"DNA: It Calls the Signals of Life," by Wallace Cloud and excerpted below, originally appeared in the May 1963 issue of Popular Science magazine. Francis Crick and James Watson first described the double helix structure of DNA on April 25, 1953.--Ed

Last December an American biologist and two English physicists received formal recognition, in the shape of a Nobel Prize, for a discovery made 10 years ago-a discovery that started a chain reaction in biology.

They determined the structure of a molecule that provides answers to questions scientists have been asking for over a century:

• How does a heart muscle "know" how to beat?
• How does a brain cell "know" how to play its role in thinking and feeling?
• How do the cells of the body "know" how to grow, to reproduce, to heal wounds, to fight off disease?
• How do infectious bacteria "know" what diseases to cause?
• How do single fertilized egg cells, from which most of nature's creatures begin, "know" how to become plants, animals, people?
• If one such cell is to multiply and form a human being, how does it "know" how to produce a potential Einstein or a Marilyn Monroe?

The stuff that genes are made of

Sounds like a lot to expect of a molecule-even one with a jaw-breaking name like deoxyribonucleic acid (known more familiarly as DNA). But it's scientific fact that DNA is what genes are made of. DNA molecules supply the basic instructions that direct the life processes of all living things (except a few viruses). The DNA molecule contains information in a chemical code-the code of life.

The effects of discovery of the structure of DNA have been called "a revolution far greater in its potential significance than the atomic or hydrogen bomb." Professor Arne Tiselius, President of the Nobel Foundation, has said that it "will lead to methods of tampering with life, of creating new diseases, of controlling minds, of influencing heredity-even, perhaps, in certain desired directions."

I asked the American member of the Nobel Prize trio, Dr. James D. Watson, about these speculations in his laboratory at Harvard. It was a few weeks before he flew to Stockholm to receive the award along with Dr. Francis H. C. Crick of Cambridge University and Dr. Maurice H. F. Wilkins of King's College, London.
The discovery of the structure of DNA was as important as the working out of atomic structure that led to the atom bomb.

The boyish 34-year-old Nobelman, who did the prize-winning research in England when he was only 25 (he entered college at 15, had been a Quiz Kid before that, in the days of radio), refused to endorse the wilder predictions about the future of DNA research. He said, "The average scientist busy with research looks ahead anywhere from an hour to two years, not more."

Conceding that discovery of the structure of DNA was as important as the working out of atomic structure that led to the atom bomb, he added, "It will have a very profound effect, slowly, on medicine. Doctors will stop doing silly things. Our knowledge of DNA won't cure disease, but it gives you a new approach-tells you how to look at a disease."

Dr. Watson went on to explain just what he and his co-workers discovered during those days of inspired brainwork in England, back in 1953, and how they did it.

The discovery was not the work of an institute-full of technicians, he said, but the product of four minds: He and Crick did the theoretical work, interpreting cryptic X-ray diffraction photos made by Wilkins, who had as collaborator an English woman scientist, Dr. Rosalind Franklin. She died in 1958. She "should have shared" the Nobel Prize, said Dr. Watson.

Picking up the thread

DNA was not a newly discovered substance. It had been isolated in 1869, and by 1944 geneticists were sure it was the substance of the genes-the sites of hereditary information in the chromosomes. Then they started asking, "How does it work?" That's the question Watson and his co-Nobelists answered.
They knew DNA as one of the most complex of the "giant molecules" known to man.

They knew DNA as one of the most complex of the "giant molecules" known to man. It was believed to have a long, chainlike structure consisting of repeating groups of atoms, with side groups sticking out at regular intervals.

The shape of the DNA molecule was important. In the cell, many of the larger molecules work together like machine parts, and their mechanical properties are as important as their chemical activity. However, even the electron microscope, through which it is possible to see some of the biggest giant molecules, shows DNA only as a thread, without detail. One way of "looking" at molecules is to take them apart by chemical treatments that make small molecules out of big ones. In the case of DNA, the pieces-six kinds of sub-molecular units-had been identified. Now it was necessary to figure out how the jigsaw puzzle fitted together.

Read the rest of the story in the May 1963 issue of Popular Science.

Deforestation definitely isn't doing nature any favors, but at least there's a financial incentive for it, right?

Well, not really, actually, as this infographic shows.

Based on an economic valuation of Sumatra's Leuser National Park, designer Jan Willem Tulp breaks down the pros and cons of alternatives to deforestation in a beautiful interactive infographic. It maps the relative impact of three different forest management strategies: logging but replanting trees, or "selective-use"; deforestation, which is what's happening to the park now; and total, tree-friendly conservation. Each strategy is then evaluated on how it'd impact the bottom line of different regions, industrial sectors and stakeholders.

For the most part, logging but replanting trees or conserving forests altogether would result in financial gain: certain areas would take a hit (the timber industry, obviously, and also agriculture), but more industries, like tourism and fisheries, would improve. Of course, this is only based on research for a single park, so data for other forests would be at least a little different. You've got to wonder what this chart would look like for a place like the Amazon.

See the full infographic here.

[visaul.ly]

Click to enter the gallery

Army researchers at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (ECBC) are developing new technology that could help U.S. troops battle chemical warfare. The technology, a canister about the size of a soda can, can sniff out dangerous chemicals and relay information about potential hazards back to troops.

The canister could be especially useful in Syria. In a letter released yesterday, the White House said it has reason to believe "the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin."

Often odorless and invisible, chemical agents act fast and can rapidly lead to paralysis or death. ECBC's technology--still under development--is designed to help soldiers avoid those dangerous situations. Built around the handheld Joint Chemcial Agent Detector, these sensor-equipped canisters can be dropped from an airplane, parachute to the ground, and then relay via satellite any information on chemical agents they pick up. The canisters have seismic sensors, and the ability to detect other airborne chemical agents, including Sarin, Mustard gas, Lewisite, and Cyanogen Chloride, among others. There's also a GPS antenna to help soldiers pinpoint its location. The prototype cans have a battery life of up to six hours, which the researchers hope to increase to several days.

This sensor cans are officially known as Global Strike Near Real-Time Battle Data Assessment (NRT-BDA) and as the name implies the goal is to provide a broad, instantaneous picture of unseen threats in a battle field. Because of their indiscriminate nature, chemical threats are usually launched long-range, so detecting a chemical attack also means figuring out a place the enemy probably isn't. The speed is especially important for informing advancing troops about areas that are safe versus those that aren't. If a chemical attack is detected further than 500 feet from troops, that gives troops enough time for them to put on protective equipment. That is a tremendous advantage over the handheld device on which they are based, and would prove invaluable to any troops moving on the ground against a regime with chemical weapon stockpiles.

America's gray wolves are moving off the endangered species list, the Los Angeles Times has revealed.

That means wolves are losing federal protections in the continental U.S. (There is an exception for Mexican wolves in Arizona and New Mexico, the Times reported.) Instead, states will decide to what extent they want to protect Canis lupus.

Scientists the Times talked with debated whether the move means wolf numbers have recovered or whether the Fish and Wildlife Service has bowed to pressure from hunters and ranchers, whose livestock wolves kill (though not in very big numbers). Check out the Times story for arguments from both sides, including a northern Rockies Fish and Wildlife Service wolf manager, although the service would not officially comment.

Gray wolves can live in a variety of habitats and were once widespread in the northern hemisphere. Their numbers in the U.S. plunged in the early 20^th century, however, as cities and ranches spread west and the U.S. government offered bounties for hunted wolves. By the mid-1960s, wolves in the continental U.S. were limited only to remote parts of Minnesota and Michigan. In 1973, the U.S. placed the first wolves under the protection of the Endangered Species Act. In the 1990s, officials began reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone National Park and other places.

The Fish and Wildlife Service had planned to announce the delisting "in coming weeks" and could have finalized the decision within the year. The Los Angeles Times got a jump on the news by obtaining a draft document.

[Los Angeles Times]

In 2011, ICANN, the organization in charge of the internet's domain names, decided to open up the field and expand the list of domains from the typical .com, .net, and country codes out to, well, pretty much anything. We knew we'd see some battles over the new domains, but one of the first is an interesting case: .amazon.

Web and content giant Amazon has been making big moves lately, moving into original content with its own version of television pilot season as well as a persistent rumor that the company is working on its own set-top box to compete with Roku, Apple TV, and Xbox. And Amazon has already attempted to get generic domains like .book and .author (which hasn't sat well with book publishers). So it makes sense that the company would want to lock down its domain future with the .amazon domain; it'd be convenient to go to tv.amazon or store.amazon or kindle.amazon, and Amazon certainly doesn't want some other company to snap it up and confuse people.

But what if the competition for the domain isn't a company, but a coalition of governments?

The Peruvian and Brazilian governments have called for Amazon's application to be rejected, stating that the Amazonian geographic area is a more natural fit for the domain than an American web company. Earlier this month, according to The Guardian, the government advisory committee within ICANN even recommended a freeze on disputed proposals.

Said the Brazilian ministry of science and technology, in a statement: "Allowing private companies to register geographic names as [domain names] to reinforce their brand strategy or to profit from the meaning of these names does not serve, in our view, the public interest."

A coalition of countries that share the Amazon region, including Bolivia, Colombia, and Venezuela in addition to Brazil and Peru, have signed a petition asking that .amazon be used for environmental or education purposes. ICANN has already asked Amazon to defend the application, and the matter should be decided in July at an ICANN meeting.

[via Fox News]

VOTO is a new device that turns fire into a power source for cell phones. Now, where there's fire, there can be modern civilization!

The key is a fire-activated fuel cell. The fuel-cell end of the device is placed into a stove, below the charcoal, and can stay there while the stove is used for cooking. The rest of the device juts out from the stove, looking like a pot handle, and the cell phone charges from a cord at the end of the VOTO (away from the fire, thankfully). Using oxygen from the air the fuel cell converts the burning carbon and hydrogen biomass into electricity.

VOTO isn't the first device to pair stoves and cell phones. There's already a campstove that turns waste heat into electrical energy. What VOTO does differently is insert the fuel cell directly in the fire of a stove someone already has.

The device is designed with two very different customers in mind: campers in the developed world that want to use some electric devices while out in nature, and people living in underdeveloped parts of the world who already have cell phones but lack home electricity.

Watch the CEO explain the device below:

During the short, dark winter days, many humans suffer from seasonal affective disorder, in which they experience symptoms of depression that subside come springtime (and recent research suggests all mental illnesses, not just depression, might get worse in winter.) A new study has found that rats get SAD, too-but during the long, sunny summer days, instead.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, exposed one group of rats to five hours of light and 19 hours of darkness every day for a week. A second group of rats spent one week with the opposite-19 hours of light and 5 hours of darkness each day.

The biologists found that rats who spent most of the week in the dark had more neurons synthesizing dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with reward and pleasure. By contrast, the rats who spent the week in the light produced less dopamine and more of the neurotransmitter somatostatin, which may be linked to anxiety. The rats who got more hours of darkness were also more willing to swim and explore the open end of an elevated maze, which suggests they were more confident and less stressed.

"We're diurnal and rats are nocturnal," says Nicholas Spitzer, a biology professor and one of the study's authors. "So for a rat, it's the longer days that produce stress, while for us it's the longer nights that create stress." According to Spitzer, greater knowledge about how light alters neurotransmitter production in the brain could eventually lead to new treatments for diseases like Parkinson's, which are linked to the death of dopamine-generating brain cells.

The study appears in the April 26 issue of Science.

Another science-tested way to depress a rat? Terrorize it with a robot.

Business is booming at Europe's largest port, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, which sees the lion's share of the continent's imports and exports. About 34,000 ships and 12 million shipping containers-each large enough to hold 27 refrigerators, 175 bicycles, or 2,500 pairs of jeans-already pass through it each year. But that's nothing compared with the 32 million containers it will handle by 2035. With no land for expansion, the Port of Rotterdam Authority has approved a $4-billion project to turn four square miles of 66-foot-deep ocean into dry ground for what will likely become the most advanced port in the world, Maasvlakte 2. The new facility will include automated container-moving vehicles powered by 13-ton batteries in place of diesel and a harbor so deep it will accommodate superships that haven't even been built yet. So far, dredging boats have vacuumed up more than seven billion cubic feet of sand from the ocean to fill in the new site, which will open its first terminal next year. When the entire port is finished, in 2035, it will see enough containers each month to circle half the Earth.

FASTER

Modern terminals move no more than 30 containers an hour. At Maasvlakte 2, automated equipment will blow past that rate and improve overall efficiency by up to 50 percent. People will control ship-to-shore cranes [A] remotely from an office. Then, automated ground vehicles [B] will grab a container or two and navigate by following transponders in the pavement. Rather than wait in line for a crane to unload its cargo, the vehicles will unload themselves with built-in hydraulic lifts. And instead of polluting and noisy diesel engines, they will run on rechargeable, 13-ton lead-acid batteries. After an eight-hour shift, the vehicles will enter a robotic battery-exchange station [C] to swap for a fresh one.

DEEPER

The world's largest container ship, the CMA CGM Marco Polo, is larger than an aircraft carrier, and superships [D] of the future will be even bigger. That's because the more goods crammed onto a vessel, the cheaper the shipping cost per ton. The 16,000-container Marco Polo requires a port at least 53 feet deep. Berths at Maasvlakte 2 will be six feet deeper than that, appropriate for ships that carry 18,000 containers or more.

GREENER

If the world's shipping industry were a country, its carbon footprint would be the sixth largest. But this port is pushing for electric container-moving vehicles, cleaner engines on water and land, and harbored ships that use electric shoreside power. The port authority plans to shift goods onto more efficient rail [E] and inland ships to cut container-truck traffic by 25 percent by 2030. Electricity will probably come from windmills and two 1,100-megawatt coal and biomass electric plants that will capture most of their carbon dioxide. The port authority has also launched a large-scale carbon-capture and storage demo program to put 1.2 million tons of CO₂ a year in exhausted undersea oilfields.

MORE FLOODPROOF

Manmade beaches and dunes, held in place by wind-resistant marram grass, form a soft seawall [F] on the port's south and west edges. To protect the northwest side from stronger storms, engineers completed a more expensive hard seawall [G]: sand covered by stone, topped off by 19,558 44-ton concrete blocks-likely the largest concrete blocks in all of Europe. Computer modeling suggests the seawall could withstand waters 18 feet above sea level.

This article originally appeared in the May 2013 issue of Popular Science. See the rest of the magazine here.

The largest current study of a potential AIDS vaccine, a $77 million project led by a Columbia University doctor, has been shut down due to "futility." The patients will be monitored to see any long-term effects, but the message is clear: it doesn't work, shut it down.

The study, called HVTN-505, was begun in 2009, over the years enrolling over 2,500 volunteers. The vaccination process doesn't actually involve any live or even deactivated HIV; instead, it starts with one that includes genetic material that's simply modeled after the virus, to prime the immune system. Then comes the real vaccine, involving recombinant DNA (meaning, DNA from various sources) based on adenovirus type 5, a common cold virus that in this case has been disabled so it doesn't actually cause a cold. Attached to those adenoviruses are artificial versions of HIV antigens. Antigens--the term is short for antibody generator--trigger an immune response, and these artificial antigens were designed to attack the three major HIV subtypes.

This technique had shown some mild success before; in a study in Thailand in 2009, it showed a 31 percent reduction in the HIV infection rate, which sounds good to me, but is apparently not enough to really do more than encourage further research. Unfortunately, that was as much success as this strategy ever saw. (It's worth noting that though the Thai study was very similar to HVTN-505, the two studies used different primers and boosters.)

Distressingly, the study actually showed that those who received the vaccine actually contracted HIV more often than those who received the placebo. Not many more; in fact, it was a statistically insignificant different. That, coupled with the fact that people who were infected despite having the vaccine showed no decrease in the viral load at all, led the National Institute of Health to pull the plug on the study this week.

It sounds ridiculous, but learning what doesn't work is almost as valuable as learning what does, and the researchers who took part in the study, while clearly tremendously disappointed, aren't defeated. According to NPR, which covered the story here, this is hardly the end of the search for a vaccine.

When you hear about well-regarded scientists making up data in their studies, it's easy to wonder, What were they thinking?

A New York Times Magazine piece has one answer. The magazine profiled Diederik Stapel, a psychologist, former dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and author of at least 55 papers with totally made-up data. He even made up data for the graduate students he supervised. He would tell them he was doing their experiments for them, an unusual move, as many professors prefer to leave that tedium for their underlings.

The profile described a couple instances during which he fabricated data, going into detail about what he did. The first time he did it followed a predictable story line. He tested a hypothesis, he didn't find the answer he wanted, and then he didn't want to have to redo the experiment or face the fact that he'd "wasted" all that time. "I said-you know what, I am going to create the data set," he told the New York Times Magazine.

Later, he kept making up data to support hypotheses that were interesting, yet believable. The magazine described him as researching old studies thoroughly before making anything up. It seems he wasn't avoiding hard work. He was avoiding the occasional (or frequent) failure that comes with honestly done science.

His frequent, high-profile studies brought him a great career, which his wife, Marcelle, said he might have been trying to share when he made up data for his students, too.

He has since been the subject of media scrutiny in the Netherlands and an unflattering university report about his personality. In the New York Times Magazine reporting, he was open about his fraud and culpability.

Meanwhile, his case has brought an uncomfortable light to the field of psychology. Each of Stapel's fraudulent papers was peer-reviewed. Other psychologists had analyzed them and judged them of worthy of going to print. If they missed nearly 10 years of fraud from Stapel-and it was a couple graduate students who ultimately blew the whistle on Stapel, not a peer review panel-what else did they miss? Many researchers may not be as bold as Stapel, but may cherry-pick the data they want, or analyze it in a less-than-ideal way for their own ends. Their cumulative effect on what's considered known and true in psychology could be grave.

[New York Times Magazine]

Wind power is pretty great: One doesn't need to do much but build turbines and capture the energy from a passing breeze. But, like what happened to the Ancient Mariner, still air means trouble. Intermittent energy is not useful for a grid that requires a continuous supply.

To get over this problem, engineers have devised a number of ways to store energy generated when it's windy for disbursement during the times when it is not. Ideas include giant flywheels, carbon-neutral natural gas and giant batteries made from gravel and argon gas. Now Alexander Slocum, Brian Hodder and their colleagues at MIT have demonstrated a new way to store that energy -- giant hollow concrete balls. They published their results this month in Proceedings of the IEEE.

The concept is pretty simple: As floating offshore wind turbines churn, they send most of the generated power to the grid. Some of the power, though, goes to pumping seawater out from 25-meter-wide hollow spheres which sit on the seafloor. As soon as the wind dies down, the pumps turn off, and the seawater rushes back into the spheres through a turbine; the water turns the turbine, which then generates electricity. The researchers calculated that one such sphere, moored in 400-meter-deep water, could store up to six megawatt-hours of power. A few hundred of those would be enough to offset an hour of energy from a typical nuclear power plant.

According to the researchers, initial estimates indicate that one sphere would cost $12 million to build and deploy, which is three or four times the cost of a typical onshore wind turbine. But worrying about the cost is still a bit premature, as only a 30-inch-diameter proof-of-concept has thus far been built. The MIT team has plans to build a sphere with a diameter of three meters, but further funding will be required to build a 10-meter sphere intended for undersea testing. Still, it could be worth the investment -- the researchers estimate that floating offshore wind farms with energy storage capacity could satisfy more than 20 percent of our energy needs.

This is a 1.79 percent scale model of a concept supersonic aircraft designed by The Boeing Company. You're seeing it through a window in the supersonic wind tunnel at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Ohio.

Researchers recently wind tunnel-tested the model's performance while changing the amount of air streaming through inlets you can see near the back of the model, NASA said. The research is part of the agency's work into making supersonic flights quiet enough to go over land.

[NASA]

Interested in beer, but are somewhat confused by all of the styles and technical jargon that encrusts the current craft movement? Computer science graduate student Kevin Jamieson has created an experimental app that will help you navigate your next encounter at the snooty beer bar.

Jamieson studies machine learning, but wanted to construct a practical implementation of a process called active ranking on an iPad, so he built the Beer Mapper. How it works: The app presents two different beers; the user taps on the one that he or she prefers. After a few iterations of this, the app builds a "heat map" of beer styles by user preference. This should, in theory, be able to then recommend beers from the database that correspond to those calculated preferences.

Constructing the mapper involved a number of steps. First, Jamieson collected the reviews for about 10,000 beers (each beer must have at least 50 reviews) on RateBeer.com. He had his software parse each review and weight a series of key words that would (ostensibly) accurately describe the beer. Each set of keywords was turned into a vector that represented the beer as a whole, then the software looked for the nearest neighbors in Euclidian distance for each beer vector. The next bit is a bit tricky to understand, but Jamieson basically had his software plot out each beer onto a two-dimensional space, then looked at how "close" three beers were to each other. Doing so allowed him to delineate where one beer style ends and another begins. He did not follow the style descriptors used by RateBeer (because style guides can be notoriously misleading), but let the data dictate where the lines of demarcation would lie.

Jamieson then overlaid bitterness data (IBUs), color (SRM data) and "maltiness" (amount of unfermented sugar in the beer by comparing final gravity to original gravity) onto the spatial map of beer styles. This is where I get a bit skeptical, to be honest, because two of those criteria -- bitterness and maltiness -- have data values that don't necessarily correlate well with drinker experience. And bitterness doesn't correlate with "hoppiness;" problematic because I know a number of beer drinkers who don't mind a bitter beer, but can't stand a really grassy or resinous hop-bomb. To be fair, Jamieson does admit that the "maltiness" value is somewhat dubious, and the various keyword weightings should help address the hop-bomb category.

In any case, the app isn't for public use. As Jamieson says on his website, it's not intuitive enough for the average user. Guess you're stuck asking the bartender for recommendations.

This drone could become the proverbial fly on the wall. Thanks to a joint research project between the University of Maryland's Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory and Stanford's Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Lab, there is now a quadrotor that can cling to walls and land on ceilings.

Making a drone that sticks to ceilings like a fly is an example of biomimicry, in which researchers try to imitate natural abilities in artificial machines. We've seen biomimicry in quadrotors before, when the University of Pennsylvania made an eagle-inspired claw for a drone. Standford's Biomimetics lab has already made a gecko-like robot that climbs glass surfaces, and this quadrotor borrows the same adhesive.

Andrew Kehlenbeck, a research assistant at the University of Maryland, says the gecko-inspired, dry adhesive "can detach instantly on-command and will eventually allow vehicles to perch and take-off at will on a wide variety of surfaces."

Why make a drone that can cling to walls and land on ceilings? Sometimes, there is no other surface available, especially in a city after a disaster. Also, given the finite battery life of a vehicle, the ability to transmit information from a fixed location would mean more energy left over for flying and spying.

Watch it in action below:

Robots, while awesome, tend to be clumsy in unpredictable human environments. Machines that use hands as deftly as humans do, with only minimal direction, would be a tremendous boon to rescue and hazardous work. They'd also be a major step toward useful, multipurpose household robots.

Whereas prosthetic hands are designed to restore lost ability while still mimicking the appearance of a human hand, the hands that DARPA's Autonomous Robotic Manipulation (ARM) program is developing are all about giving robots the power to use human tools and manipulate objects in a way that people generally take for granted.

Without the constraint of resembling a human hand, these robotic variants are free to focus on the function. iRobot's version opts for only three fingers and so looks more like a bird's talon than human phalanges. Watch the eerily silent video below (I recommend playing Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" in the background) to see iRobot's ARM-H pick up a basketball, use tweezers, turn a key in a lock, operate a drill, and more:

A new study from the University of California, Berkeley and the Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice might make us rethink sexy red lips. According to the paper published online today in Environmental Health Perspectives, many lipsticks actually contain toxic metals.

Since the 1990s, reports of lead traces in lipsticks have caused periodic alarm and even spawned rumors that you could detect lead levels with the help of a gold ring. This study analyzed metal content in 32 lipsticks and lip glosses commonly used by a sample of young women in ACRJ's Youth Program and found that many contained levels of heavy metals, that, though small, could become problematic with regular exposure.

It's essentially impossible to wear a lip product without ingesting small amounts. Based on previous data, the researchers estimated that with average use (applying it twice a day), wearing lipstick involves ingesting about 24 mg of the product per day, and up to 87 mg with high use. Acceptable daily intakes for the metals were calculated based on existing public health standards like EPA drinking water standards.

The U.S. doesn't currently have content standards for metals in cosmetics, but the European Union has banned any level of cadmium, chromium (both established carcinogens) or lead in makeup products as part of its Cosmetics Directive.

The results of the preliminary study showed all of the products contained manganese, and most contained high levels of titanium and aluminum. High levels of manganese have also been linked with neurological disorders, though it's an essential nutrient found in nuts, whole grains and pineapples. Average use of 10 of the 32 products would lead to more than the acceptable daily intake of chromium.

Many also contained lead, though study author S. Katharine Hammon told USA Today that "lead is not the metal of most concern."

The researchers detected lead in 75 percent of the lipwear. However, even at high use the estimated intake was lower than the acceptable daily intake. In 2011, fears over potential lead content in lipsticks led the FDA to examine 400 products on the market, finding that the products had acceptably low levels of lead. The agency does not consider the levels of lead ingested through lipstick to be dangerous, and doesn't set limits on acceptable lead levels in cosmetics, though there are maximum levels specified for certain color additives.

There weren't any observed links between metal content and brand, color or cost. The tested products ranged in price from a little more than $5 to $24. No product names were revealed, though other studies, including the FDA's, have revealed data related to specific brands.

The study's authors conclude more research is needed to evaluate the health risks of metals in lipsticks. They suggest that we should be regulating toxic metals in cosmetics, as the European Union already does. "Some of the toxic metals are occurring at levels that could possibly have an effect in the long term," Hammond said in a press statement.