Poor Mojo's Newswire

Banana Boat is recalling its UltraMist spray-on sunscreens after five people in the past year have literally caught on fire from wearing it, the AP reports. It's not the sunscreen that's the problem—it's the bottle. Allow us to explain: Banana Boat, owned by Energizer Holdings (seller of batteries, razors, sunscreen, and lots of other stuff found near the registers at drugstores) sold more than 20 million bottles that sprayed too much sunscreen out of the valve. The result: it didn't dry fast enough, making it more vulnerable to nearby flames. Poor Brett Sigworth of Massachusetts figured that out this past summer at his backyard barbecue. Right after he sprayed on Banana Boat's Sport continuous spray, he went to tend the grill, and his entire body immediately lit on fire. Photos from a video by WBZ-TV in Boston showed that the burns lined up with sunscreen sprays. (Warning: The photos are not pretty.) A couple days after the story blew up in late May, Banana Boat vowed to investigate the cause. Again, sunscreen itself is usually not flammable. As Anahad O'Connor explained in The New York Times after the Sigworth case, when it's sprayed from a can it can become flammable. Turning something into an aerosol requires flammable ingredients like alcohol, which is why products like spray sunscreen and hairspray include flammability warning labels. Alcohol usually should evaporate quickly, but because Banana Boat spray valves let out too much, the alcohol did not evaporate quickly enough.

The study, widely considered the most reliable attempt to measure puberty in American boys, estimates that boys are showing signs of puberty six months to two years earlier than was reported in previous research, which historically taught that 11 � was the general age puberty began in boys. But experts cautioned that because previous studies were smaller or used different approaches, it is difficult to say how much earlier boys might be developing. The study echoes research on girls, which has now established a scientific consensus that they are showing breast development earlier than in the past. The study, which was to be announced at the Academy of Pediatrics national conference on Saturday and published online in the journal Pediatrics, did not try to determine what might be causing earlier puberty, although it mentioned changes in diet, less physical activity and other environmental factors as possibilities. Experts said that without further research, implications for boys are unclear. “This should perhaps set a standard going forward for being very attentive to puberty in boys and being mindful that they’re developing earlier,” said Dolores J. Lamb, a molecular endocrinologist at Baylor College of Medicine and president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. She was not involved in the study.

Textbook publisher Pearson set off an unfortunate chain of events with a takedown notice issued aimed at a copy of Beck's Hoplessness Scale posted by a teacher on one of Edublogs' websites (You may recall Pearson from such other related copyright nonsense as The $180 Art Book With No Pictures and No Free Textbooks Ever!). The end result? Nearly 1.5 million teacher and student blogs taken offline by Edublogs' host, ServerBeach. James Farmer at wpmu.org fills in the details. In case you don’t already know, we’re the folks not only behind this site and WPMU DEV, but also Edublogs… the oldest and second largest WordPress Multisite setup on the web, with, as of right now 1,451,943 teacher and student blogs hosted. And today, our hosting company, ServerBeach, to whom we pay $6,954.37 every month to host Edublogs, turned off our webservers, without notice, less than 12 hours after issuing us with a DMCA email. Because one of our teachers, in 2007, had shared a copy of Beck’s Hopelessness Scale with his class, a 20 question list, totalling some 279 words, published in 1974, that Pearson would like you to pay $120 for.