The European Union has decided to burn more wood to offset the increases in emissions that will be caused by closing nuclear plants. It's doing so because wood is renewable. While that sounds great, the problem is that burning wood is still combustion, which in this case is more harmful than CO2 emissions from coal.
Other Science News
This study shows that the crisis in overdose deaths is, unfortunately, not new. It goes back nearly 40 years. Three graphs reveal a tapestry over time of drugs, demographics and geography. It's not simply a new problem due to prescription drugs.
There are two ways that the media get meta-analysis claims wrong. And here's how to spot them.
Rather than rehash the disclosure of conflicts that led to the downfall of the now-former Chief Medical Officer at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, consider how this episode reflects a more common problem of "entitled" powerful people. Here are two remedies that don't require investigations and can possibly help correct medical research's vacillating integrity dilemma.
"Satisficing" – a made-up word created by combining satisfactory and sufficient – indicates something good, but not great. Like the Canadian single-payer health system, like Medicare for All.
A recent review identified 44% of "services" in Washington State's commercial coverage was wasted. A big chunk of that was unnecessary testing prior to surgery.
GMOs are completely safe. Insisting otherwise is intellectually indefensible. Yet, the University of California-San Francisco remains a stubborn holdout against reality. UCSF is nothing short of the academic home of the anti-GMO movement. In fact, the university is so dedicated to this position that it openly collaborates with conspiracy theorists.
Heart failure guidelines, like many established procedures, are the result of controlled studies. Front-line physicians use them differently than anticipated by their authors. Is it different in the real world?
Over the past decade, Americans' trust in the news media has collapsed. However, it can be restored, if the media dedicates itself to accuracy and correcting its mistakes. As we are learning Americans care less about a media outlet's political slant than its dedication to the truth.
Those who oppose vaccinations represent a form of tyranny, which occurs when a vocal minority overrides a complacent majority. Therefore, logic dictates that it's time to be less complacent.
If you're a wise adult of many years, you may have already sensed this. But now you have some supporting evidence to lean on, courtesy of the findings from a recent meta-analysis. Researchers determined that an individual's self-esteem peaks at roughly age 60 and remains at that high level until 70.
According to pharmacologist Ray Dingledine, good science is hard to do because of (1) "our drive to create a coherent narrative from new data, regardless of its quality or relevance"; (2) "our inclination to seek patterns in data whether they exist or not"; and (3) our negligence to "always consider how likely a result is regardless of its P-value." The good news is that this can be fixed.