Earth

Health & Medicine

PCBs hike blood pressure

No one would choose to eat polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs — yet we unwittingly do. And a new study finds that the cost of their pervasive contamination of our food supply can be elevated blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart disease.

Earth

Plastics ingredients could make a boy’s play less masculine

Study links boys' fetal phthalate exposure to tendency toward gender-neutral play later on.

Humans

Record chills are falling, but in number only

Weather-monitoring stations in the Lower 48 have been logging record daily highs in temperature at twice the pace of record lows. Yet more evidence of climate warming. Many people have pointed to colder than normal winters — or summers — as evidence that global warming is a myth. Climatologists have countered that weather, the meteorological features that we experience at any given hour or day, may show anomalies even as Earth’s overall climate warms. So weather can locally mask the planet’s overall slowly rising fever. Except that any such mask appears to be disappearing throughout most of the United States, according to a new study.

Earth

Buried-lakes story wins top award

Some readers may be unaware of our sister publication, Science News for Kids, a weekly online magazine for middle-school readers. This morning, we learned that one of the site’s feature stories — Where Rivers Run Uphill — won this year’s top science journalism award for reporting news for children.

Earth

Asteroid impact could have stirred the ocean

Model offers one explanation for sudden change in deep-ocean chemistry almost 2 billion years ago.

Climate

Guarded optimism on Copenhagen climate talks

Negotiators representing 181 nations completed their final prep work in Barcelona, Spain, last Friday, on a new climate treaty — one that they hope to build a month from now at a major conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. But at least one scientist worries that what comes out of the Copenhagen deliberations may not have sufficient coordination and strength to meet the challenges that Earth’s climate has begun throwing at us.

Health & Medicine

Vinegar: Label lead-tainting data

Under California’s Proposition 65 law, products containing chemicals that may cause cancer, birth defects or reproductive toxicity must carry a warning label at their point of sale. Among such products: pricy balsamic and red-wine vinegars that contain lead. At least some California groceries apparently have taken a conservative approach and post labels suggesting all such vinegars are dangerously tainted. Although they aren't.

Paleontology

Pollination in the pre-flower-power era

Scorpionflies with long-reaching mouthparts may have helped plants procreate long before blossoms evolved.

Earth

Nanoparticles’ indirect threat to DNA

Tiny metal nanoparticles can damage DNA, essentially by triggering toxic gossip.

Earth

Small earthquakes may not predict larger ones

Quakes far from tectonic plate boundaries may simply be aftershocks of ancient temblors.

Climate

Kyoto climate treaty’s greenhouse ‘success’

There are 33 days until the opening of formal negotiations in Copenhagen on the next global climate-protection treaty. The hoped-for accord would take up where the current treaty leaves off. But to get some perspective on just where that is, a new United Nations report describes for negotiators and the public just how much the Kyoto Protocol has achieved. And real strides have been made in slowing the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions, thanks to many European nations (albeit with little help from North American ones or Japan).

Climate

Mount Kilimanjaro could soon be bald

The world-renowned ice caps could disappear by 2022, new research suggests.