Such safety testing has never been done on the active ingredients in sunscreen, because those chemicals were approved decades ago, before anyone suspected they could be absorbed into the body. Her team found that it took only a few hours after the application of sunscreen for the photoprotective chemicals to infiltrate the bloodstream and shoot up to concentrations above the FDA’s toxicology threshold that triggers further safety testing. When new research emerged in the late ’90s and early 2000s suggesting that UV-blocking ingredients in chemical-based sunscreens could be absorbed into the human body, the agency began to ask any companies bringing new molecules to market to include such data in their safety studies.

eyecrave/Vetta/Getty Images

hide caption

toggle caption

eyecrave/Vetta/Getty Images

Even if a genetic test could reliably predict obesity risk, would people make effective use of the information? In fact, researchers have worried that when people learn that they are at high genetic risk for diseases like obesity, people would become fatalistic and stop trying to change their behaviors. It’s also possible that a careful probe of the genes – rather than the abstract risk score – could identify genetic variants that actually reduce a person’s risk of obesity.

If we allow for future evolution, then it is possible that humans might develop different types of color sensors in their visual systems and new types of processing to allow them to experience new color perceptions. Therefore, while new techniques for producing stimuli that evoke color sensations will certainly be developed (e.g. today’s televisions easily produce stimuli that the televisions of my childhood could not muster), color is ultimately a perception and limited to the capabilities of the human visual system. “If we allow for future evolution, then it is possible that humans might develop different types of color sensors in their visual systems and new types of processing to allow them to experience new color perceptions.”

In the tract of land where Mary Hampton lives, the risk of cancer from air toxicity is 50 times the national average. For the next year, the Guardian will be reporting from Reserve and elsewhere in Cancer Alley on the battle the residents are waging for clean air. Routinely, chloroprene emissions were dozens of times above the EPA’s guidance, suggesting residents living close to the plant had been constantly exposed for decades.

My dad was unconscious in the hospital and on a feeding tube for a few days before a nurse pulled me aside and said, “nobody has talked to you yet about his condition?” “No” “Your dad is considered in end stage care”. So glad of all the doctors we’d seen, it was a nurse who had the guts and decency to confirm that my dad was dying.

Years ago, Fontanini and his team found direct neural evidence of this speedup effect in the gustatory cortex, the part of the brain responsible for taste perception. Fontanini, La Camera and their postdoctoral fellow Luca Mazzucato (now at the University of Oregon) found that the same network structure was fundamental for recreating the effects of expectation, too. The clusters alone “capture many, many features of the gustatory cortex,” Fontanini said: “the spontaneous activity, the patterns of response to taste, the expectation effect.”

In fact, the 99-million-year-old specimen is so unusual that it necessitated the creation of an entirely new suborder in the current tree of millipede classification, Pavel Stoev, a researcher at Bulgaria’s National Museum of Natural History and the study’s lead author, said in a statement. For context, the small but mighty field of millipede research has only seen a handful of new suborders established over the past 50 years. “In the past few years, nearly all of the 16 living orders of millipedes have been identified in this 99-million-year-old amber,” the fossil arthropod expert Greg Edgecombe of the Natural History Museum in London said in a comment.

Lawns do provide some benefits: Green spaces help reduce the urban heat island effect. They can help restore groundwater and reduce urban flooding, and because they’re plants, they help pull a small amount of carbon dioxide out of the air. But, on balance, lawns are awful for the planet.

Lawns do provide some benefits: Green spaces help reduce the urban heat island effect. They can help restore groundwater and reduce urban flooding, and because they’re plants, they help pull a small amount of carbon dioxide out of the air. But, on balance, lawns are awful for the planet.

Based on the rate at which cosmic rays enter the solar system, the estimated strength of the sun’s magnetic field, the density of its atmosphere, and other factors, Seckel and colleagues calculated the mirroring process to be roughly 1 percent efficient. During solar minimum, more cosmic rays can reach the strong magnetic field near the sun’s surface and get mirrored, instead of being deflected prematurely by the turbulent tangle of field lines that pervades the inner solar system at other times. Whether or not cosmic rays account for the entire gamma-ray signal, Joe Giacalone, a heliospheric physicist at the University of Arizona, says the signal “is probably telling us something very fundamental about the magnetic structure of the sun.”