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Phthalates are recognized as reproductive toxins and carcinogenic substances. A recent study highlights the ongoing exposure of Southern Californians to hazardous air pollutants known as plasticizers, including a chemical that has been prohibited in children’s products and cosmetics. Plasticizers are chemical compounds that make materials more flexible. They are used in a wide variety of products ranging from lunchboxes and shower curtains to garden hoses and upholstery. “It’s not just for drinking straws and grocery bags,” said David Volz. Previous California monitoring programs focused on plasticizers called ortho-phthalates, some of which were phased out of manufacturing processes due to health...

Researchers have discovered that plasticizers DEHP and DINP have negative effects on normal brain function in vertebrates. These plasticizers are used in products such as PVC, paints, and cosmetics. Phthalates are among the most commonly used plasticizers. However, plasticizers often leach from products over time, entering the environment and making their way into the human body via food, clothing, and dust. DEHP, in particular, has been proven to have severe impacts on development and reproduction, which is why it has been replaced in many instances by DINP, which is considered to be a safer alternative. Recent studies, however, have shown...

More than 30 million years ago, the Peruvian sea was home to one of the largest predators to ever emerge in the ocean. Its colossal size has surprised the scientific community.Species endangered by this fearsome marine animal that remained hidden in the Peruvian sea. In 2021, one of the most important discoveries ever recorded in the country was announced. It was only at the beginning of 2022 that the first assessments of the skeletal remains of Peru's so-called 'sea monster', an ancient whale considered one of the largest predators that existed 36 million years ago, were reported. Its impressive size...

One of the alleged greatest transformations in vertebrate evolution is said to be the emergence of creatures that traded fins for feet and transitioned from water to land.1-3 In other words, fish somehow evolved the numerous anatomical and physiological systems found in four-legged amphibians and various land-based reptiles. Despite evolutionary propaganda surrounding unusual fish-like creatures discovered in the fossil record, the necessary evidence of such a monumental evolutionary leap is profoundly lacking.In 2012, Jennifer Clack, one of the most famous vertebrate paleontologists of the modern era, concluded, “The question of where tetrapods evolved is even more difficult to answer than...

The Walea pygmy seahorse is one of five species named in a flurry of recent seahorse discoveries from coral reefs in the Red Sea and Indonesia. All five are less than an inch tall (2.5 centimeters) and are among the tiniest known vertebrates.

Charles Darwin, the 19th century geologist who wrote the treatise 'The Origin of Species, by means of Natural Selection' defined evolution as "descent with modification". Darwin hypothesized that all forms of life descended from a common ancestor, branching out over time into various unique life forms, due primarily to a process called natural selection. However, the fossil record shows that all of the major animal groups (phyla) appeared fully formed about 540 million years ago, and virtually no transitional life forms have been discovered which suggest that they evolved from earlier forms. This sudden eruption of multiple, complex organisms is...

The first chordates appear in the fossil record at the time of the Cambrian explosion, nearly 550 million years ago. The modern ascidian tadpole represents a plausible approximation to these ancestral chordates. To illuminate the origins of chordate and vertebrates, we generated a draft of the protein-coding portion of the genome of the most studied ascidian, Ciona intestinalis. The Ciona genome contains ~16,000 protein-coding genes, similar to the number in other invertebrates, but only half that found in vertebrates. Vertebrate gene families are typically found in simplified form in Ciona, suggesting that ascidians contain the basic ancestral complement of genes involved...