Endocrinologists are warning us in a paper for an upcoming issue of the
journal Endocrinology

that some of the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing - fracking - can disrupt the body's hormones. 

Individuals with a family history of premature heart disease, heart attacks or stroke in a first degree relative before the age of 60 years, continue to have a higher risk of dying despite earlier referral to general physicians, lifestyle changes and drug treatments. 

 Doctors are aware of the increased risk individuals with family history of heart disease face, with around a 40% higher chance of being affected than the average population. In response, these individuals are usually referred earlier for interventions to reduce the risk, but research published by the University of Glasgow in the European Heart Journal has shown that even when early interventions are instituted, these patients are still 12-20% more likely to die prematurely. 

Tests conducted by scientists from Rice, Nankai and Tianjin universities at two wastewater treatment plants in northern China revealed antibiotic-resistant bacteria were not only escaping purification but also breeding and spreading.  

The "superbugs" were carrying New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1), a multidrug-resistant gene first identified in India in 2010, in wastewater even after being disinfected by chlorination. Significant levels of NDM-1 were found in the effluent released to the environment and even higher levels in dewatered sludge applied to soils. 

Want to boil water in less than a trillionth of a second?

Now you can, if you are at the Hamburg Center for Free-Electron Laser Science and can find someone to build your theoretical concept.

Still, heating water 600 degrees Celsius in just half a picosecond seems like a fun application. If it ever does get built, it will be the fastest water-heating method on earth.  

It seems like common sense to want to avoid foodborne illnesses but the naturalistic fallacy regarding food has extended to milk - with claims that raw milk somehow wards off disease and is better for you.

While no one should drink it if they aren't absolutely sure how it was produced, like cigarettes, raw milk should especially be avoided by pregnant woman and kids.

A new policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics

Americans' perceptions of income inequality are largely over-inflated due to political and cultural grandstanding, at least when compared with actual census data.

Most science fiction and news stories describe Mars terraforming as a long term but simple process. You warm up the planet first, with greenhouse gases, giant mirrors, impacting comets or some such. You land humans on the surface right away and they introduce lifeforms designed to live on Mars. Over a period of a thousand years or so, life spreads over the planet and transforms it, and Mars becomes a second Earth.

In America, where the Obama administration is using surveillance cameras, tracking website visits and monitoring citizens using GPS, many people feel their privacy is slipping away.

It's no surprise that, if there is a choice, like with electronic health records, people out opt - at least until the Afforadable Care Act requires it. Already, health records and clinical tissues are being used for medical research purposes, even without patient consent but completely compliant with federal regulations. 

Like most government spending programs, once environmental lobbyists got their way and renewable ethanol biofuels became mandated and subsidized, they have been difficult to eliminate.

Perhaps the news that blending more ethanol into fuel to supposedly cut air pollution from vehicles carries a hidden risk of toxic or even explosive gases in buildings may help. 

Those problems would likely occur in buildings with cracked foundations that happen to be in the vicinity of fuel spills. Vapors that rise from contaminated groundwater can be sucked inside, according to Rice University environmental engineer Pedro Alvarez. Once there, trapped pools of methane could ignite and toxic hydrocarbons could cause health woes, he said.

In 1989 the CDF experiment was sitting on its first precious bounty of proton-antiproton collisions, delivered by the Tevatron collider at the unprecedented energy of 1.8 TeV. One of the first measurements that was produced was the measurement of the mass of the Z boson, which was at the time known with scarce precision by the analysis of a handful of candidates produced by the CERN SppS collider, at a third of the Tevatron energy.