News Articles

If you're a woman and need an excuse not to clean the carpet, it's your lucky day.   The bad news is, whatever you may already have done may have an impact on having kids.   Researchers at the UCLA School of Public Health have found the first evidence that perfluorinated chemicals, or PFCs — chemicals that are widely used in everyday items such as food packaging, pesticides, clothing, upholstery, carpets and personal care products — may be associated with infertility in women. 

Want to know if you have an honest dentist?   Tell him you want to try UV tooth bleaching.   A study in Photochemical&Photobiological Sciences writes the lack of any enhanced bleaching effect is bad enough but it also damages skin and eyes up to four times as much as sunbathing.And as with sunbathing, fair-skinned or light-sensitive people are at even greater risk, said lead author Ellen Bruzell of the Nordic Institute of Dental Materials.  Bruzell also found that bleaching damaged teeth. She saw more exposed grooves on the enamel surface of bleached teeth than on unbleached teeth. These grooves make the teeth more vulnerable to mechanical stress.Want skin damage?

Creationism, the rejection of the scientific basis of  evolutionary theory, is experiencing a resurgence among Europeans. The Department of Biology and Didactics of Biology at the TU Dortmund has organized an international conference addressing the issue, titled “Attitude and Knowledge concerning Evolution and Science in Europe (AKESE)”, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education.On February 20th, researchers from different scientific backgrounds and seven European countries will meet at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology in Dortmund to discuss the scientific significance of evolutionary theory, its lack of social acceptance and the negative attitude towards science that rejection of evolution entails.

It would seem that in a bad economy, tax cuts make the most sense.    Letting people keep their money instead of letting the government spend money to collect taxes, spend money to institute government programs and then pay government employees to write checks is believed to lead to a great deal of waste.

How many Cardinals can fit on the head of a pin?   Still unknown, but Stanford physicists can at least tell us how many letters formed by quantum electron waves can fit on the surface of a sliver of copper - two; as in "S" and "U."   That's for 'Stanford' and 'University' if you haven't caught on and Cardinals are their ... oh, never mind, if you didn't already get it you stopped reading by now.So how small is that? The letters in the words are assembled from subatomic sized bits as small as 0.3 nanometers, or roughly one third of a billionth of a meter.   Bonus: the wave patterns even project a tiny hologram of the data, which can be viewed with a powerful microscope.

Biology exists in a physical world and cancer researchers are increasingly looking to include concepts of physics and mathematics in their efforts to understand how cancer develops -- and how to stop it.Traditional cancer biology involves taking a sample of cells and holding them in time so they can be studied. Then the researchers look at that slice of cells to understand what signals and pathways are involved. But that doesn't capture the full picture, says Sofia Merajver, M.D., Ph.D., co-director of the Breast Oncology Program at the University of Michigan Health System Comprehensive Cancer Center. 

When it comes to assessing the romantic playing field -- who might be interested in whom -- men and women were shown to be equally good at gauging men's interest during an Indiana University study involving speed dating -- and equally bad at judging women's interest. Researchers expected women to have a leg up in judging romantic interest, because theoretically they have more to lose from a bad relationship, but no such edge was found. 

In almost every diet book you read, they tell you to never get hungry.   You will binge if you do, they all say, because of temptation and that gnawing in your stomach.   Yet all those snacks and meals have corresponded to a ballooning obesity problem which gets instead blamed on trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, salt - you name it.It may be that all those self-help books and catering to mental weakness has caused a drop in self-control, says psychological theory.   If you want to lose weight, keep a house full of chocolate. 

Variations in the brightness of the Q0957+561 quasar, also known as the “twin quasar” due to its duplicated image on Earth, are intrinsic to the entity itself and not caused by the gravitational effects of possible planets or stars from a far away galaxy.This is the conclusion of a study carried out by Spanish researchers resolving a mystery that has intrigued astronomers for the past 30 years.

The origin of species may be almost as random as a throw of the dice, says Iosif Pinelis, a professor of mathematical sciences at Michigan Technological University, who claims to have worked out a mathematical solution to a biological puzzle: Why is the typical evolutionary tree so lopsided?In other words, the reason some descendants of a parent species evolve into hundreds of different species  while others produce so few goes beyond natural selection  and into math; simple probability yields a surprisingly elegant solution, Pinelis says.

A century-old drug that failed in its original intent to treat tuberculosis but has worked well as an anti-leprosy medicine now holds new promise as a potential therapy for multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases."We never expected that an old antibiotic would hit this target that has been implicated in multiple sclerosis, psoriasis and type 1 diabetes," says Johns Hopkins pharmacologist Jun O. Liu "People have been working for years and spending tens of millions of dollars on developing a drug to inhibit a specific molecular target involved in these diseases, and here, we have a safe, known drug that hits that target," known as the Kv1.3 potassium channel. 

Desert locusts are harmless, solitary creatures until they get a certain chemical - and it isn't firewater, catnip or anything that comes from Colombia.   It's serotonin, a common brain chemical, but in the right amount they turn into hordes of hungry ... well ... locusts. With desert locusts, the expression of this swarming characteristic generally means serious trouble for nearby farmer.   Locusts are known to sometimes swarm by the billions, and they often devastate crop yields.  Dr. Stephen Rogers from the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford in the UK says about 20 percent of the world is affected by desert locusts.