As the days become shorter and colder, our thoughts turn to the holidays, a time for baking and sharing homemade treats. Cookies and bars, peppermint bark, and gingerbread houses are all delightful to eat cooked and to “test” before cooking as raw batter. Don’t lick that spoon! Recent outbreaks from raw and uncooked flour products should cause us to reexamine the safety of these ingredients.

When someone does something inexplicable and out of the blue, my husband’s mantra is to ask qui bono. Who benefits?  So why would Emily Oster, an economist without public health or legal training, propose a forgiveness program for COVID disinformation? Why propose not only doing a reset but creating an amnesty program for something that may be a legal wrongdoing?

What’s the deal with near-death experiences
Giving back “tainted” money can be more complex than it seems
In the rush to make medical records transparent, have we only succeeded in making them more opaque?

If you watch TV, ads for Coca-Cola's Smart Water are inescapable. Also inescapable is that the ads suggest that the stuff will make you smart or perhaps offer some other health benefit. But the only thing smart about Smart Water is Coca-Cola's ability to make you shell out money to buy something you could pretty much get from a fire hydrant in Newark.

The short answer to this question is: If we consider monozygotic (identical) twins, then it's a firm somewhat. A new study looks at the impact of differing leisure time physical activity and twins' health.

Ants – with their wise farming practices and efficient navigation techniques – could inspire solutions for some human problems. From The Conversation, by Scott Solomon, Associate Teaching Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Rice University

I’ve been thinking about Elon Musk’s social platform, Twitter, a lot lately. I wondered how one might keep the public square and identify the village idiots more readily. A new study in Nature’s Human Behavior looks at how knowing the identity of a writer alters our perceptions.

The discharge of ballast water used to balance a ship is a real man-bites-dog story. This is an issue where environmental groups, public health organizations, businesses, trade associations, tribes, and states sing from the same hymnal, yet the EPA refuses to implement meaningful regulations. What is the EPA drinking? It always wants to regulate, even when it shouldn’t.

"It can disappear in a moment," Dr. Chuck Dinerstein said after his near-fatal battle with a pulmonary embolism. How should our mortality influence our worldviews? Unregulated medical devices may put patients in harm's way. Why is the Cleveland Clinic parroting anti-vaping talking points from the Truth Initiative?

Last week, the media notified us that airplane seats were being downsized. This is at a time when, for a variety of reasons, we are all upsizing. Here are a few fun facts, including a few the media left out.