Plastic bottles litter most of the world. There have been ongoing efforts to find methods to biodegrade PET, a very common plastic used for bottled water. British scientists have discovered an efficient way to get bacteria to "eat" PET plastic. Here's how it works.

Early on in the pandemic, the call was to flatten the curve, in order to reduce the number of cases and not overwhelm our healthcare systems. Over time, some say that has morphed into an attempt to eliminate or suppress the viral spread. A new study looks at the tradeoff.

Given that more than 200,000 Americans have died (at least in part) due to COVID-19, there seems little to lose and much to gain by green-lighting human challenge trials in which volunteers are vaccinated and then deliberately infected with coronavirus. The U.S. should follow the UK's lead.

Thirty-seven years ago, at the end of September, the world faced another global crisis. Just three weeks earlier, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 inadvertently entered prohibited Soviet airspace and was shot down by a Soviet air-to-air missile, killing all 269 passengers and the crew of a Boeing 747.

Although pain patients in the U.S. continue to struggle mightily to get the prescription opioids they need, at least they -- finally -- have the American Medical Association behind them. But in Canada, patient advocacy groups are also fighting the Canadian Medical Association, something that can be seen in an open letter to the CMA from the Chronic Pain Association of Canada. Here are some of the letter's highlights, especially those involving contributions from ACSH.

The term "opioid" has become a dirty word. "Synthetic" is also dirty. When putting them together you get something that is dirty but also confusing -- and probably intentionally so. There's no scientific reason to categorize a drug as a "synthetic opioid" or a "synthetic anything," as you will read here. To see how silly it is, let's perform the same exercise with antibiotics and see how that works out.

On tap this time 'round: Is Science magazine political? ... Do you suffer from Lesesucht? ... If life is a gift, are we sharing it? ... and shaming in the time of COVID-19 distributing vaccines, the 18th Century perspective.

Just as COVID-19 is a global problem, the search for a vaccine is a global effort. Sometimes, to get clarity, especially in the run-up to a presidential election, it is better to get an outsider's view.

It's now more than seven months into the pandemic in the U.S. and doctors and scientists have been trying pretty much everything -- with little to show for their efforts. Perhaps the most effort has gone into finding drugs to prevent the immune system meltdown caused by the virus. Here's another: Can a simple, safe, approved drug called phenylbutyric acid tread the line between under- and over-treatment of the immune system by reducing cell stress?

Bad behavior has consequences, except when you're a social media platform. But the number of peer-reviewed articles subsequently retracted raises the question of whether medical journals believe that they, too, are "platforms" without responsibility for what they publish and disseminate.