Ongoing health concerns: "Every phthalate that has been studied for health effects has been found to pose a health risk," Tom Neltner, chemicals policy director for Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement. Why the lawsuit? Although a coalition of health and environmental advocates filed two petitions in 2016 asking the FDA to prohibit phthalates in food packaging and process materials, the FDA still has not acted - despite the fact that the administration was required by law to respond to that principal petition within 180 days, according to the suit.Įarthjustice filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Environmental Defense Fund, the Learning Disabilities Association of America, the Center for Food Safety, the Center for Environmental Health, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), Breast Cancer Prevention Partners, Defend Our Health and Alaska Community Action on Toxics. "While FDA idles, babies and children are consuming phthalates in their food that endanger their brain development and long-term health," O'Brien added. Those health complications are particularly pronounced in young children, as well as communities of color and low-income individuals, in comparison to the general population, the groups said.įirst words: "FDA is sitting on years of scientific evidence that phthalates used in food packaging and processing materials are dangerous to human health," Earthjustice attorney Katherine O'Brien, whose organization filed the lawsuit, said in a statement. Phthalates - chemicals found in plastics that can interfere with hormone function - are linked to birth defects, infertility, miscarriage, learning disabilities and neurological disorders in children, according to the lawsuit. Please send tips or comments to Saul at or Sharon at Follow us on Twitter: and get to it. Then we'll sit down with a group of Native American "solar warriors" who see renewable energy as the key to an economic and political renaissance for the tribal communities of the High Plains.įor Equilibrium, we are Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin.
Today we'll look at a legal push from environmental groups to push the Food and Drug Administration to act on the hormone-disruptors lurking in our food packaging materials. The seagrass, killed off by algal blooms caused by human waste and fertilizer runoff, is now down by 90 percent, with conditions only expected to worsen as climate change ushers in further extreme weather, according to the Times. That's all I feel like doing at the moment - after all, sometimes it's nice to relax and enjoy the beauty of physics, and to leave the worrying about the calculus and data crunching for another day.Wildlife officials link the sea mammals' decline to a loss of seagrass - a manatee dietary staple - in the Indian River Lagoon where the animals spend the winter. Or better yet, watch a movie of the splash in an article by Lisa Grossman at Science News. Of course, you can forget about the science and just appreciate the fleeting and elegant lines in the images instead. Instead of dropping things into water, he had a huge pool that was mounted on an apparatus that bounced it up and down, creating waves that would collide to create jets of water that shot straight up in nearly unbelievable liquid spikes. I used to work across the hall from his lab where he did related experiments. If you want to learn more about the science of the supersonic splash, it's worth looking over an explanation by University of Maryland physicist Dan Lathrop in the APS online publication Physics. It turns out that the void left behind collapses and pushes out a supersonic jet of air. They were studying what happens when an object rapidly plunges into a fluid. The researchers who took the pictures weren't out to make art. It's just a disc being pulled rapidly down into water, but the space left behind looks so pretty. There's something very elegant about these images.