, to Adams, this is horrific and alarming. Particularly hilarious is how he narrates the video as though it were an episode of a science show examining the microscopic world, complete with a soundtrack of atmospheric moody electronic music common to such films, and writes things like:

As the following photos show, the Chicken McNuggets were found to contain strange fibers that some people might say even resemble so-called “Morgellon’s.”

We found dark black hair-like structures sticking out of the nugget mass, as well as light blue egg-shaped structures with attached tail-like hairs or fibers.

These are shown in extreme detail in the photos below, taken on August 15, 2013 at the Natural News Forensic Food Lab. The actual Chicken McNugget samples used in these photos have been frozen for storage of forensic evidence.

We also found odd red coloring splotches in several locations, as well as a spherical green object that resembles algae.

But apparently even the Health Danger is slightly cautious. Notice how he doesn’t out and out say that these fibers are dangerous and actually goes so far as to qualify his alarmism while adding a touch of JAQing off to the mix:

We are not claiming or implying that these objects in any way make McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets unsafe to consume. We do, however, believe that this visual evidence may warrant an FDA investigation into the ingredient composition of Chicken McNuggets.

In particular, where are the hair-like structures coming from? This is especially important to answer, given that chickens do not have hair. Is there cross-species contamination in the processing of Chicken McNuggets? This question needs to be answered.

Looking at the pictures, I’ll take a stab at it. Those “hair-like” objects look like dust to me. I mean, seriously. Has Mike Adams ever looked at dust under the microscope at 200X magnification? It’s easy to find images on the web, for example, here, here, and here. Lots of everyday things look really scary under the microscope. I did that when I was a little kid. (Actually, I noticed dust on the microscope slides and was fascinated by it.) Some forms of dust look a lot like those fibers. Of course, given that the fibers have not been analyzed, we don’t know what they are. All Adams knows is that they look scary to him.

Particularly amusing is what Adams leaves out. For example, in the introduction to his video, Adams doesn’t just purchase some Chicken McNuggets, but he buys a Big Mac, too. Yet he doesn’t show any images of the Big Mac. One wonders if he couldn’t find anything sufficiently terrifying in the Big Mac. You know that if Adams had found anything he would have put it in the video. At least, I know it. Indeed, at the very beginning of the video, he says, “We’re going to order Chicken McNuggets and a Big Mac and put it under a high-powered microscope.” In the next scene, Adams is shown ordering the McNuggets and Big Mac. So where are the microscopic images of the Big Mac? I didn’t learn that until I subjected myself to more brain-melting stupidity from Adams (see below).

Also left out are comparative microscopic images of other foods or similar foods. Adams is really blatant about this, too. Near the end he shows an image of some chicken that he claims to have purchased from a Mexican restaurant that uses real, organic chicken. Yet, tellingly, he doesn’t show any microscopic images of the chicken. What about supplements, vegetables, and organic foods? I bet they’d look really scary under the microscope. Certainly, they also resemble alien landscapes just as much as any McNugget. Heck, sage leaves even have lots of fibers attached to them!

So where does Adams decide to go with his “first research project”? Where else? He gets on Alex Jones’ show:

Comedy gold!

What’s really depressing is that such a high end microscope is being used for such a pointless purpose, especially since Adams openly states that he has no idea what these things are. You know what a real scientist does, Mike? If he doesn’t know what something is, he finds someone who does or, if there is no one who knows what that something is (i.e., it’s a real unknown), he tries to figure out what it is before spouting off. Adams is also amazed that he didn’t find anything that looked to him like chicken. That’s entirely possible, given that it’s well known that McNuggets are basically chicken meat and other products ground finely and then shaped and breaded before being fried. However, Adams just admitted that he didn’t know what chicken looks like under the microscope. He had some chicken. Why didn’t he look at it under the microscope? See what I mean by comedy gold? An ignorant twit who doesn’t know what things look like under the microscope is amazed to find things under the microscope that he can’t identify! He then goes on to link them with Morgellons disease:

There has been a wave of public speculation (see comments, below) about whether these fibers are related to a mysterious condition known as “Morgellon’s,” which also appears to involve the presence of strange, unexplained fibers in humans. You can see examples of Morgellon’s morphology at: http://www.morgellons-research.org/morgellons/morgellons-morphology.htm

As I’ve pointed out before, Morgellon’s disease is nothing more then delusional parasitosis, and the “fibers” that Morgellons advocates cite as evidence of the disease are also nothing more than normal fibers that we all have on us from wearing clothes and being in contact with dust and other fibers.

Lest anyone think that I’m in the pocket of McDonalds or some sort of shill for the fast food industry, I’ll just say that I am under no illusions that McDonalds provides healthy food, at least not its fried items like Chicken McNuggets. However, what Adams is doing is deceptive in that it couples ignorance of what everyday objects look like under the microscope with fear mongering and some very blatant JAQing off, implying that McNuggets cause Morgellons while not really claiming it explicitly.

At least I finally learned what Adams did with the Big Mac. He just hasn’t looked at it yet. He does, however, announce that he wants to look at all sorts of other fast foods under the microscope and report back “forensically and scientifically” what is in them. Hmmm. “Forensically.” “Scientifically.” You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean. In this case, what it means is that we can expect to be treated to more scientifically ignorant hilarity from Mike Adams on this front for some time to come. I wonder if he’ll compare the Big Mac to an organic hamburger made from grass-fed, free range cattle. No, actually I don’t.

Dyssynchronous myocardial motion aggravates cardiac pump function. Cardiac resynchronization using pacing devices is a standard-of-care in the management of heart failure. Post-infarction, however, scar tissue formation impedes the efficacy of device-based therapy. The present study tests a regenerative approach aimed at targeting the origin of abnormal motion to prevent dyssynchronous organ failure. Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells harbour a reparative potential, and were here bioengineered from somatic fibroblasts reprogrammed with the stemness factors OCT3/4, SOX2, KLF4, and c-MYC. In a murine infarction model, within 30 min of coronary ligation, iPS cells were delivered to mapped infarcted areas. Focal deformation and dysfunction underlying progressive heart failure was resolved prospectively using speckle-tracking imaging. Tracked at high temporal and spatial resolution, regional iPS cell transplantation restored, within 10 days post-infarction, the contractility of targeted infarcted foci and nullified conduction delay in adjacent non-infarcted regions. Local iPS cell therapy, but not delivery of parental fibroblasts or vehicle, prevented or normalized abnormal strain patterns correcting the decrease in peak strain, disparity of time-to-peak strain, and pathological systolic stretch. Focal benefit of iPS cell intervention translated into improved left ventricular conduction and contractility, reduced scar, and reversal of structural remodelling, protecting from organ decompensation. Thus, in ischaemic cardiomyopathy, targeted iPS cell transplantation synchronized failing ventricles, offering a regenerative strategy to achieve biological resynchronization.

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