Now that the political drama around gas stoves has waned, it's time to discuss the science. Here's what all the talking heads got wrong. Does secondhand weed smoke cause asthma? Maybe, though the most recent study cited as evidence isn't all that rigorous.

The simple formulation "calories in vs. calories out," somewhat explains weight gain or loss. A new study takes a deeper look at four components of calorie intake and how they change across various dietary patterns. Are tasty hyper-palatable foods the “Great Satan?”

Debunking bad science can be difficult. The misdirection, false assumptions, and biased narratives are often nuanced or built upon a series of citations requiring the debunker to go down the rabbit hole to find the underlying “truth.” Why is it so much harder to counter lies than to tell them?

The most recent scare by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) over PFAS in freshwater fish was picked up by CNN and all the major news organizations and presented as fact. But the EWG models skew the results. There are other ways that EWG uses deceptive means to reach its conclusions and deliver the scariest outcomes possible. 

"Peer review" of scientific articles before publication is often considered the "gold standard" of reliability, but its luster has become tarnished by greed – the desire of the research community to tap into research funds, the pressure on scientists to publish or perish, and publishers of scientific journals seeking to maximize profits. 

Have you noticed that the names of new drugs are not merely obnoxious; they are also bizarre? As if drug companies hired consultants with a complete disdain for the English language? Quviviq? Ukoniq? Seriously? The people (mostly women) who broke the Nazi secret code in WWII couldn't handle this. Plus assorted other rants.

Deaths of despair, death from alcoholism, drug overdoses, and suicides have become a consistent explanation for the increasing mortality in middle-aged White males. A new viewpoint calls our attention to the deaths of despair among Native Americans.

Most of us would say “good” after little deliberation, as would virtually all of the media, but no purveyor of motor fuels would agree, and number crunchers would say, “it depends.”

Original Antigenic Sin (OAS) is the “tendency of individuals exposed to a given strain of influenza to respond with antibodies that react more strongly to the first strain of influenza they had met in early childhood than to the exposure strain itself.” A new study in Nature tries to unravel the reason for that propensity and tells us something about vaccines and boosters.

There is no longer any doubt that drinking alcohol raises the risk of multiple cancers. Why alcohol? What's it doing to us? And an episode of The Dreaded Chemistry Lesson From Hell. No extra charge!