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Record levels of synthetic fragrances from everyday cleaning, deodorising and beauty products have been found in the breast milk of American women. Kurunthachalam Kannan from New York state's Department of Health and his colleagues found that levels of synthetic musks in breast milk from 39 women were five times those found in European women nearly a decade ago.

EDWARDS AFB - Searching for a means of reducing dependence on foreign oil, the Air Force is testing a synthetic fuel for its aircraft. The fuel could be a replacement for the JP-8 aviation fuel currently in use. Already tested by the Air Force Research Laboratory and in ground tests using an aircraft engine unattached to an airplane, the fuel will be put to the test at Edwards Air Force Base this month. "Now what we're going to do is take the next step and fly this," said Col. Arnie Bunch, commander of the 412th Test Wing. The flight tests...

Plastic toys may have subtle effects on the male reproductive system, as chemicals found in products ranging from plastics to cosmetics may slowly reduce testosterone production in newborn boys, a new study has found. Danish paediatric endocrinologist Professor Niels Skakkebfk, of the Rigs hospitalet in Copenhagen, and team report their study of newborn exposure to phthalates in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. "It gives a small piece of information that the newborn testis may be fragile to such toxins," Skakkebfk, was quoted by ABC Online, as saying. "Whether the effects will persist we can't tell but we were quite surprised...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building. Frank Clewer, who was wearing a woollen shirt and a synthetic nylon jacket, was oblivious to the growing electrical current that was building up as his clothes rubbed together. When he walked into a building in the country town of Warrnambool in the southern state of Victoria on Thursday, the electrical charge ignited the carpet. "It sounded almost like a firecracker", Clewer told Australian...

Time to deal with Cubism and its development. For those who are really intense about all this, there is an excellent book from which many of today’s ideas come from. It’s edited by William Rubin (former curator of the Museum of Modern Art) and is called Cezanne: The Late Work. It’s the essay on Cezannism and the beginnings of Cubism that opened my eyes to how it was not Picasso, but his buddy Georges Braque, who really did the first cubist paintings. Surprised? I think most of the art world was surprised at that and most of them probably still...

YOU might think Norman Packard is playing God. Or you might see him as the ultimate entrepreneur. As founder and CEO of Venice-based company ProtoLife, Packard is one of the leaders of an ambitious project that has in its sights the lofty goal of life itself. His team is attempting what no one else has done before: to create a new form of living being from non-living chemicals in the lab. Breathing the spark of life into inanimate matter was once regarded as a divine prerogative. But now several serious and well-funded research groups are working hard on doing it...

New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) has long been rumored as desperately seeking the democratic nomination for president in 2008. And while many political observers fully expect the power hungry former First Lady to hit the campaign trail within only a few months of being re-elected as a US Senator in 2006, US News & World report claims to have a confirmation of sorts. From USNews.Com's Washington Whispers: Hillary's in… You don't have to take it from us about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton 's desire to run for president. Her brothers, Hugh and Tony Rodham, say it's true. Friends...

-- Researchers synthesize gem-sized diamonds of natural colour and exceptional hardness using Chemical Vapour Deposition. -- WITH U.S. GOVERNMENT DEBT now topping US$7 trillion (about US$100,000 for each family of four), and interest rates at historic lows, new life is beginning to breathe through the Canadian resource sector. One sign of this renewed vigor is a sudden surge in prospecting claims being staked throughout vast tracts of the Canadian Arctic. Over 1,500 new permits have been issued this year for Nunavut alone, compared to 190 last year. And according to the Nunavut Mining Recorder’s Office in Iqualuit, the largest number...

Ageless athlete may not be far offPenn's research into a synthetic gene has wide implications for sports.By Frank FitzpatrickInquirer Staff WriterYou know all those steroid-laced sluggers, blood-doped swimmers, and hormonally enhanced weightlifters who people worry are ruining sports?They're just minor-league fears.The real nightmare is lurking inside tiny cages in a University of Pennsylvania basement.There, genetically engineered mice and rats, some of them the equivalent of 80-year-old humans, display rippling, well-toned muscles that neither aging nor a lack of exercise can diminish.Injected only once with a synthetic gene created by researchers in Penn's physiology department, these ripped rodents are as much...