Statues, memorials, and street names all commemorate our chosen cultural history. Street names, in particular, because their cost is less than a commissioned statue or memorial, making renaming easier may “mirror a city’s social, cultural, political, and even religious values.” New research on “streetonomics” may provide insight.

Thanks to excess alcohol consumption, July 4th is the deadliest driving day of the year. If you find yourself inebriated at a DUI checkpoint blowing into a breathalyzer, you can thank Sir Ewart Ray Herbert Jones for the invention he published 75 years ago. Yep, you've been caught by organic chemistry, specifically, the Jones Oxidation.

Not only does your diet fuel your body, but it also fuels and shapes your microbiome, which in turn can alter your mood, change your response to pathogens, and maybe, just maybe, alter your energy metabolism.

Last year the American Medical Association directly challenged the CDC's disastrous Guidance for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain, which was issued in 2016. Not surprisingly, Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing (PROP), a group that was (for some mysterious reason) directly involved with the CDC, responded defensively. Here are my comments on PROP's disingenuous rebuttal.

The notes of physicians are now freely available to patients. Is medical innovation fueled by theory or experiments? Another consideration in the Wuhan leak story, what are the limits to eminence over specific expertise? Finally, the nose knows - in this case how the receptors of smell are challenging lock and key.

The other day, the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, hosted a webinar for stakeholders on maintaining the scientific integrity of their work. I have pulled a few images from their “slide deck” to share. 

Are some COVID-19 shots engineered to control your thoughts? A prominent anti-vaccine campaigner claims this might be the case. He's wrong, but debunking his concern gives us a chance to discuss cool gene-therapy technology.

t’s increasingly clear that social media exacerbates our differences, using emotional wording and algorithms to curate what information we’re exposed to. The result is that these features conspire to echo, rather than expand, our thinking. Included in this chain of “causative” links is one of our most human needs: belonging – especially to a tribe.

Lawyers and activists who allege that the weed killer glyphosate causes cancer have moved on to a second target: another herbicide called paraquat. Claiming this chemical can cause Parkinson's Disease, these courtroom crusaders are now suing the herbicide's manufacturers in pursuit of another payday. The science is not on their side.

In the past week, two studies reported a nearly two-year loss of life expectancy in 2020 due to COVID-19. While that sounds bad, what exactly does it mean? Life expectancy is one of those terms that can be difficult to grasp. Here’s a closer look at what it means.