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Discard scratched baby bottles and sippy cups. Do not put hot liquids into plastic containers for infants. Most importantly, breast-feed infants if at all possible. These are among the recommendations released Friday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in response to growing concerns over bisphenol A (BPA), an ingredient found in many common plastics used in consumer packaging and containers, including infant formula can liners. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration “is not saying that it’s unsafe to use a baby bottle with BPA,” Josh Sharfstein, FDA principal deputy commissioner explained in a conference call with reporters....

For the past two decades scientists have been attempting to harness the peculiarities of the microscopic quantum world to achieve leaps in information processing and communication ability. By exploiting several features of physics at the universe’s smallest scales—that electrons are both particles and waves, that an object can be in many places at once and that two particles can maintain an eerie instantaneous connection even when separated by vast distances—quantum machines could make previously unthinkable computing, communication and measurement tasks trivial....

Cockroaches typically elicit revulsion, not relief. Yet what if you were trapped in a collapsed building, and rescuers had sent in a cockroach to find you? A team of researchers has harnessed the cockroach’s uncanny survivability in ways that could help humans in the wake of disasters. The scientists direct the insects’ movements by sending wireless pulses to the roaches’ antennae. Roaches use their antennae as touch sensors, so stimulating one makes a roach think there is an obstacle in its path, and it moves in the opposite direction....

Gianluca Stringhini spends his days in some of the shadier corners of the internet. As a cybercrime researcher at University College London, he has studied ransomware, online-dating scams and money laundering. In May, his team published two papers exploring how hate speech and fake news are spread around the Internet, focusing on the notorious but popular 4chan message boards. In a conference-proceedings paper, the researchers analysed 8 million posts on 4chan’s /pol/ (‘politically incorrect’) board, and traced how its users ‘raid’ other websites by posting inflammatory comments1....

You know better than to judge a book by its cover. Sizing up a person by his or her shoes, however, might at times be justified. A new study found that people deduce certain characteristics of strangers with better-than-chance accuracy based solely on their footwear. One group of study participants completed a personality survey and provided pictures of the shoes they wear most frequently. A second group then viewed the pictures and rated the shoes’ owners on various characteristics....

In my eighth-grade science class, our teacher explained to us the Doppler effect: that objects moving away from us would display stretched-out sound or light waves, whereas objects moving toward us would show crunched-up sound or light waves. The instructor cited as an example that astronomers could determine whether cosmological objects are moving toward or away from Earth depending on if their light waves were stretched out (redshifted for longer wavelengths) or were shorter wavelengths (blueshifted)....

The reigning queen of Belfast, Northern Ireland, is the “Baroness” Titti Von Tramp, a deeply bronzed, thoroughly waxed and statuesque figure approaching seven feet tall in stiletto heels, wearing tinted couture glasses and crowned with a perfect platinum mane. On any given night, you can find the bosomy Von Tramp at one of the local nightclubs, pursing her strawberry-colored lips in a photo-op for one of her many fans or perhaps making an Ulster businessman turn bright red by deviously running one long, manly finger down the man’s cheek and judging, “That’s a good year....

Seven years ago, the U.S. exported its crude oil to just one country—Canada. This year, 22 countries received American crude oil, marking a more than 1,000 percent increase in U.S. oil exports since 2009, according to U.S. Department of Energy data released this week. Since Congress lifted restrictions on American oil exports a year ago, more and more U.S. crude oil has been streaming onto the global oil market to supply the world’s growing demand....

The video images may be tiny, grainy, dark and fleeting, but many looking at them see something glorious: evidence that at least one ivory-billed woodpecker–an 18- to 20-inch-tall bird with a wingspan of some 30 inches, last seen in the U.S. in 1944–is alive in the bottomland forest of eastern Arkansas. After a year of traipsing and canoeing through the Big Woods and its bayous, many inconclusive recordings of ivory-bill-like calls, seven good sightings and one fortuitous videotaping, scientists and conservationists announced in April that the bird was not extinct after all....

How does one protect elephants from poachers in an African reserve the size of a small country? This daunting task typically falls to park rangers who may spend weeks patrolling the bush on foot, sometimes lacking basic gear such as radios, tents or even socks. They are largely losing to ivory poachers, as attested by the latest available data on Africa’s two species of elephant, both threatened: savanna elephant populations fell 30 percent between 2007 and 2014, and those of forest elephants plummeted by 62 percent between 2002 and 2011....

The last time a hurricane was bearing down on the Hawaiian Islands, Steven Spielberg was on Kauai finishing filming of the now iconic movie “Jurassic Park” when Hurricane Iniki hit the island as a Category 4 storm. Now — 22 years later — not one, but an unprecedented two hurricanes are making a beeline for the island chain and residents are preparing for a threat they rarely face. Hurricane Iselle, which retained hurricane strength after showing signs of weakening, is expected to make landfall as a Category 1 on the Big Island on Thursday night, bringing with it strong winds and torrential rains....

On September 18 Orianna Carvalho woke up at 3 A.M. with a sore throat and the sniffles. At first, she thought her symptoms were caused by allergies. But as the minutes ticked by, she began to worry they were caused by COVID-19. The following morning, Carvalho got tested at the University of Rhode Island, where she is a first-year doctoral student. Over the next few hours she developed a fever, and the catastrophizing began in earnest....

CAIRO (Reuters) - An Egyptian woman and child died of H5N1 bird flu, the health ministry said on Monday, the fourth and fifth persons to die of the illness in the country this year. The six-year-old child died in Minya province on Monday evening, after a 47-year-old woman succumbed to the disease in Assiut province earlier in the day, ministry spokesman Hossam Abdel Ghaffar said. Both Assiut and Minya provinces are rural areas that have seen a number of bird flu cases in the past year....

Each year hundreds of the best and brightest researchers gather in Lindau, Germany, for the Nobel Laureate Meeting. There, the newest generation of scientists mingles with Nobel Prize winners and discusses their work and ideas. The 2013 meeting is dedicated to chemistry and will involve young researchers from 78 different countries. In anticipation of the event, which will take place from June 30 through July 5, we are highlighting a group of attendees under 30 who represent the future of chemistry....

There is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease. Although a few drugs manage temporarily certain cognitive symptoms of the illness, none can stop or meaningfully slow its progression. “We really don’t have much to offer people,” says Shannon Macauley, a neuroscientist at Wake Forest School of Medicine. Virtually all new treatments have failed in clinical trials. But new research is looking beyond drugs to see what relief might come from a simple LED light and a speaker....

A lot of people want to read something they’ll barely understand. The University of Cambridge made famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking’s 1966 doctoral thesis freely available to the public today (Oct. 23), and demand for the document has been so intense that it crashed the download website. As of this afternoon, that website was still down. Hawking’s 134-page thesis, “Properties of Expanding Universes,” was already the most-requested item in Cambridge’s open-access repository, known as Apollo, university officials said in a statement....

U.S. EPA cast aside a 1,217-page staff analysis to cite automaker arguments in its official declaration to loosen fuel economy rules. The agency pointed to industry concerns about motorist safety, technology lapses and the unpopularity of cleaner cars in its justification for rolling back Obama-era standards meant to make passenger vehicles go 54 miles on a gallon of gas by 2025. (Real-world estimates put that number at 36 mpg.) Those arguments, which echo the concerns of the auto industry and its allies, were often challenged for being inaccurate by agency specialists under the past administration and by environmentalists....

Most galaxies have a supermassive black hole lurking at their centers, but a galaxy 10.5 billion light-years away looks like it might have two—and the pair may be set to crash together in just 21 years. If the observations are confirmed, the duo would be the closest known set of binary black holes, and their imminent collision would offer scientists an unprecedented chance to watch extreme physics in action. [Video: When Black Holes Collide] The potential black holes are impossible to glimpse directly....

In April, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary did something unusual. For the previous 20 years, they had issued quarterly updates to announce new words and meanings selected for inclusion. These updates have typically been made available in March, June, September and December. In the late spring, however, and again in July, the dictionary’s editors released special updates, citing a need to document the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the English language....

WAYCROSS, Ga.—Pawn shops, diners, churches and pine trees. Hundreds of thousands of pine trees. This is the view from U.S. Route 85, which runs from the coast across the Southern ridge of Georgia. In recent years, though, something else has sprouted up: billboards advertising upcoming wood pellet plants. They carry the promise of steady jobs in a recession-racked economy. In 2008, then-Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue called this region the “bioenergy corridor of the nation....