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Men are more likely to pay attention to their female partners around the time of ovulation. This could be an evolutionary strategy to keep women away from other men during fertile periods, say the researchers who carried out the questionnaire study.

There?s a good reason for this: It?s been discovered that between one and 30 per cent of children are not the offspring of their so-called fathers. Steven Gangestad and colleagues at the University of New Mexico found that women fantasized more about other men just before ovulation. “It was clear from the results that the women’s primary partners were more attentive and proprietary near ovulation,” Gangestad says. “The results suggest a conflict of interest between the sexes when women are fertile.?
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Dentists are likely to suffer memory and kidney problems from long-term exposure to the mercury in tooth fillings. A study of 180 dentists by researchers at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary in Scotland found they had up to four times the normal level of mercury in their urine and nails and had more kidney disorders and memory lapses than the general public.

“We found several differences in the health and cognitive functioning between our dentists and the control group,” says Dr. Ewan Macdonald. “These differences could not be directly attributed to their exposure to mercury, but as mercury exposure at higher levels is known to cause similar health effects an association cannot be ruled out.”
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Chicken farmers on the Delaware?Maryland?Virginia peninsula are introducing between 20 and 50 tons of arsenic to the environment annually, and researchers aren?t sure where it?s ending up. At some point, this arsenic could contaminate surface and groundwater.

The poultry industry in the region raises 600 million chickens annually, according to the Department of Agriculture. In the process, these chickens are fed organic arsenic compounds, like roxarsone, to control infections and increase weight gain. Keeping within U.S. Food and Drug Administration limits, little of the roxarsone is retained in the meat. Most of it ends up in the 1.5 million tons of manure produced annually by the chickens.
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The trash that ends up in the ocean has become a vehicle for the transportation of exotic marine life into new ports. This is threatening global biodiversity, particularly in the Southern Ocean.

David Barnes of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) made a 10-year study of human litter, mostly plastic, that washed ashore on 30 remotes islands, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. His team found that litter has almost doubled the spread of alien species in the subtropics and more than tripled it at high latitudes.
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