Ah, that new car smell, that eau de car-logne; it does an ego good while it does a wallet bad. And now it turns out, it can do bad things to your health, too.

All these years, while we were being offered safety first, last and front, side and rear ways, hardly anyone in the vehicle industry had given much thought to what actually was in that perfume de profit, the new car smell that car buyers sought and bought.

As everyone knew, pollution related to vehicles originated from the exhaust pipe, not the shifter knob. It was spewed out the back of the rear, not the back of the rear view mirror. Well, what everyone thought they knew was wrong. (View Full Article)

NEW YORK (CNN) — Michelle Hammond and Jeremiah Holland were intrigued when a friend at the Oakland Tribune asked them and their two young children to take part in a cutting-edge study to measure the industrial chemicals in their bodies.

“In the beginning, I wasn’t worried at all; I was fascinated,” Hammond, 37, recalled.

But that fascination soon changed to fear, as tests revealed that their children — Rowan, then 18 months, and Mikaela, then 5 — had chemical exposure levels up to seven times those of their parents. (View Full Article)