The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics

Each night at dinnertime, a familiar ritual played out in Michael Green's home: He'd slide a stainless steel sippy cup across the table to his two-year-old daughter, Juliette, and she'd howl for the pink plastic one. Often, Green gave in. But he had a nagging feeling. As an environmental-health advocate, he had fought to rid sippy cups and baby bottles of the common plastic additive bisphenol A (BPA), which mimics the hormone estrogen and has been linked to a long list of serious health problems. Juliette's sippy cup was made from a new generation of BPA-free plastics, but Green, who runs the Oakland, California-based Center for Environmental Health, had come across research suggesting some of these contained synthetic estrogens, too.

He pondered these findings as the center prepared for its anniversary celebration in October 2011. That evening, Green, a slight man with scruffy blond hair and pale-blue eyes, took the stage and set Juliette's sippy cups on the podium. He recounted their nightly standoffs. "When she wins…every time I worry about what are the health impacts of the chemicals leaching out of that sippy cup," he said, before listing some of the problems linked to those chemicals—cancer, diabetes, obesity. To help solve the riddle, he said, his organization planned to test BPA-free sippy cups for estrogenlike chemicals.

The center shipped Juliette's plastic cup, along with 17 others purchased from Target, Walmart, and Babies R Us, to CertiChem, a lab in Austin, Texas. More than a quarter—including Juliette's—came back positive for estrogenic activity. These results mirrored the lab's findings in its broader National Institutes of Health-funded research on BPA-free plastics. CertiChem and its founder, George Bittner, who is also a professor of neurobiology at the University of Texas-Austin, had recently coauthored a paper in the NIH journal Environmental Health Perspectives. It reported that "almost all" commercially available plastics that were tested leached synthetic estrogens—even when they weren't exposed to conditions known to unlock potentially harmful chemicals, such as the heat of a microwave, the steam of a dishwasher, or the sun's ultraviolet rays. According to Bittner's research, some BPA-free products actually released synthetic estrogens that were more potent than BPA.

Estrogen plays a key role in everything from bone growth to ovulation to heart function. Too much or too little, particularly in utero or during early childhood, can alter brain and organ development, leading to disease later in life. Elevated estrogen levels generally increase a woman's risk of breast cancer.

Estrogenic chemicals found in many common products have been linked to a litany of problems in humans and animals. According to one study, the pesticide atrazine can turn male frogs female. DES, which was once prescribed to prevent miscarriages, caused obesity, rare vaginal tumors, infertility, and testicular growths among those exposed in utero. Scientists have tied BPA to ailments including asthma, cancer, infertility, low sperm count, genital deformity, heart disease, liver problems, and ADHD. "Pick a disease, literally pick a disease," says Frederick vom Saal, a biology professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia who studies BPA.

BPA exploded into the headlines in 2008, when stories about "toxic baby bottles" and "poison" packaging became ubiquitous. Good Morning America issued a "consumer alert." The New York Times urged Congress to ban BPA in baby products. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) warned in the Huffington Post that "millions of infants are exposed to dangerous chemicals hiding in plain view." Concerned parents purged their pantries of plastic containers, and retailers such as Walmart and Babies R Us started pulling bottles and sippy cups from shelves. Bills banning BPA in infant care items began to crop up in states around the country.

Today many plastic products, from sippy cups and blenders to Tupperware containers, are marketed as BPA-free. But Bittner's findings—some of which have been confirmed by other scientists—suggest that many of these alternatives share the qualities that make BPA so potentially harmful.

by Mariah Blake, Mother Jones |  Read more:

Image: Evan Kafka 

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

by Roz Chast, New Yorker |  Read more:
Images: Roz Chast

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Polynesian Seafarers Discovered America Long Before Europeans, says DNA Study

The prevailing theory about the "rediscovery" of the American continents used to be such a simple tale. Most people are familiar with it: In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Then that theory was complicated when, in 1960, archaeologists discovered a site in Canada's Newfoundland, called L'Anse aux Meadows, which proved that Norse explorers likely beat Columbus to the punch by about 500 years.

Now startling new DNA evidence promises to complicate the story even more. It turns out that it was not Columbus or the Norse — or any Europeans at all — who first rediscovered the Americas. It was actually the Polynesians.

All modern Polynesian peoples can trace their origins back to a sea-migrating Austronesian people who were the first humans to discover and populate most of the Pacific islands, including lands as far-reaching as Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island. Despite the Polynesians' incredible sea-faring ability, however, few theorists have been willing to say that Polynesians could have made it as far east as the Americas. That is, until now.

Clues about the migration patterns of the early Polynesians have been revealed thanks to a new DNA analysis performed on a prolific Polynesian crop: the sweet potato, according to Nature. The origin of the sweet potato in Polynesia has long been a mystery, since the crop was first domesticated in the Andes of South America about 8,000 years ago, and it couldn't have spread to other parts of the world until contact was made. In other words, if Europeans were indeed the first to make contact with the Americas between 500 and 1,000 years ago, then the sweet potato shouldn't be found anywhere else in the world until then.

The extensive DNA study looked at genetic samples taken from modern sweet potatoes from around the world and historical specimens kept in herbarium collections. Remarkably, the herbarium specimens included plants collected during Capt. James Cook’s 1769 visits to New Zealand and the Society Islands. The findings confirmed that sweet potatoes in Polynesia were part of a distinct lineage that were already present in the area when European voyagers introduced different lines elsewhere. In other words, sweet potatoes made it out of America before European contact.

The question remains: How else could Polynesians have gotten their hands on sweet potatoes prior to European contact, if not by traveling to America themselves?

by Bryan Nelson, MNN |  Read more:

Image: Wiki Commons

Nicoletta Branco
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Everybody's Doing It

There used to be order. Not being cool in a certain way meant rejection by the pack. The flock. No one took a shot at the popular kids. When someone did try to mock teenage royalty, everyone else laughed at them. “Peer pressure no longer exists because peers no longer exist” a 15-year-old girl told me recently. She wasn’t trying to make some pithy adolescent statement about how there isn’t any “meaning” in “anything”—no nihilistic or solipsistic or ironic tendencies intended—she meant it literally. 

Peers are now just media filters, she said. Collectors. Separated from their physical forms. Social pressure no longer comes from groups made up of singular individuals confined to the unforgiving collective architecture of a specific school. Instead, the adoption of aesthetics, identities, and behaviors are filtered through countless nodes on various networks, digital manifestations of humans and nonhumans alike.

Advertising executives are your older siblings. Aging hipsters twice your age are your friends. The affectations of generations past are yours. Your music can be their music and their music can be your music. You have access to any set of tastes or styles and the theoretical ability to acquire and adopt them, to dress, listen, fuck, and/or ingest whatever you want. You no longer need a patient zero in your classroom. You don’t need the older kids to show you how to roll a joint. You can be the first and only to stop eating or the first to smoke up, or a few years later the first to decide not to smoke up and write black X’s on your hands and listen to hardcore. You can now discover straight edge on your browser and start a tumblr full of pictures of Ian Mackaye and bemoan how you didn’t grow up in the late ’80s. And you wouldn’t be alone. And yes, your “peers” trolling the hallways and cell towers might make fun of you for this or that. But they’ll go after you either way.

Now, unlike in the ’90s, being the dreamiest basketball player or having the right halter top from the mall pays no dividends; everyone is a target. Fair game for hatred in the schoolyard and ridicule on the wireless networks. No one is safe. The hierarchies still exist, and status still exists, but it’s almost taken the life of a game. An ingrained biological response to the harsh conditions of scholastic pseudo-imprisonment.

by Maxwell Neely-Cohen , TNI |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Dila Kaplan
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Christian Neuenscwhander
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The Ting Tings

This Bud's for You

[ed. Extraordinary look at a new commodity industry being born.]

Amiko Li
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Casa das Canoas, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil - Oscar Niemeyer (1952)
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Normcore

Sometime last summer I realized that, from behind, I could no longer tell if my fellow Soho pedestrians were art kids or middle-aged, middle-American tourists. Clad in stonewash jeans, fleece, and comfortable sneakers, both types looked like they might’ve just stepped off an R-train after shopping in Times Square. When I texted my friend Brad (an artist whose summer uniform consisted of Adidas barefoot trainers, mesh shorts and plain cotton tees) for his take on the latest urban camouflage, I got an immediate reply: “lol normcore.”

Normcore—it was funny, but it also effectively captured the self-aware, stylized blandness I’d been noticing. Brad’s source for the term was the trend forecasting collective (and fellow artists) K-Hole. They had been using it in a slightly different sense, not to describe a particular look but a general attitude: embracing sameness deliberately as a new way of being cool, rather than striving for “difference” or “authenticity.” In fashion, though, this manifests itself in ardently ordinary clothes. Mall clothes. Blank clothes. The kind of dad-brand non-style you might have once associated with Jerry Seinfeld, but transposed on a Cooper Union student with William Gibson glasses. (...)

Jeremy Lewis, the founder/editor of Garmento and a freelance stylist and fashion writer, calls normcore “one facet of a growing anti-fashion sentiment.” His personal style is (in the words of Andre Walker, a designer Lewis featured in the magazine’s last issue) “exhaustingly plain”—this winter, that’s meant a North Face fleece, khakis, and New Balances. Lewis says his “look of nothing” is about absolving oneself from fashion, “lest it mark you as a mindless sheep.”

“Fashion has become very overwhelming and popular,” Lewis explains. “Right now a lot of people use fashion as a means to buy rather than discover an identity and they end up obscured and defeated. I'm getting cues from people like Steve Jobs and Jerry Seinfeld. It's a very flat look, conspicuously unpretentious, maybe even endearingly awkward. It's a lot of cliché style taboos, but it's not the irony I love, it's rather practical and no-nonsense, which to me, right now, seems sexy. I like the idea that one doesn't need their clothes to make a statement.”

by Fiona Duncan, The Cut |  Read more:

Image: Novembre magazine

The Problem With Easy Technology

In the history of marketing, there’s a classic tale that centers on the humble cake mix. During the nineteen-fifties, there were differences of opinion over how “instant” powdered cake mixes should be, and, in particular, over whether adding an egg ought to be part of the process. The first cake mixes, invented in the nineteen-thirties, merely required water, and some people argued that this approach, the easiest, was best. But others thought bakers would want to do more. Urged on by marketing psychologists, Betty Crocker herself began to instruct housewives to “add water, and two of your own fresh eggs.”

The cake-mix debate may be dated, but its central question remains: Just how demanding do we want our technologies to be? It is a question faced by the designers of nearly every tool, from tablet computers to kitchen appliances. A dominant if often unexamined logic favors making everything as easy as possible. Innovators like Alan Kay and Steve Jobs are celebrated for making previously daunting technologies usable by anyone. It may be hard to argue with easy, yet, as the add-an-egg saga suggests, there’s something deeper going on here.

The choice between demanding and easy technologies may be crucial to what we have called technological evolution. We are, as I argued in my most recent piece in this series, self-evolving. We make ourselves into what we, as a species, will become, mainly through our choices as consumers. If you accept these premises, our choice of technological tools becomes all-important; by the logic of biological atrophy, our unused skills and capacities tend to melt away, like the tail of an ape. It may sound overly dramatic, but the use of demanding technologies may actually be important to the future of the human race.

Just what is a demanding technology? Three elements are defining: it is technology that takes time to master, whose usage is highly occupying, and whose operation includes some real risk of failure. By this measure, a piano is a demanding technology, as is a frying pan, a programming language, or a paintbrush. So-called convenience technologies, in contrast—like instant mashed potatoes or automatic transmissions—usually require little concentrated effort and yield predictable results.

There is much to be said for the convenience technologies that have remade human society over the past century. They often open up life’s pleasures to a wider range of people (downhill skiing, for example, can be exhausting without lifts). They also distribute technological power more widely: consider that, nowadays, you don’t need special skills to take pretty good photos, or to capture a video of police brutality. Nor should we neglect that promise first made to all Americans in the nineteen-thirties: freedom from a life of drudgery to focus on what we really care about. Life is hard enough; do we need to be churning our own butter? Convenience technologies promised more space in our lives for other things, like thought, reflection, and leisure.

That, at least, is the idea. But, even on its own terms, convenience technology has failed us.

by Tim Wu, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Hannah K. Lee

Here's What We Just Learned About Farting

Each and every day, Americans collectively fart between 2.5 and 6.3 billion times, unloading up to 466.7 million liters of gas into the atmosphere. Approximately 99% of an "anal gas evacuation" is composed of odorless gases, mostly hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane, along with smaller amounts of nitrogen and oxygen. The remaining 1% of compounds grant the fart its notorious scent. Hydrogen sulfide is the chief culprit.

A fart's life begins with food. After entering your mouth and traveling down the esophagus, a meal makes its way to the stomach to be digested and, soon after, the small intestine, where nutrients are absorbed. Some dregs, however, survive the acidic gauntlet and continue to the next leg of the journey: the large intestine. There, what began as a meal for you becomes a feast for resident bacteria. They ferment the leftover food, releasing gas in the process, gas which must be expelled.

Flatulence's omnipresence, smell, sound, and social stigma make it a frequently explored topic in popular culture. Men gathered around restaurant feasts of beer, buffalo wings, and nachos perform much of the experimentation and discussion. Scientists' contributions, while noteworthy, pale in comparison. Sure, they've calculated the average volume of a fart (between 5 and 375 millileters), identified two strains of bacteria to make beans "flatulence-free," and documented the causes of extreme flatulence, but they haven't characterized the magnificence and grandeur of a fart's flammability with anywhere near the precision of the common man equipped with a camera and a YouTube account.

With two new papers, one published in the journal Gut in June 2013, and the other just published to Neurogastroenterology and Motility, Spanish researcher Fernando Azpiroz takes the attention off of fart jokes (at least temporarily) and bolsters our scientific knowledge on passing gas.

Most recently, he tested how two different diets affected flatulence. For the longest time, experts have been recommending foods to reduce gassiness, but surprisingly, there actually hasn't been a study conducted that gauges how eating those foods affects the frequency of farting.

Until now, that is.

by Ross Pomeroy, RealClearScience |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock

linda vachon / tête de caboche, 27463
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Jeff Buckley feat. Elizabeth Fraser

The Great Crypto Stagecoach Robbery

[ed. See also: Mt. Gox Topples.]

Anyone holding Bitcoins—or pretty much any cryptocurrency, really—has taken a substantial hit in the last few months, with the exchange rate of dollars to Bitcoins dropping from a high of around $1200 last November to around $550 today. But it's possible that those whose Bitcoins were parked at the long-troubled Mt. Gox exchange have suffered a near-wipeout, or even a total one, in what may have been the catastrophic theft of some 744,000 Bitcoin from that exchange.

Mt. Gox was the first big Bitcoin exchange; as such it attracted the most attention, the most traffic, and the most trouble. It was hacked repeatedly because, at one time, it was simply where all the Bitcoins were. Most knowledgeable Bitcoin enthusiasts took off for more modern, more reliable exchanges long ago. (...)

Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles, who is apparently holed up at home in Tokyo with his cat, has since verified in an IRC chat that the document is "more or less" legitimate, though it was not prepared internally by his embattled firm. He says that he is still trying to save the company: "'Giving up' is not part of how I usually do things."

You could look at the Mt. Gox disaster this way: imagine that ordinary consumer banks had only just been invented five years ago, and they'd since exploded in popularity. All of a sudden, Bank of America's internal systems are alleged to have been broken all along and every penny that was held there is gone. The money in all the other banks is okay, seemingly—but now, the whole banking system looks very rocky and untrustworthy. How to trust any bank, if one of the biggest lost everything?

That's basically what has happened to Bitcoin over the last few weeks, since it became clear that Mt. Gox was having trouble processing transactions last November. (...)

There has been a temptation to mock the libertarians who make up a lot of Bitcoin's most passionate following, and to blame the unregulated joys of the free market for Bitcoin's current problems. But just take a look at the stock market, the startup world, the bankruptcy courts, the markets for distressed debt, the art market, the real estate market, and any number of other markets (sure, basically all of them) where hopeful neophytes ripe for the plucking and clever participants eager to benefit from insider knowledge, plus quite a lot of plain cheats, are not hard to find. The most surprising thing about the Mt. Gox episode so far might be the resilience of Bitcoin prices, which might have been expected to take a much larger tumble in the face of the disaster.

by Maria Bustillos, The Awl |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

An Unthinkably Modern Miracle

A cursory internet search revealed a world of theories and testimonials on how to negotiate medical bills, but all of the articles and listicles and forums effectively boiled down to two distinct approaches. The first and most obvious was to simply claim I couldn’t pay. So long as I could credibly explain the nature of my hardship, chances were good that the hospital would offer me a discount. The second approach was more aggressive and involved obtaining copies of the hospital’s billing forms. I would have more leverage if I could find a billing mistake or could pick at one of the more extreme charges. Just be warned, one website cautioned, hospitals won’t be very friendly about this.

I opted for the former strategy, dialing the 800 number on my bill. This connected me with a pleasant-sounding woman in what I realized was not a hospital office but a call center. Before I could say anything, she politely reiterated the active balance on my account.

“I’d like to discuss my options,” I said. “This surgery resulted in complications that prevented me from working for six weeks, and that’s been very difficult financially.”

“We’d be happy to help, Mr. Fischer. What we can offer you is an installment plan.”

“That’s great,” I said, trying to smile through the phone. “But I hoped we might be able to talk about a discount for prompt payment.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not authorized to offer that,” she said.

“Not a problem. Could I speak to your supervisor about the matter?”

“He’s not available, sir,” she said.

I asked her when he might be and she suggested I call back next week. So I did. And although I reached a different operator, I had the exact same conversation. This time I also asked for an itemized list of charges, which was a buzz-term I’d picked up from the medical negotiation how-tos.

“That should be what’s on your bill,” the second operator said.

“My bill only has category charges. I’m trying to get an itemized breakdown of what those are for.”

The operator said he’d send one out. What reached me several days later was an identical copy of my bill.

Additional research produced mention of a form called the UB-04. Evidently, this document was used by hospitals as the central manifest for billing my insurance provider. Get the UB-04 form—said the patients’ rights message boards—and you’ll get the true dollar amounts associated with your treatment.

A call to the hospital’s medical records department redirected me to their billing office. After a few minutes of hold music, an operator informed me in no uncertain terms that UB-04 forms were not given to patients.

“For insurance only,” she said, and hustled me off the line.

My insurance company said that they didn’t have access to it either, but that the hospital should give it to me.

Technically speaking, the UB-04 form is part of something called the HIPAA Designated Records Set. HIPAA (the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is an enormous piece of Clinton-era legislation that has a lot to do with patient privacy. You sign a HIPAA disclosure every time you visit a new doctor, allowing them to legally share your medical records with your insurer. But the “P” in the acronym also has more specific consumer-protection benefits. It legally establishes patients’ rights to access any document used to make decisions about their treatment, billing, or insurance payments.

Armed with this information, I again called the billing department. I reached another operator. When she told me that the UB-04 form was off-limits, I hit her with the HIPAA statue and code.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, audibly annoyed. “Can you fax me whatever you’re reading from?”

“I’m legally entitled to this form,” I said. “This is my right as a patient. May I speak to your supervisor?” By this point I was keeping a record of every phone call, every response, everyone’s name.

“He’s on special assignment and not available,” the woman said.

“Can I have your name?”

She offered her first name as Ariel, but wouldn’t give a last name.

“Can I have your supervisor’s name and contact information, then?”

Ariel asked me to hold while she transferred me to someone who could better assist with my request. It took me a moment to realize that the transfer was actually just her hanging up.

by John Fischer, TMN |  Read more:

Image: Martin Mull