By Ben Locwin, Genetic Literacy Project

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was just awarded to three neuroscientists for refining some past research and developing some pioneering new results to understand how our brains keep track of where we are spatially.

 

David Fincher's film shows the desolation of failed suburban promises. Credit: Twentieth Century Fox

By Julie McIntyre, University of Newcastle

A new study of human placenta has provided evidence that  flame retardant chemicals called polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), implicated as being endocrine disrupting chemicals, and find they can interfere with thyroid hormone action in pregnant women.

The implication is that PCBs can infiltrate the placenta during pregnancy and affect thyroid hormone activity at the cellular level. PCBs were used in transformers and other electrical equipment, paints, adhesives and tape. Although the endocrine-disrupting chemicals were banned in the United States in 1979, PCBs still are released into the environment from disposal sites or products manufactured prior to the ban. Most people have only been exposed to low levels of PCBs.

A government report on obesity, recently published by the Department of Health, states that in England most people can be classified as being overweight or obese – 61.9% of adults and 28% of children currently have an unhealthy body mass index (BMI).

Onions consistently make the lists of organic foods even the most ardent organic advocates don't recommend paying the extra money for; they have so many layers of skin that no pesticide, organic or synthetic, is getting through.

But it's still a market as long as people are willing to pay for a special sticker. And if you are in that market, there is good news; a new study of herbicides derived from clove oil tested the natural products' effectiveness in controlling weeds in Vidalia® sweet onion crops. Vidalia® sweet onion is a dry bulb onion grown in Georgia as a cool-season (winter) crop. 

America now has a services funding problem that has plagued Europe for a time - nowhere near enough workers to pay for people getting government money. 

Though there are now 2 workers to pay for Baby Boomer social security, compared to 42 when the system started, a new study advocates even fewer babies and more economic slowdown. But it will pay off, say scholars from the University of California, Berkeley and the East-West Center in Hawaii.

By Angela Crean and Russell Bonduriansky

A team of scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to make the most detailed global map yet of the glow from a giant, oddball planet orbiting another star, an object twice as massive as Jupiter and hot enough to melt steel, called WASP-43b.

WASP-43b is a world of extremes, where winds howl at the speed of sound from a 3,000-degree-Fahrenheit dayside to a pitch-black nightside when temperatures plunge to a relatively cool 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, still hot enough to melt silver.