Each year, someone writes a book scaring people about food and that gets covered in the New York Times and then a whole rash of junk science studies get produced affirming exactly what the book said. This has been  a tradition since the 1960s, when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, a book of anecdotes and scary claims about how someone she heard of sprayed DDT in her cellar and died, surrounded by science jargon about carcinogens.

In a new paper, a team reports their recent work examining  the effects of spaceflight on microbial pathogens - in this case infectious disease potential of the fungal pathogen, Candida albicans, the first global gene expression profiling and phenotypic characterization of a fungal pathogen during spaceflight.

Candida is a type of fungus—a eukaryotic microorganism. It is often found in soils and water and is ubiquitous in man-made environments, including the space shuttle and International Space Station. C. albicans is part of the normal flora of human beings, present on the skin, in the oral cavity, and in the gastrointestinal, urogenital and vaginal tracts.

You can perform simple qualitative analysis to detect certain metals in various substances using borax bead, and flame tests. The inoculating loop for these tests is very easy to make. You can use 20 gauge to 26 gauge Nichrome or platinum wire depending on what is easiest for you to find. To make the loop use a 20cm length of wire and something cylindrical to wrap the wire around such as a small brad or finishing nail. I used an ink cartridge from a disposable ball point pen.

Note: the wire in this photo is oversized to make it easier to see in the photograph.

Wrap the wire around the cylinder to form a loop:

For most of its life, a star is pretty stable, slowly consuming the fuel at its core to keep it shining brightly, but once most of the hydrogen that stars use as fuel has been consumed, some stars evolve into very different beasts -- pulsating stars. They become unstable, expanding and shrinking over a number of days or weeks and growing brighter and dimmer as they do so.

An analysis of thyroid hormones from urine samples of zoo-living chimpanzees and bonobos has led anthropologists to conclude that hormone levels may be why chimpanzees and bonobos share similar starting conditions at birth but develop different behavioral patterns later in life.

The researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp discovered that bonobos retain elevated thyroid hormone concentrations well into adulthood, whereas in humans and chimpanzees thyroid hormone concentrations decline after puberty.

The late decline of thyroid hormones in bonobos might have consequences on their behavior and might also indicate a delayed development of their mental capacities.

A new technique will significantly decrease pain for children following high-risk urology surgeries, according to a paper in the Journal of Pediatric Urology.

The research team evaluated continuous infusion of local anesthesia using the ON-Q pain relief system to improve pain control in children undergoing urological procedures. While the ON-Q system is well-established as an effective pain management technique for adults, this is the first study that evaluates its pain management effectiveness in children.

Almost every study of food production over the last decade has claimed it has implications for global warming, but in reality the resources required to grow food and raise livestock and grains vary dramatically depending on the animal, the type of food it provides, the kind of feed it consumes and where it lives.

It's not well known but astronomers actually cannot see what our Galaxy, the Milky Way, really looks like. We are on the inside looking out so scientists instead deduce its shape by observation of its stars and their distances from us. 

In the 1950s, astronomers used radio telescopes to map our Galaxy. Their observations focused on clouds of gas in the Milky Way in which new stars are born, revealing four major arms. More recently, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope scoured the Galaxy for infrared light emitted by stars but in 2008 it was announced that Spitzer imaging had found about 110 million stars, yet only evidence of two spirals. Did the Milky Way have missing arms? Were they ever there?

Consumers who buy organic products do not want synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, microbials or antioxidants in their food - they only want natural carcinogens - but that is a recipe for disaster and a key reason why so many foodborne outbreaks are related to organic products.

Recently, scientists have begun to make precise genetic modifications to genes in order to move a beneficial effect of one plant to another. This is not without controversy but far superior to prior methods of optimizing plant biology.

The most random thing that can happen is letting natural radioactivity within DNA alter chemical compounds, providing a new pathway for genetic mutation.