Yes, life is unfair, and that partially explains why billionaires exist. But many billionaires have used their tremendous wealth to help the poor and boost public health. For these reasons, we should not be scornful, but grateful.

Who funds this research? Most would say it's government, but they'd be wrong. ACSH friend Dr. Robert Popovian, vice president of Pfizer's U.S. Government Relations, discusses this perennially controversial topic.

The ubiquitous online portals are always in the news. A new study looks at how we use – and are used by – these virtual conversations that first started taking place around the campfire before moving to the water cooler.

Clickbait – provocative and intentionally misleading headlines online, designed to draw in newspaper or magazine readers – are nothing new to ACSH, or one of our trusted advisors. Have things gotten worse? That advisor, Dr. Jeffrey Singer (pictured), wonders whether scientific studies have stooped to an extremely low level.

The feats of the athletes in a Netflix documentary cannot be considered to be proof of the benefits of a vegan diet for athletic performance. For every vegan “star,” one can find numerous top-level athletes who gorge on meat.

Understanding the confidence interval will help you grasp what an election poll is -- or is not -- saying. As you might have guessed, the media consistently gets it wrong.

Gold is known as a noble metal because of its lack of chemical reactivity. But if you treat it right, you can get it to do some cool things. You can chew on it, make some lousy drugs, screw up the environment mining it, and (maybe) even make a super-pricey burger. Really.

Here's today's lineup: Why are there smell receptors in the kidney? ... Men and women see the world differently ... Spotify shows us how big data can inform and delight us ... and robots come for the village blacksmith.

A new paper in the periodical Health Affairs demonstrates the separate universes of patients and information technology policymakers. Before you decide that this doesn't affect you, consider that these "meaningful use" programs have already cost the taxpayer $38 billion.

Aging, whether you consider it a “natural” biologic process or a disease, is increasingly the subject of scientific investigation that goes beyond epidemiologic studies. Or how diseases impact longevity. Some of the most exciting work comes from studying our metabolism and mapping those changes to specific diseases.