With its narrow connection to the North Sea, strong currents, a large number of river estuaries and a bottom profile marked by ridges, basins and troughs, the Baltic represents an inland sea with highly different water qualities. The fact that these morphological and hydrographic conditions can also influence the fate of fish stocks has now been shown by a team of fisheries biologists from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and the National Institute of Aquatic Resources (DTU Aqua) at the Technical University of Denmark.

Most of the public doesn't know this, but some people are allergic to metal. 10 percent of the Germany public is allergic to nickel, according to background information in a new paper.

But medical implants use nickel. Nickel-titanium alloys are increasingly used as material for cardiovascular implants in minimal invasive surgery and, once implanted, these alloys can release small amounts of nickel due to corrosion. Is that dangerous? 

Congenital heart disease is the most common form of birth defect, affecting one out of every 125 babies, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Researchers from the University of Missouri recently found success using chemical compound 
PHPS1
to treat laboratory mice with one form of congenital heart disease, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy — a weakening of the heart caused by abnormally thick muscle.

By suppressing a faulty protein, the researchers reduced the thickness of the mice's heart muscles and improved their cardiac functioning.

Bisphenol A (BPA) has been used for decades in a wide variety of consumer products, like metal food and beverage containers, thermal paper store receipts, and dental composites.

Though the FDA has found BPA safe after numerous studies, because it can exhibit hormone-like properties the public has grown concerned about conflicting claims. There have been studies that have found exposure of rodent fetuses, infants, children or adults can cause cause abnormalities, including cancer, as well as reproductive, immune and brain-behavior problems. 

Researchers at the University of Missouri are now saying that daily exposure to very low concentrations of BPA by pregnant females can cause fetal abnormalities in primates.

The notion of environmental "footprinting" as a way to represent the impact of human activity on the planet's environment has become a veritable industry over the last two decades.

Since the concept first gained popularity in the 1990s — when it was introduced by researchers William E. Rees and Mathis Wackernagel — footprinting has been used to explain a range of complicated phenomena as a single metric, spawning carbon footprints, water footprints, and various other indicators to communicate the carrying capacity of Earth.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 18, 2014—For futuristic applications like wearable body sensors and robotic skin, researchers need to ferry information along flexible routes. Electronics that bend and stretch have become possible in recent years, but similar work in the field of optics – communicating with light instead of electrons – has lagged behind. Particularly difficult to engineer have been optics that stretch, lengthening when someone wearing body sensors bends to tie their shoe, or when a robotic arm twists through a full range of motion.