BPA is controversial because it exerts weak, but detectable, hormone-like properties, raising concerns about its presence in consumer products and foods contained in such products. In testing the effects of the controversial chemical BPA on zebrafish, UWM (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee)scientist Daniel Weber found himself in familiar territory. The results he observed were similar to…

A dust devil is a term for a relatively small swirl of air with dust trapped in it so that it is visible. They are normally not very big. A Martian dust devil roughly 12 miles high was captured whirling its way along the Amazonis Planitia region of Northern Mars on March 14. It was…

We have pictures of other worlds but no sounds to date. This is not without trying but failing. In a world first, the sounds of Mars and Venus are revealed as part of a planetarium show in Hampshire this Easter. Despite many years of space exploration, we have no evidence of the sound of other…

Nothing like a good barbecue! Less to clean up, easy to cook, and tasty. Rhode Island Hospital physicians have identified six cases of accidental ingestion of wire grill brush bristles that required endoscopic or surgical removal. The paper calls attention to the need for the public and physicians to be aware of this potential danger.…

Over the years, there have been various hypotheses about the origin of the Moon. Historically, the major theories have been fission, capture, giant impact, and co-accretion. A chemical analysis of lunar rocks may force scientists to revise the leading theory for the Moon’s formation: that the satellite was born when a Mars-sized body smacked into…

How fast is fast enough? There is an innate desire to cut travel time so as to enjoy or work harder once one gets where is going. In air flight that dream was the Concorde which was retired from use a few years back due to fuel economics as well as other reasons. For 27…

During the Pliocene epoch (5.3 to 2.6 million years ago) climate became cooler and drier, and seasonal, similar to modern climates. The global average temperature in the mid-Pliocene was 2–3 °C higher than today, global sea level 80 feet higher and the northern hemisphere ice sheet was ephemeral before the onset of extensive glaciation over…

A battery is a device that stores energy and makes it available in an electrical form. A capacitor is a device that stores energy in the electric field created between a pair of conductors on which equal but opposite electric charges have been placed. A capacitor is not a battery and is of a more…

There are many strange and ordinary lights in the sky. There are the stars, moon, planets and the Aurora Borealis for example. High in the sky, 60 to 65 miles above Earth’s surface, winds rush through a little understood region of Earth’s atmosphere at speeds of 200 to 300 miles per hour. Lower than a…

The human genome is stored on 23 chromosome pairs and in the small mitochondrial DNA. Twenty-two of the 23 chromosomes belong to autosomal chromosome pairs, while the remaining pair is sex determinative. But that is human, what about one of our close relatives, the gorilla? Researchers announce today that they have completed the genome sequence…