A team of epidemiologists have written a study indicating that exposure to certain phenols during pregnancy, especially parabens and triclosan, may disrupt growth of boys during fetal growth and the first years of life.

Triclosan is on store shelves and in almost every home. Bisphenol A (BPA), which has been increasingly removed from products due to environmental claims, showed no impact. 

Two new species of sea-dwelling, mushroom-shaped organisms have been discovered. 

Scientists classify organisms based on shared characteristics using a taxonomic rank, including kingdom, phylum, and species. In 1986, the authors of this study collected organisms at 400 and 1000 meters deep on the south-east Australian continental slope and only just recently isolated two types of mushroom-shaped organisms that they couldn't classify into an existing phylum.

A group of ecotoxicologists claim that the US Environmental Protection Agency's evaluations of pesticide safety are inadequate and lead to bias.

Parts of the iconic Galapagos Islands have been overrun by invasive plants from other parts of the world, according to  results published in Neobiota which confirm that in the humid highland part of Santa Cruz Island in the Galapagos National Park, nearly half of the canopy of the vegetation is comprised of non-native trees, shrubs and grasses.
 

Keeping upright in a low-gravity environment is not easy and nothing shows that more than by how often NASA has documented astronauts falling on the lunar surface.

A new paper suggests these moon mishaps might be common because its gravity isn't sufficient to provide astronauts with unambiguous information on which way is "up".

You have a new galactic address; astronomers have determined that our own Milky Way galaxy is part of a newly identified enormous supercluster of galaxies - dubbed "Laniakea," which means "immense heaven" in Hawaiian.

This discovery broadens the boundaries of our galactic neighborhood and establishes previously unrecognized linkages among various galaxy clusters in the local Universe. How big are are talking? The Milky Way galaxy alone has 100 billion stars. We think. And then there are 10¹² galaxies. So your address is now a lot bigger. Instead of being Earth, Sol, Orion arm, Milky Way, Local Group and Virgo cluster, you can now add Laniakea before Universe.

Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), the most widely used drugs for the treatment of depression, have been reported to reduce bone formation and increase the risk of bone fracture. Since osseointegration is influenced by bone metabolism, a new study investigated the association between SSRIs and the risk of failures in osseointegrated implants.

Within the limits of the study, the findings indicate that treatment with SSRIs is associated with an increased failure risk of osseointegrated implants.   

Eric R. Kandel, MD, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries related to the molecular basis of memory, and Denise B. Kandel, PhD, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, write in the New England Journal of Medicine that electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) may function as a "gateway drug"—a drug that lowers the threshold for addiction to other substances, such as marijuana and cocaine— as part of the 120th Shattuck lecture and presented to the Massachusetts Medical Society.

Most living mammals are nocturnal and it has long been thought that the transition to nocturnality occurred at about the same time as mammals evolved, around 200 million years ago. That hypothesis was based on features such as the large brains of mammals (good for processing information from senses like hearing, touch, and smell) and the details of light-sensitive chemicals in the eyes of mammals.

It turns out that nocturnal activity might have a much older origin among ancient mammal relatives, called synapsids.