Consumers who switched from polycarbonate-plastic water bottles to metal ones in hopes of avoiding the risk that bisphenol A will leach into their beverages aren’t necessarily any better off, a new study finds. Some metal water bottles leach even more BPA — an estrogen-mimicking pollutant — than do ones made from the now-pariah plastic. Read the full story.
Archive for Science
Metal Water Bottles May Leach BPA
Chimp Recognizes Human Words
Panzee doesn’t talk, but she knows a word when she hears one — even if it’s emitted by a computer with a synthetic speech impediment. That’s not too shabby for a chimpanzee. Raised to recognize 128 spoken words by pointing to corresponding symbols, Panzee perceives acoustically distorted words about as well as people do, say psychology graduate student Lisa Heimbauer of Georgia State University in Atlanta and her colleagues. Panzee thus challenges the argument that only people can recognize highly distorted words, thanks to brains tuned to speech sounds. Read the full story.
Greenland Ice in Danger of Thaw
Scientists have uncovered a potentially potent risk to Greenland’s ice sheets during the next century and beyond: rapidly warming deep water. The subsurface ocean off Greenland is now expected to warm at roughly double the rate that is projected for such waters globally, including off the coast of Antarctica.
Alzheimer’s Has a Genetic Component
The high-risk version of a gene associated with Alzheimer’s disease hinders the brain’s ability to clear out a troublesome protein, a new study finds. Researchers have known that people who carry the e4 version of the gene APOE are at higher risk for Alzheimer’s disease and more likely to have cell-killing plaques in their brains than people who have the e3 or e2 versions. But it hasn’t been clear whether people with the e4 version made more of the plaque protein — called amyloid-beta — or if the stuff just stuck around in their brains longer. Read the full story.
Nobel Scientist Calls for Population Control
A 93-year-old Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine received a standing ovation from hundreds of scientists June 30 at the end of a speech in which he urged the world’s young people to take measures to control runaway population growth in order to resolve related ills that have resulted from humans’ remarkable evolutionary success as a species.
Oil is Needed to Create Greener Energy
The world is waiting for a clean revolution, a shift away from the greenhouse gas-emitting, mountain-leveling, air-polluting, fossil-fuel burning way of life. The world may have to wait a long time if past energy transitions are anything to go by, according to environmental scientist Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba—especially since fossil fuel energy is so cheap. “Energy is dirt cheap. Oil is cheaper than any mineral you can buy,” Smil noted. “The percent of disposable income devoted to energy is about 10 percent.” Read the full story.
Gene Therapy May Offer Hope for Genetic Diseases
A new type of gene therapy allows scientists to fix DNA defects directly. That’s a potentially revolutionary improvement on present gene therapy techniques, which introduce working genes to cells — but not into the genetic library itself. Working with newborn mice, researchers led by Katherine High at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia found that molecular editors called zinc finger nucleases can correct a genetic mutation that leads to the blood-clotting disorder hemophilia. Fixing a mistake in the gene for blood coagulation factor IX allowed the animals to make about 3 percent to 7 percent of normal levels of the protein, High and her colleagues report online June 26 in Nature. Even such modest increases are therapeutically meaningful, High says. People who make about 5 percent of normal levels of the clotting factor have mild cases of hemophilia. Read the full story.
Global Diabetes Rates Climb
Diabetes incidence has been climbing precipitously in the developed world along with rises in obesity rates and dietary and other lifestyle changes. But a massive new study finds that the rest of the global population has not been immune to these changes. Globally, the rate of diabetes has more than doubled in the past three decades. Read the full story.
Oceans Appear to Be in Trouble
Most people know that wild fisheries are dwindling, and we might know that low-oxygen aquatic dead zones are blooming around the planet’s most crowded coasts. But the oceans appear to be undergoing fundamental changes — many of them for the worse — that we can barely understand, in part because we barely understand that vast blue territory that covers 70% of the globe. That’s the conclusion of a surprising new report issued by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), a global panel of marine experts that met this year at Oxford University to examine the latest science on ocean health. That health, they found, is not good. According to the authors, we are “at high risk for entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.” It’s not just about overfishing or marine pollution or even climate change. It’s all of those destructive factors working cumulatively and occurring much more rapidly than scientists had expected. “The findings are shocking,” says Alex Rogers, the scientific director of IPSO. “We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, our children’s and generations beyond that.” Read the full story.
Students Design Efficient Greener Technology
For more than 150 years New York City’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (more commonly called The Cooper Union) has finished its school years with an annual event showcasing student projects in the areas of art, architecture and engineering. Of the more than 300 projects on display this year were several inventions designed and built by students demonstrating a firm grasp of what society will want and need from technology moving forward. Such inventions included a bicycle that features a flywheel, a wave energy converter and a mobile mini-robot. Read the full story.