The presence of toxic lead in used consumer products is extremely widespread and at levels far beyond safe limits, researchers conclude in a new study.  Research recently found that lead and cadmium were present in cartoon character drinking glasses and now the new study has found that many other items available for purchase throughout the United States – such as toys, home décor items, salvage, kitchen utensils and jewelry – contain surface lead concentrations more than 700 times higher than the federal limit.

The results were published in The Journal of Environmental Health.

Lactococcus lactis, the workhorse bacterium that helps turn milk into cheese, may also lead to understanding of how microbes turn the organic compound cellulose into biofuels, according to new research from Concordia University published in Microbial Cell Factories. 

Concordia biology professor Vincent Martin and PhD student Andrew Wieczorek demonstrated how structural or scaffolding proteins on the surface of the bacteria can be engineered in Lactococcus lactis towards the breakdown of plant material.   They showed how these scaffold proteins were successful in providing a stable surface outside the cell for chemical activity, e.g. the transformation of plant material into biofuels.

A new study was released today in JAMA which looked at, in part, mitochondrial DNA overreplication in a sample of ten autistic children between the ages of 2 and 5 and ten matched controls.  Giulivi et al. found that 5 of the 10 autistic children and 2 of the control children had mitchondrial DNA overreplication.

In the comments section of a previous post, the question was raised of how autism is diagnosed in the samples being studied. This new study allows an opportunity to look at how carefully the sample is selected and controls matched to the sample.

A satellite as cute as a pumpkin, they are.  Ran into this neat post at NASAHackSpace about a Forbes report on Pumpkin Inc's pre-made CubeSats.  CubeSat itself is a specification, not a piece of off-the-shelf hardware, so Pumpkin decided to prebuild kits and sell them.  If you have your own rocket to launch on, for $7500 they'll sell you a CubeSat kit.  Although, to quibble, it looks like they're selling the variant mini CubeSat configuration, rather than the usual 10cm cubes.

Small, dim stars known as red dwarfs have turned out to be much more prolific than previously thought, which means that the total number of stars in the universe is likely three times larger than realized. 

Red dwarfs are relatively small and dim compared to stars like our Sun, so astronomers haven't been able to detect them in galaxies other than our own Milky Way and its nearest neighbors - so there were only conjectures about how much of the total stellar population of the universe is made up of red dwarfs.

Chronic jet lag alters the brain in ways that cause memory and learning problems long after returning to a regular 24-hour schedule, according to research by Berkeley psychologists.

Twice a week for four weeks, the researchers subjected female Syrian hamsters to six-hour time shifts, the equivalent of a New York-to-Paris airplane flight.   During the last two weeks of jet lag and a month after recovery from it, the hamsters' performance on learning and memory tasks was measured.   As expected, during the jet lag period, the hamsters had trouble learning simple tasks that the hamsters in the control group did well on. What surprised the researchers was that these deficits persisted for a month after the hamsters returned to a normal day-night schedule.

Recently, we featured an article on how new federal money -- funneled through the NOAA -- is being directed to citizen science efforts (read more).

Sensorineural hearing loss (SSHL) is a condition that causes deafness in 40,000 Americans each year, usually in early middle-age.   

A new treatment has been developed SSHL, say researchers writing in BMC Medicine who describe the positive results of a preliminary trial of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) applied as a topical gel.

In reviewing this article, I couldn't help but notice the problems in how this information was reported, so that it became quite apparent why the general public perpetually misunderstands or misinterprets evolution.

"Our results demonstrate, for the first time, that Coal Forest fragmentation influenced profoundly the ecology and evolution of terrestrial fauna in tropical Euramerica, and illustrate the tight coupling that existed between vegetation, climate, and trophic webs." (Abstract)

Physics hunts for the ultimate theory; at least that is what the media and people like L. Susskind and M. Tegmark tell us incessantly what physics is all about (god particle, ultimate string theory landscape, ultimate ensemble, and all that). If you are after the ultimate theory, Smolin