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SACRAMENTO, Calif. — This Easter, Americans will devour more than 1 billion Peeps — those radiant marshmallow chicks whose appearance on store shelves each year is as much a herald of spring as azaleas at the Masters. What makes the treats so vibrant is erythrosine, a chemical that shows up on ingredient labels as Red No. 3. It's one of several chemicals, along with titanium dioxide, used to color some of the most popular candy in the country — including Skittles and Hot Tamales. Both chemicals have been linked to cancer. More than 30 years ago, U.S. regulators banned Red...

A proposed California bill could force popular candies like Skittles to change their recipes — or stop selling them in California altogether. In February, Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel introduced Assembly Bill 418, which would prohibit the manufacture, sale and distribution of food products containing five chemicals linked to cancer and other health risks. One of these chemicals is titanium dioxide, which is listed as an ingredient in Skittles on the candy brand's website. Last July, a lawsuit filed in California alleged that Skittles are "unfit for human consumption" because they contain titanium dioxide; however, the lawsuit was dismissed in November. In...

Mars Inc. has been sued by a consumer who claims that Skittles candies are unfit to eat because they contain a known toxin that the company had pledged six years ago to phase out. In a proposed class action filed on Thursday in Oakland, Calif., federal court, Jenile Thames accused Mars of endangering unsuspecting Skittles eaters by using “heightened levels” of titanium dioxide, or TiO2, as a food additive. The lawsuit also said titanium dioxide will be banned in the European Union next month after a food safety regulator there deemed it unsafe because of “genotoxicity,” or the ability to...

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - The latest scientific analysis of a disputed map of the medieval New World supports the theory that it was made 50 years before Christopher Columbus set sail. The study examined the ink used to draw the Vinland Map, which belongs to Yale University. The map is valued at $20 million — if it is real and not a clever, modern-day forgery. A study last summer said the ink on the parchment map was made in the 20th century. But chemist Jacqueline Olin, a retired researcher with the Smithsonian Institution (news - web sites) in Washington, said...

PORTLAND, Ore. — The long-sought after memristor--the "missing link" in electronic circuit theory--has been invented by Hewlett Packard Senior Fellow R. Stanley Williams at HP Labs (Palo Alto, Calif.) Memristors--the fourth passive component type after resistors, capacitors and inductors--were postulated in a seminal 1971 paper in the IEEE Transactions on Circuit Theory by professor Leon Chua at the University of California (Berkeley), but their first realization was just announced today by HP. According to Williams and Chua, now virtually every electronics textbook will have to be revised to include the memristor and the new paradigm it represents for electronic...

Memory plus resistor may add up to longer-lasting batteries and faster-booting computers After nearly 40 years, researchers have discovered a new type of building block for electronic circuits. And there's at least a chance it will spare you from recharging your phone every other day. Scientists at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, Calif., report in Nature that a new nanometer-scale electric switch "remembers" whether it is on or off after its power is turned off. (A nanometer is one billionth of a meter.)Researchers believe that the memristor, or memory resistor, might become a useful tool for constructing nonvolatile computer memory,...

Scientists have discovered a rare form of solid - a quasicrystal - in a rock sample from Russia's Koryak mountains. Quasicrystals have unusual properties and have previously only been made in the laboratory. The discovery could redefine the field of mineralogy and expand our understanding of how quasicrystals form, leading to new applications.Quasicrystals are a type of solid with structures in between those of crystals and glasses. They are often compared to Penrose tilings, where two different shapes of tile are tessellated in patterns with local symmetry but more complex overall periodicity. The materials have interesting properties, often being harder or...

A flat lens made of paint whitener on a sliver of glass could revolutionise optics, according to its US inventors. Just 2mm across and finer than a human hair, the tiny device can magnify nanoscale objects and gives a sharper focus than top-end microscope lenses. It is the latest example of the power of metamaterials, whose novel properties emerge from their structure. Shapes on the surface of this lens are smaller than the wavelength of light involved: a thousandth of a millimetre. "In my opinion, this technology will be game-changing," said Federico Capasso of Harvard University, the senior author of...

Human Blood Simplifies Cyborg Circuitry Could electronic components made from human blood be the key to creating cyborg interfaces?... Circuitry that links human tissues and nerve cells directly to an electronic device, such as a robotic limb or artificial eye might one day be possible thanks to the development of biological components. Writing in the International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics, a team in India describes how a "memristor" can be made using human blood. Memristors were a theoretical electronic component first suggested in 1971 by Berkeley electrical engineer Leon Chua and finally developed in the laboratory by scientists...

Televangelist, author and convicted felon Jim Bakker is back with another product he says cures 'all venereal disease' and is made up of 'silver.' In a video clip where he's introducing the product, the star of The Jim Bakker Show sits beside his co-host and wife, Lori Bakker, as the two tout the benefits of 'Silver Solution.' 'Do you know the one thing we never talk about, really, is one of the few gels and products that cures, or gets rid of, all venereal diseases,' he says to the man and woman sharing the screen with the Bakkers, in a...

How about a side of silver with your yogurt? According to an ongoing inventory by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN), 96 food items containing nano-sized particles of titanium dioxide—including many found in the dairy aisle—have hit the market. And that number is up from just eight foods in 2008. […] So what’s the big deal? In short, too many unanswered questions. In 2012, the FDA released a draft revealing its many safety concerns about nanoparticles in food. Specifically, they worry that nanoparticles alter the bioavailability, or how much your body can absorb of a substance, and may cause unforeseen...

An indoor air cleaning system originally developed to zap dust mites and mold spores also destroys airborne anthrax and other pathogenic microbes, says the University of Florida engineering professor who pioneered the technology. The system has been successfully tested against a close cousin of the anthrax bacteria and could be installed relatively inexpensively and quickly in office and home heating and air conditioning systems, says Yogi Goswami, a UF professor of mechanical engineering and director of UF’s Solar Energy and Energy Conversion Laboratory. “There are other technologies for air cleaning, but for air disinfection, there is no more effective system,” ...

Cleaning bathrooms may become a thing of the past with new coatings that will do the job for you. Researchers at the University of New South Wales are developing new coatings they hope will be used for self-cleaning surfaces in hospitals and the home. Led by Professor Rose Amal and Professor Michael Brungs of the ARC Centre for Functional Nanomaterials, a research team is studying tiny particles of titanium dioxide currently used on outdoor surfaces such as self-cleaning windows. The particles work by absorbing ultraviolet light below a certain wavelength, exciting electrons and giving the particles an oxidising quality stronger...

MEXORYL is not the most notorious drug on the black market. Only a few insiders, most of them women, even know its worth, let alone where to buy it. But it is one of the most ordinary substances ever to be bootlegged. Mexoryl SX, made by the Paris-based skin-care giant L'Oréal, is an illegal sunscreen in this country, one that is thought to be particularly useful in preventing wrinkles. Called by dermatologists one of the most effective filters of all wavelengths of ultraviolet light, Mexoryl has been used in sunscreen lotions sold in Canada and Europe for more than a...

The team examined 11 pancreas specimens, eight of which were from donors who had Type 2 diabetes (T2D) and three from donors who did not. Whereas the three non-diabetic pancreatic tissue specimens contained no detectable TiO2 crystals, the crystals were detected in all of the eight T2D pancreatic tissue specimens. The UT Austin researchers found more than 200 million TiO2 crystallites per gram of TiO2 particles in the specimens from T2D donors but not in the three specimens from non-diabetic donors. They published their findings last month in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology. In the mid-20th century, titanium dioxide...

A Japanese menswear company is selling an "anti-swine flu" business suit that it says can reduce the risk of catching the H1N1 virus. Haruyama Trading has developed a wool suit coated with titanium dioxide, which it says breaks down the virus molecules on contact under ultraviolet light, according to Reuters . "If a person with the flu virus coughs, it might get on someone else's suit and from there, another person might get infected," Shinto Hirata, vice director of merchandising at Haruyama told Reuters. "Small children might catch the virus after touching their father's suit. We came up with this...

A Japanese company, Haruyama Trading Co., has developed a suit that it claims protects the wearer from the deadly H1N1 strain of influenza. The company has produced 50,000 of the suits and will start selling them on Thursday, according to a company spokesman. The suit is coated with the chemical titanium dioxide, which reacts to light to break down and kill the virus when it comes into contact with it, according to Junko Hirohata.

Independent teams of researchers in the UK and the US have shown that nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere can participate in chemical reactions on the surfaces of buildings, indoors and outdoors, producing harmful pollutants including the respiratory irritant nitrous oxide, the toxic gas nitrosyl chloride and hydroxyl radicals. Rod Jones' team at the University of Cambridge in the UK investigated the fate of NO2 when it comes into contact with glass that has been coated with titanium dioxide.1 TiO2-coated glass is available commercially as a self-cleaning product in which the TiO2 photocatalytically degrades organic dirt in the presence of sunlight. In...

Pure hydrogen fuel is non-polluting. Current methods of extracting hydrogen, however, use energy derived from sources that pollute. Finding ways to use the sun's energy to split water to extract hydrogen would make for a truly clean energy source. Several research efforts are using materials engineered at the molecular scale to tap the sun as an energy source to extract hydrogen from water. Researchers from Pennsylvania State University have constructed a material made from titanium dioxide nanotubes that is 97 percent efficient at harvesting the ultraviolet portion of the sun's light and 6.8 percent efficient at extracting hydrogen from water....