The number of industrial chemicals in widespread use recognized to cause childhood brain impairments has more than doubled since 2006, scientists said Friday.

Researchers at the Mount Sinai Hospital and Harvard School of Public Health cited six broad groups of toxins in 2006 as having a direct impact on human brain development. Now, they have identified another six, which include metals and inorganic compounds, pesticides and dangerous solvents.

Based on their examination of chemicals that are widely used — but untested for human safety — the scientists concluded that fetal and early childhood exposures have grown into a silent pandemic of neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia and even losses in IQ points.

Some of the brain-damaging compounds, they say, waft through the air of countless homes as house dust.

“These are chemicals that Americans are exposed to on a regular basis,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, chairman of preventive medicine at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine in Manhattan and director of the Children’s Environmental Health Center at the hospital.

In the first study Landrigan and colleagues named arsenic, arsenic-based compounds, lead, methylmercury, toluene and polychlorinated biphenyls — PCBs — as key brain-damaging culprits. That list was culled from a longer […]

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Washington State University’s agriculture research and extension facility in Mount Vernon, about an hour due north along the Puget Sound from Seattle, looks at first glance like any recently built academic edifice: that is to say, boring and austere. On the outside, it’s surrounded by test plots of wheat and other grains, as well as greenhouses, shrouded in the Pacific Northwest’s classic gray skies and mist. Inside, professors and grad students shuffle through the long halls, passing quiet offices and labs.

Yet one of those labs is not like the others-or any other that I know of, for that matter. When you look down the length of the room from the back wall, you see two distinct chambers, separated by long, adjoining tables: gleaming chunks of impressive-looking machinery to the left; flour sacks, mixing bowls, a large, multileveled oven to the right. And in place of the vaguely chemical smell of most university labs, you get the rich, toasty aroma of fresh-baked bread.

Mounted on the outer edge of the short wall that divides the two tables, there’s an image of a human brain, with its two halves. “Aha, that symbolizes the lab,” says lab staffer Jonathan McDowell. The left side is […]

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Many of these ingredients are banned in Europe, but here in the good old USA you’ll find them on your dinner plate.
Two years ago, the nation’s collective stomach churned when people learned they were eating a meat product called “pink slime.” Lean, finely textured beef as the industry wanted to call it, was meat scraps that were once earmarked for pet food repurposed for the human dinner table, especially the National School Lunch Program. While the product looked like human intestines, what caused the national revulsion was that pink slime was treated with puffs of ammonia to kill the bacterium E. coli. Yum.

Soon after the hoopla began, the main supplier of pink slime, Beef Products, Inc., announced it was closing its production facilities. But since then, other products the public doesn’t know it’s consuming or want to consume have surfaced, and the manufacturers have not necessarily been as forthcoming. There’s a good chance you are eating some of the following products and byproducts.

1. Azodicarbonamide in Bread

Until a month ago, few had heard of this “dough conditioner,” intended to provide strength and improve elasticity. Like pink slime, it was azodicarbonamide’s industrial overtones that drove indignation-it’s “the same […]

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Those who believe some people face eternal torment in the afterlife tend to be less satisfied with their current life and less happy, according to a new study published in PLoS One.

‘Although religiosity is consistently tied to greater well-being, little research has examined which elements of religious belief offer mood benefits, which do not, and which may in fact be detrimental,” Azim F. Shariff of the University of Oregon and Lara B. Aknin of the Simon Fraser University in Canada wrote in their study.

The researchers first analyzed data from the Gallup World Poll, World Values Survey, and European Values Survey to compare the ‘differences in subjective well-being between 63 countries against national rates of Heaven and Hell beliefs.” These international surveys were conducted on hundreds of thousands of individuals, and allowed the researchers to account for potentially confounding variables like religious attendance, GDP per capita, and unemployment.

Shariff and Aknin found that both the belief in Heaven and the belief in Hell were significant, but divergent, predictors of happiness at the national level. Countries that had higher rates of happiness had lower rates of belief in Hell and higher rates of belief in Heaven.

In a second study, the researchers again used […]

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Scholar Reza Aslan outlines how Jesus’ crucifixion and his Judaism reflect on who he was and how the Gospels were not meant to be read as a biography. The author of Zealot also says many people misinterpret the phrase “Son of God” as a description instead of a title.

Reza Aslan is a religious scholar, a professor of creative writing and a journalist. In another age, he would have been called a renaissance man.

In fact Aslan’s range of knowledge and his self-confidence have been used by some of his detractors to challenge his account of the historical Jesus in Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. However, his critics generally target Aslan’s credentials on the basis of his background (he is an interdisciplinary academic with multiple degrees and a Muslim) rather than taking issue with the contents of Zealot.

Zealot infuses Jerusalem and Palestine at the time of Christ’s life with a vividness and detail that reveals a historical cauldron in which radical Jews challenged both the authority of the Roman Empire and established Jewish leaders who cooperated with Rome. Aslan’s account of the historical Jesus moves back and forth between what was his likely life versus how he is […]

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