Word: plasticizers
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...added closely packed lining cells to the inside and stitched it into a sheep's pulmonary-artery circuit. Blood pulsing against the walls gradually strengthens the muscle cells, just as weight training builds biceps. To make smaller vessels, Laval's Auger bends a sheet of muscle cells around a plastic tube and reinforces it with an outer layer of stiffer cells. Then he removes the tube and seeds the inside with lining cells, which soon grow together. The vessels have worked well in animal tests, and in the lab have withstood blood pressure 20 times normal...
...have enough credit-card debt, this year Uncle Sam will begin accepting plastic from those who owe tax come April 15. Charging your taxes may be a nifty way to rack up frequent-flyer miles, and for some 30 million electronic filers it's a convenient way to complete a paperless tax return. For Uncle, it's certainly a convenient way to shift the burden of collection. But if you'll need to carry the debt a while, choosing plastic is a mistake--unless you carry it all the way to personal bankruptcy court. Let me explain...
...credit-card option is part of the IRS' recent customer-friendly makeover, and in our credit-card culture it's a route many people will take. Indeed, the number of taxpayers who are going plastic is running ahead of the 75,000 the agency projected this year. But this is one bandwagon you shouldn't hop on quickly. For starters, you'll have to pay the typical 2% or so transaction fee that merchants normally cover when you whip out plastic at the mall. On the average expected federal-tax balance...
Odds are your plastic food wrap is not going to kill you. You're probably in no immediate danger from the plastic bowl you used to store last night's spaghetti or from the IV bag from which you once got a blood transfusion...
...plastic products raising the loudest alarms are made of a material known as polyvinyl chloride, or PVC. To make PVC pliable, manufacturers treat it with softeners known as phthalates (pronounced thalates)--loosely bound chemicals that easily leach out of the plastic. In the U.S. millions of IV bags made of PVC are used annually. If the liquids the bags contain pick up stray phthalates, they can be transfused straight into the veins of patients. Animal studies suggest that phthalates can damage the liver, heart, kidneys and testicles, and may cause cancer. "We don't know the toxicity mechanism," says Charlotte...