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A 19th century nursery rhyme called "What Are Little Boys Made Of?" and generally attributed to Robert Southey goes"What are little boys made of?  What are little boys made of? Snips and snails and puppy-dogs' tails, that's what little boys are made of.What are little girls made of? What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice,that's what little girls are made of."But these days in Australia both genders, even only four weeks old, are made of sugar.  And salt and high-fat foods, despite health authorities recommending exclusive breastfeeding to six months of age.

Psychotropic medications -  psychostimulants like Ritalin,  antidepressants like Prozac and antipsychotics like Haldol - during pregnancy increase the probability of birth defects, according to a  University of Copenhagen study.  In Denmark, psychotropic medications were associated with 429 adverse drug reactions in Danish children between 1998 and 2007 -  more than half of the 429 cases were serious and several involved birth defects, such as birth deformities and severe withdrawal syndromes. 

While proponents of organic farming insist it can meet population projections and is better for wildlife, scientists at the Universities of Leeds and York say instead a balanced approach is superior.  At least for butterflies.Their study found that organic farms have more butterflies than conventional farms but that a conventional farm plus an area specifically managed for wildlife could support more butterflies and produce the same amount of food from the same area of land.  Drawback: the wildlife area would have to be similar in quality to a nature reserve rather than similar to an uncultivated field margin, which boosts costs even more.

The Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps are melting at half the speed previously predicted, shows a team from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft, The Netherlands) and SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research in Nature Geoscience.The melting of the ice caps has been charted since 2002 using the measurements produced by the two GRACE satellites. From space they detect small changes in the Earth's gravitational field and these changes are related to the exact distribution of mass on Earth, including ice and water. When ice melts and lands in the sea, this therefore has an effect on the gravitational field.

A research team says they have discovered one of the key drivers of human evolution and diversity, accounting for changes that occur between different generations of people.Professor Alec Jeffreys, who discovered DNA fingerprinting at the University of Leicester in 1984, and has spent the decades since investigating what he describes as "pretty bizarre bits of DNA" - highly variable repeated parts of DNA called 'minisatellites' - found in the human genome. Jeffreys observed that these seemed to be changing and "picking up mutations at an extraordinary rate" when compared to other DNA.

It would seem that mimicking nature would be among the easiest things to do for science.  After all, it's right there, in front of us, happening for millions of years. Take plants, for instance.   Every day they absorb sunlight and turn it into energy but our solar technology is bordering on laughable and, if solar lobbyists get there way and it gets more subsidies and even mandates, criminal.   The issue science has is that the sun's rays are highly destructive to man-made materials and that leads to a gradual degradation of many systems developed to harness it.

Most fashion students keep finished designs in a wardrobe but Emily Crane has to use a freezer.   Unlike the stereotypical fashion designer, Crane is more likely to be found in a lab coat and wearing goggles than working with pencils or scissors.Crane’s work forms an exotic part of Kingston University’s display at Vauxhall Fashion Scout on September 17, during London Fashion Week, and she is currently preparing her collection but can’t promise what she’ll be showing - because it doesn't always work, being that her clothes are made of things like gelatin and seaweed.

The sharing, preservation and reuse of data has become an increasingly important element of modern scientific research, but even though granting agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) naturally embrace data sharing, resistance from parts of the scientific community has continued to block scientific progress and valuable research data over the world is kept under lock and key or hidden away in lab drawers, forcing time and cost of unnecessary duplication. BMC Research Notes is commissioning a large, ongoing collection of educational articles which outline procedures for sharing data that enable the data to be readily re-used by others and  providing researchers with best practice guidance.  

Scientists at the universities in Tübingen and Mainz say they have developed a blood test that can provide conclusive proof of gene doping - even after 56 days.To date, it has been impossible to prove that an athlete had undergone gene doping but they say the new test provides a clear answer based on whether or not transgenic DNA is present in blood samples. Transgenic DNA (tDNA) does not stem from the person being tested but has been transferred into their body, often via viruses, in order to create performance-enhancing substances such as erythropoetin (EPO) for forming red blood cells. 

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution describes the survival of the fitter, the best adapted organisms, but biologist Gerard Jagers op Akkerhuis says it does not pay enough attention to the succession of living things during evolution and so has developed what he calls the ‘operator hierarchy’, a system based on the complexity of particles and of organisms, which can predict the next step in evolution: a technical life form, that can pass on its knowledge and experience to the next generation.

Phosphorus is a critical ingredient in fertilizers, pesticides, detergents and various industrial and household chemicals but once phosphorus is mined from rocks, getting it into products is hazardous and expensive, so chemists have been trying to streamline the process for decades.

While the public has a great respect for scientists, they don't trust scientists, at least when it comes to issues that also overlap with politics, like the environment.When it comes to policy-related topics, scientists have a limited effect on the public, perhaps not because people are stupid but because some in science have moved away from being trusted guides and into being advocates, which damages the credibility of science overall.   And once those beliefs are locked in, they are difficult to change.So while oil drilling is safe, scientists who say so now will go unheard because some in science have gone out of their way to say it isn't due to a cultural agenda.