What makes a patient chose not to undergo treatment, a decision that can reduce the risk of cancer by upwards to 30%? Facts or beliefs? (And another thing: Why do we pay so much attention to that homunculus jabbering away in our heads?)

The plaintiffs claim that Ocean Spray lied about not using artificial flavors, and the only restitution is for the company to hand over a big bag of money. How big? Very big. They want a jury to award them "statutory, compensatory, treble, and punitive damages." That's all due to a technicality that hasn't affected their lives one iota.

Conventional wisdom tells us that 10,000 steps per day is the "magic number" required for health benefits. But is there sound evidence behind this number? Dr. Christopher Labos, from McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, investigates.

Melinta is only one of several companies experiencing the pain of antibiotic development. The company lost 85% of its market cap over the past year. Yet, the company just received European approval to market Vabomere, a combination of one antibiotic, meropenem, and one beta-lactamase inhibitor vaborbactam. This is becoming a repetitive pattern of success breeding failure in the antibiotic space. Dr. David Shlaes explains.

Everyone believes in evidence-based decision making. But why is it so hard to find the evidence we need?

A key challenge in building electric aircraft involves how much energy can be stored in a given amount of weight of the onboard energy source. Although the best batteries store about 40 times less energy per unit of weight than jet fuel, a greater share of their energy is available to drive motion. Here's more on why batteries are, relatively speaking, heavy for aviation.

What a medical doctor sees in social media posts can tell an entirely different picture than the one intended to be told. As the saying goes "the devil is in the details."

Medicare Part D provides coverage for the cost of drugs. It is a complex system with varying out-of-pocket costs. The stakeholders, beneficiaries, insurance companies, manufacturers and the feds are all trying to shift costs to someone else. Two graphs will show the value of Part D to patients and what all the fighting is about.

One would think that in a world where facts can be easily verified, it shouldn't become so polarized. But a new paper in the European Journal for Philosophy of Science argues that polarization is the natural outcome when groups of people disagree. In fact, the authors document a major example of polarization within the scientific community itself.

Researchers, believe it or not, ingested Lego toys to see how quickly they could be, um, excreted. Yes, this actually took place. This "work" was published in a journal.