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PAYERNE, Switzerland (Reuters) - A solar-powered airplane designed to fly day and night without fuel or emissions successfully made its first test flight above the Swiss countryside on Wednesday.

The reigning queen of Belfast, Northern Ireland, is the “Baroness” Titti Von Tramp, a deeply bronzed, thoroughly waxed and statuesque figure approaching seven feet tall in stiletto heels, wearing tinted couture glasses and crowned with a perfect platinum mane. On any given night, you can find the bosomy Von Tramp at one of the local nightclubs, pursing her strawberry-colored lips in a photo-op for one of her many fans or perhaps making an Ulster businessman turn bright red by deviously running one long, manly finger down the man’s cheek and judging, “That’s a good year.”

For many people, the term “transvestite” is synonymous with such larger-than-life characters, an entertaining coterie of mostly gay men and their oversexed female alter egos. But as with any human demographic, transvestites are a very diverse bunch, and it is only a select few who can turn their minority status into such a lucrative career in drag theatrics. For more modest individuals, the limelight is hardly a desirable place to be. Furthermore, the psychological motivation to dress or act as the opposite sex varies widely--transvestism is but one of the many manifestations of cross-gender behavior in the human species.

Everyone makes mistakes, especially when it comes to entering numbers into a calculator or spreadsheet. It’s not such a big deal if you’re tracking how much you spend on pizza. But if you’re administering drugs in a hospital, such a slip can be deadly. Now a report in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface [see Harold Thimbleby and Paul Cairns,  http://bit.ly/cqcD83 ] shows how devices can be programmed to catch at least some mistakes on the spot. [More]

This January the Food and Drug Administration warned parents not to pour hot liquids into plastic baby bottles and also to discard bottles that get scratched. Otherwise, a potentially harmful chemical might leach out of the plastic. This warning was the agency’s first, tentative acknowledgment of an emerging scientific consensus: many widely used chemicals once deemed safe may not be.

But a warning was all the FDA could offer worried consumers. The agency does not have the power to force baby-bottle makers to stop using the chemical in question--bisphenol A, better known as BPA. Nor is the FDA alone. The Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator Lisa Jackson testified to Congress last September that her agency lacks the muscle to restrict the manufacture of BPA and other chemicals. The relevant law, the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, is simply too weak. It must be strengthened.

The U.S. will cut its nuclear weapons stockpile, use such weapons only as a deterrent, and pump more money into the infrastructure to create and sustain such weapons, according to the new nuclear weapons policy released today by the Obama administration. [More]

If a discussion Monday at a Manhattan bookstore is any indication, book publishers and sellers find e-books threatening, but writers, feeling generally abused for decades by publishers, are gleeful over their newfound digital access to readers--be that via the Web, iPads, e-book readers, podcasts or cell phones. [More]