Ali Kimmel

BLANK VERSE

Blank Verse, a local Claremont band is celebrating their one year anniversary this December with a show. Rico’s Coffee Shop in La Verne will be showcasing the band along with their new album on Friday December 30^th.

            This so called garage band is made up of Claremont High graduates and attendees. Matt Boyer, lead singer and guitarist, Nolan Ung, drums and backing vocals, Casey Proulx, keyboard and backing vocals, and Nick Maury, bass and backing vocals complied together make up Blank Verse.

            At Rico’s Blank Verse is planning to play off of their 1^st full length album titled, All Here that was released in early June of this year. This album is made up of alternative/classic rock with influences from the Beach Boys, Radiohead, and the Doors.

            The album became such a hit that it was offered to be sold at Rhino Records in Claremont and Mad Platter in Riverside. This is said to be a rarity for high school aged bands.

            This show is one in many for the boys, they have been found to play all over Claremont and surrounding areas for many events. Blank Verse has even been requested back by many by popular demand.

            Their manager, Chris Maury, father of Nick Maury has helped majorly in the kick off the band’s career. He has organized and booked every one of Blank Verse’s gigs and shows for the past year.

            Blank Verse as usual is expecting a good turn out on the 30^th and they urge everyone who can to come and check them out. They will be playing covers along with their own material so, there will be songs to sing along with.

            So, come have some coffee and support some fellow Claremont highers making a break into the music biz.

It is the ultimate conundrum for vegetarians who think that meat is murder: a revolution in processed food that will see fresh meat grown from animal cells without a single cow, sheep or pig being killed.

Researchers have published details in a biotechnology journal describing a new technique which they hailed as the answer to the world's food shortage. Lumps of meat would be cultured in laboratory vats rather than carved from livestock reared on a farm.

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Scientists have adapted the cutting-edge medical technique of tissue engineering, where individual cells are multiplied into whole tissues, and applied them to food production. "With a single cell, you could theoretically produce the world's annual meat supply," said Jason Matheny, an agricultural scientist at the University of Maryland.

According to researchers, meat grown in laboratories would be more environmentally friendly and could be tailored to be healthier than farm-reared meat by controlling its nutrient content and screening it for food-borne diseases.

Vegetarians might also be tempted because the cells needed to grow chunks of meat can be taken without harming the donor animal.

Experiments for Nasa, the US space agency, have already shown that morsels of edible fish can be grown in petri dishes, though no one has yet eaten the food.

Mr Matheny and his colleagues have taken the prospect of "cultured meat" a step further by working out how to produce it on an industrial scale. They envisage muscle cells growing on huge sheets that would be regularly stretched to exercise the cells as they grow. Once enough cells had grown, they would be scraped off and shaped into processed meat products such as chicken nuggets.

"If you didn't stretch them, you would be eating mush," said Mr Matheny.

The idea of doing away with traditional livestock and growing steaks from scratch dates back at least 70 years. In a horizon-scanning essay from 1932, Winston Churchill said: "Fifty years hence we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium."

Several decades too late, Churchill's vision finally looks set to become a reality.

Lab-raised steaks will be off the menu for some time though. Scientists believe that while tissue engineering is advanced enough to grow bland, homogeneous meat, tasty and textured cuts will have to wait.

"Right now, it would be possible to produce something like spam at an incredibly high cost, but the know-how to grow something that has structure, such as a steak, is a long way off," said Mr Matheny.

Kerry Bennett, of the Vegetarian Society, said: "This is certainly an interesting development, and one that is bound to prompt many different responses from individual vegetarians - largely depending on why those individuals have chosen vegetarianism.

"The Vegetarian Society is concerned that while this has the potential to decrease the number of meat-producing animals in factory farms, there are still a number of question marks regarding the origins of the cells and the method of harvesting.

"It won't appeal to someone who gave up meat because they think it's morally wrong to eat flesh or someone who doesn't want to eat anything unnatural," Ms Bennett added.

"Personally I wouldn't want to, but I suppose if they're going to make chicken nuggets with it, then it's probably not going to taste much different."