Many newborns are exposed in their earliest days to bisphenol A (BPA) and lots of other chemicals, the world is all chemical, but BPA has been the subject of more scrutiny than most because it is ubiquitous. Due to that, environmental advocacy studies have claimed there is probably risk to adults and newborns, while more neutral science says that it is detectable but not harmful.

If you have hepatitis B or C and feel like you are treated poorly by others due to it, you are not alone. As many as half of people infected with viral hepatitis say they have suffered discrimination and one-quarter admit that family members have avoided physical contact with them after finding out they had the infection. 

What makes triple negative breast cancer more lethal in African-American women than European-American ("White") women? A new study reveals specific genetic alterations that appears to impact their prognosis and ultimately survival rates.

Seismologists have discovered a massive magma reservoir beneath the Yellowstone supervolcano in Wyoming, US, that suggests its volcanic system could be more than 5.6 times larger than was previously thought.

I am presently in Athens for a few days, to give a seminar and meet the local group of CMS physicists. So I took the chance to visit yesterday evening the Astrophysics department of the University of Athens, where at the top floor is housed a nice 40cm Cassegrain telescope (see picture below). There I joined a small crowd which professor Kosmas Gazeas entertained with views of Jupiter, the Moon, Venus, and a few other celestial targets. I need to thank my friend Nadia, a fellow physicist and amateur astronomer, for inviting us to the event.

When a feather or a plastic bag or almost anything light is placed in water, these items will generally float.  This is easy to understand if you think of water being more dense than the other item.  If you put something heavier in water, it tends to sink like a rock or a piece of metal but this doesn't fully explain how an iron ship can float. 

Scientists may get frustrated at Dr. Oz and The Food Babe and other people who are against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) while munching happily on organic strains created by mutagenesis, but if we care about cognitive science issues, the evidence-based world might want to be a little kinder to them in the future.

The reason some people don't trust science has evolutionary roots, a group of Belgian scholars believe - science is complex, they say, and when brains were more primitive, the world had to be made as simple as possible. So 'if I can't pronounce it, you should not eat it' may be a relic of our neuroscience past and some people will have that fear in greater amounts than others.

What does it mean when a supermassive black hole exists in a place where it isn't supposed to exist? It's another puzzle of the early universe.

Henize 2-10 is a small irregular galaxy that is not too far away, at least in astronomical terms: 30 million light-years. "This is a dwarf starburst galaxy -- a small galaxy with regions of very rapid star formation -- about 10 percent of the size of our own Milky Way," says Ryan Hickox, an assistant professor in Dartmouth's Department of Physics and Astronomy. "If you look at it, it's a blob, but it surprisingly harbors a central black hole."

A recent randomized trial looked at the feasibility of 2013 guidelines issued by the American College of Surgeons Trauma Quality Improvement Project for trauma resuscitation and found that delivering universal donor plasma to massively hemorrhaging patients can be accomplished consistently and rapidly and without excessive wastage in high volume trauma centers.

The plasma is given in addition to red blood cell transfusions to optimize treatment. 
Injury is the leading cause of death among young adults, and uncontrolled hemorrhage is the most important preventable factor among those who sustain traumatic injury.

Much of what we know about cancer and many modern medicines that treat it grow from experiments on cancer cells but it is difficult to maintain the integrity of cell lines due to contamination or simple mistakes such as mislabeling.

Later generations of a cell line may bear no resemblance to the original sample, potentially invalidating results of research performed on mistaken cells. For this reason, the National Cancer Institute maintains a library of 60 authenticated human cancer cell lines for the purposes of research, called the NCI-60.