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Apr 13, 2009 | 1
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At least seven states are considering banning bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical found in baby bottles and other plastic products that U.S. federal regulators have said is safe but has been banned in Canada because of links to health problems including heart disease and diabetes.
Lawmakers in California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan and Minnesota have proposed restrictions on BPA, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports – part of a periodic series of stories the newspaper is running on the chemical also found in the lining of cans.
The proposed state measures would ban BPA in baby bottles, baby formula cans, cups and other products for kids, according to the newspaper. The House and Senate are also considering bills, introduced by Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), that would slap a federal ban on use of BPA in all food and drink containers.
Apr 1, 2009 | 1
You just couldn’t get enough. Well, good news for all you Green Porno fans: the Isabella Rossellini insect mating vehicle is back.
Yes, the actress and model returns today with the second season of the program, which features Rossellini, 56, acting out (in costume and with evocative sound effects) how critters reproduce. Six new episodes will air on SundanceChannel.com.
Rossellini has already explained how bees, dragonflies, fireflies, spiders, earthworms, snails, flies and (fittingly for sex stereotypes of women as predators of men) the praying mantis do the deed. (Rossellini probably wouldn’t have much to act out in the world of termites, some of which reproduce asexually, as we noted last week.) She told Scientific American then that while her costumes sometimes were constricting, she could break out of them while staying in character. "Once I humped them," she said, "they came apart."
Mar 27, 2009 | 4
Spring is in the air, but that doesn't have all termites looking for love. New research published this week in Science says that some queen termites can reproduce both sexually and asexually, depending on the kind of baby they're making (workers or queens).
"It wasn't known that termites did this in the field," says study co-author Ed Vargo, an associate professor of entomology at North Carolina State University. "We knew that the potential was there," he says, because seven termite species had been coaxed to reproduce asexually in experiments. "But it all seemed to me like a laboratory artifact."
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The Geoffrey Beene Foundation Alzheimer’s Initiative (GBFAI) is launching the 2013 Geoffrey Beene Global NeuroDiscovery Challenge whose
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