Who hasn’t done it? Twisted an Oreo in two and then enjoyed the creamy filling before eating the wafer (with dunking in milk, optional). Why, for the most part, does the filling always remain on just one wafer? A new study in the Physics of Fluids addresses this hugely important issue.

When does Elsie, the Borden cow, go from being an icon to being a Big Mac? When do children and adults decide which animals are pets, and which are eligible to be eaten? A new study suggests these decisions begin when we are tweens.

These days we’re awash in mask mandate conflicts, continuing vaccination resistance, and warnings that the wholesale disruptions to our lives “ain’t over yet.” While the media tends to focus on administrative conflicts as well as the slight, local, daily up and downticks, here we present a longer and broader view.

There is no doubt that remote care, virtual care, has come into its own during the pandemic. It seems equally clear that it is not going away but will find a niche in our healthcare landscape. Big businesses, especially private equity investors, see this shift in the landscape as an opportunity and are being led to the promised land of a large return on investments by consultants. What are those “thought-leaders” telling those investors will be the future? Does the term “smoke and mirrors” ring any bells?

Can we get our obesity problem under control? In part one of this series, we saw that common policy responses to our expanding waistlines have failed. Let's now consider why these interventions tend to yield such disappointing results.

Ocean? Pool? Ocean? Pool? Perhaps this will help you decide.

If you read only one thing this week please consider the hypocrisy over the ban on mentholated cigarettes. We are made of stardust, and our energy within might mean we are made of music. Once upon a time, Barnes and Noble was a predator; nowadays, has it become a benefactor? The Scream, not the picture, but the sound?

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” wrote Gertrude Stein. Others often quote this as a statement of identity. Likewise, in algebra, the law of identity is the equation ‘a = a’. What is true in botanical and mathematical terms also applies to chemistry. Whether extracted from corn or honey created by bees, glucose is glucose, and fructose is fructose.

Over the past few months more healthcare articles have featured a new (at least for me) statistical methodology: mediation analysis. It doesn’t prove causality, but it can assign a value to the impact of a variable on an outcome. More usefully, it can help suggest what factors we can leverage using public health measures, regulation, or legislation.

In order to preserve their "independence," a growing cadre of medical journals is refusing to publish any research conducted by vaping-industry scientists. It's a policy marred by hypocrisy that will exclude good science from the peer-reviewed literature.