Talking About Stuff, with Mike and Christiana

No time to explain, it can be anything! Just leave it in a comment!

Thanks!

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The Independent Online asks "How Toxic is your bathroom?"

On average, we each use nine personal care products a day containing 126 different ingredients. Such "safety" testing as exists looks for reactions, such as skin redness, rashes or stinging, but does not investigate potential long-term problems for either humans or the environment. Yet the chemicals that go into products such as shampoos and hand creams are not trace contaminants. They are the basic ingredients.

Absorbed into the body, they can be stored in fatty tissue or organs such as the liver, kidney, reproductive organs and brain. Cosmetics companies complain of unfounded hysteria, but scientists are finding industrial plasticisers such as phthalates in urine, preservatives known as parabens in breast-tumour tissue, and antibacterials such as Triclosan and fragrance chemicals like the hormone-disrupting musk xylene in human breast milk. Medical research is proving that fragrances can trigger asthma; that the detergents in shampoos can damage eye tissue; and that hair-dye chemicals can cause bladder cancer and lymphoma. An even greater number of substances in personal care products are suspected to present potential risks to human health from this known effect on animals.

The discussion regarding the unknown consequences of the "cocktail effect" made me think of "The Incredible Shrinking Woman" where exposure to Galaxy Glue on top of shampoo, laundry detergent, orange juice, etc. makes Lily Tomlin shrink to miniature proportions.

Say, maybe they could market it for weight loss!

Seriously though, this is a perfect example of the problems that can be caused by a lack of animal testing! As horrible as animal testing can be, is it really worse than not testing at all? Or testing on people, who will almost exclusively be poor people participating for the money? *shrug* It's a difficult problem.

Oh, and this month is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but even though it's not typically a problem getting men to be breast aware, they may be looking in the wrong places!

The cancer fund's Amanda Mullins says while men make up a very small percentage of new patients each year, they have to understand that it can happen to them. "Breast cancer can occur in men as well, men at any age can develop breast cancer... So male breast cancer makes up less than 1 per cent of all cases of breast cancer, but we still very much encourage men to be breast aware."

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There is an excellent editorial by Michael Balter, who writes for Science at his website, and an excellent debate about it at Dean's World.

I won't elaborate in detail here, because the debate in the Dean's World Comments pretty much covers everything that I would say.

The gist of it, however, is that the adamant insistence that Intelligent Design be left out of classrooms altogether may well do more harm than good to the proponents of evolutionary theory, by bypassing the actual scientific process by which the theory was developed.

My take has been for a long time that I agree with Intelligent Design, but that it isn't science. That said, the way Evolution is often taught these days isn't science either. It is dogmatic "facts" presented as though science requires unquestioning blind belief in whatever your teacher tells you.

Anyway, check out the comments. Great stuff.

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Beer mat knows when it's refill time

Two German students have created a device that will stop beer lovers having to get out of their seats for a refill.

The "smart" beer mat, created by Matthias Hahnen and Robert Doerr from Saarland University in Saarbruecken, southwest Germany, can sense when a glass is nearly empty, sending an alert to a central computer behind the bar so waiters know there are thirsty customers.

Leave it to those crafty Germans to streamline the beer-drinking experience with advanced technology.

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