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Almost a decade after manufacturers stopped using certain chemical flame retardants in furniture foam and carpet padding, many of the compounds still lurk in homes. New work to be presented today reaffirms that the chemicals may also still be hurting young children who were exposed before they were born.

Researchers investigating the health impacts of prenatal exposure to flame retardants collected blood samples from 309 pregnant women early in their second trimester. Spikes in the levels of one class of flame retardant, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) correlated with behavior and cognition difficulties during early childhood.

Rising 1,421 feet (433 meters) above the North-Central Mexican state of Querétaro, Peña de Bernal Natural Monument is the tallest freestanding rock in the world.

The monolith — a large geologic feature made up of a single massive stone — marks the entrance to the Sierra Gorda, a mountainous area that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization declared a Biosphere Reserve in 2001. More recently, in 2009, the rock itself was named an Intangible Cultural Heritage site by UNESCO. Yet, despite all its accolades, Peña de Bernal has largely remained a mystery to geologists; uncertainties surround its origin, its age, even its composition.

Measurements of the chemical composition of Moon rocks suggest that Earth was born with its water already present, rather than having the precious liquid delivered several hundred million years later by comets or asteroids. And in finding a common origin for the water on Earth and the Moon, the results highlight a puzzle over the leading theory for the formation of Earth's satellite.

WASHINGTON —The first humans to live on Mars might not identify as astronauts, but farmers. To establish a sustainable settlement on Earth's solar system neighbor, space travelers will have to learn how to grow food on Mars — a job that could turn out to be one of the most vital, challenging and labor-intensive tasks at hand, experts say.

"One of the things that every gardener on the planet will know is producing food is hard — it is a non-trivial thing," Penelope Boston, director of the Cave and Karst Studies program at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, said yesterday (May 7) at the Humans 2 Mars Summit here at George Washington University. "Up until several hundred years ago it occupied most of us for most of the time.".

We may be routinely orbiting, roving, drilling and lasing Mars, searching for elusive traces of life and reconnoitering sites for future human missions, but that doesn't mean studies of the red planet don't throw up surprises. On the contrary.

Take this March 21, 2013 observation by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of the southern edge of Acidalia Planitia, a plain located in the planet's northern hemisphere.

The mysterious Martian mountain that beckons NASA's Curiosity rover was likely built primarily by wind rather than water, as previously believed, a new study suggests.

Many scientists suspect that the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) Mount Sharp formed primarily from layers of lakebed silt, which is one of the main reasons that the mountain was selected as Curiosity's ultimate destination. But the new study holds that wind probably did most of the heavy lifting.

Setting foot on Mars by the 2030s is human destiny and a US priority, and every dollar available must be spent on bridging gaps in knowledge on how to get there, NASA's chief said Monday.

Addressing a conference of space experts at George Washington University, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said that despite hard economic times the United States is committed to breaking new boundaries in space exploration.

All lightning on Earth may have its roots in space, new research suggests.

Lightning flashes on Earth about 100 times per second, but what triggers lightning in thunderstorms remains mostly unknown. Especially odd is the fact that decades of analysis suggest electrical fields within thunderclouds have only a tenth or so of the strength needed to spark a lightning bolt.

Scientists, academics and medics gather this week in a London hotel to discuss a topic that has been virtually unmentionable in academic circles for decades: are humans descended from “aquatic apes” that spent more time swimming than dragging their knuckles on the ground?

The last time this question was asked, at a conference in 1992, there was much scoffing and ridicule. Other academics sneered and Bernard Levin wrote a full-page article lampooning the idea in a national newspaper.

You can make anything from a pistol to a doll to an airplane wing. Here's how it works.

This week a 25-year-old law student at the University of Texas named Cody Wilson made international headlines when he used a 3-D printer to "print out" a functional .38 caliber pistol.

He then put design software online so that—in theory, at least—anyone in the world who downloaded the software and had access to a commercial 3-D printer and $60 worth of plastic could make their own handgun.

If you’ve ever longed to have superhuman sight and hearing, a group of students from the Royal College of Art in London can fulfill those wishes.

With their project Eidos, Tim Bouckley, Millie Clive-Smith, Mi Eun Kim and Yuta Sugawara have created two masks that enhance sensory perception. One prototype is a mask that fits over the mouth and ears and lets wearers hear sound more selectively. A directional microphone in the mask isolates sounds and neutralizes background noise. Sound is then transmitted to the wearer through headphones and mouthpiece that passes sound to the inner ear by way of bone vibrations. Creators say this creates the sensation of hearing someone talk inside one’s head.

Imagine if your shirt could track your heart rate as you run, or if it could charge your cellphone on the go. Innovative fashion designers and engineers, who are pushing the envelope with "smart textiles," dream of designing garments that are not just embedded with devices, but actually are the devices. Welcome to the world of wearable computing.

The development of smart textiles is a true fusion of fashion and technology. From manipulating nanoparticles in cotton, to incorporating knit antennas and transistors into garments, the computational fashion industry is reimagining how we use clothing in our everyday lives.

Are you prepared to meet your robot overlords?

The idea of superintelligent machines may sound like the plot of "The Terminator" or "The Matrix," but many experts say the idea isn't far-fetched. Some even think the singularity -- the point at which artificial intelligence can match, and then overtake, human smarts -- might happen in just 16 years.

But nearly every computer scientist will have a different prediction for when and how the singularity will happen.

Hoping to give new meaning to the term “natural light,” a small group of biotechnology hobbyists and entrepreneurs has started a project to develop plants that glow, potentially leading the way for trees that can replace electric streetlamps and potted flowers luminous enough to read by.

The project, which will use a sophisticated form of genetic engineering called synthetic biology, is attracting attention not only for its audacious goal, but for how it is being carried out.

In the 1970s, a population of Arctic foxes on an island in the Bering Sea began to mysteriously decline. The animals were thin and mangy, and nearly all the cubs died. Today, only about 100 foxes remain.

The animals were not felled by an infectious disease, a PLOS ONE study suggests. Instead, the foxes probably suffered from high mercury exposure as a result of eating seabirds and other marine animals.