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Controlling Big Tech, why is infrastructure so expensive to build and maintain, climate migration is altering the diseases we must confront, and a users-guide to breathing.

Various degrees of hearing loss affect 70% of those adults over 70. It certainly contracts the “audio-world” we live in, but that is, unfortunately, just the tip of the disability iceberg.

OK, the headline is a bit like clickbait, I do not believe Ivermectin is useful, but I could be wrong. (Did I just say that?) A new study demonstrates how a rush to publish, (and possibly treat) may have resulted in poorly designed studies where a quiet signal is lost in an abundance of noise.

It's not all that uncommon for a chemical to be named after the place where it was discovered or even after the chemist who discovered it. But when this is applied to geology the results can be...amusing, or (better still), tasteless.

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.

In recent months, the media has called on celebrities to open up about their COVID vaccination status. Immunity is a shared space, the argument goes, and pro-vaccine pop-stars can convince the public that getting immunized isn't just a personal choice. There's some truth to this, but the argument raises touchy ethical questions about privacy that need to be answered.

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.

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.

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. 

A recent vaping-related lawsuit in North Carolina illustrates the problem with public health's black-or-white thinking about the effects of electronic cigarettes.

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.

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.

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.

A persistent characteristic of the COVID-19 pandemic is the large range of effects over time and among locations, often exceeding an order of magnitude. We analyzed cumulative effects over 15 months, and focused on variability among 100 urban counties concerning selected plausible risk factors. We developed linear regression models and found highly significant risk factors. These models explained up to half of the observed variance, much more than typical epidemiology studies.   

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.

The strange neurological symptoms of "long-COVID" may have an explanation: another virus. A study has examined whether COVID promotes the reactivation of the Epstein-Barr Virus, an ubiquitous herpes virus that causes mono in teens. The evidence suggests that this is, indeed, the case, and it's EBV that's causing some of the long-COVID symptoms.

I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t fear the big “C” diagnosis. Most people spend a lot of time trying to figure out where it came from. Is this the same kind of cancer that Great Aunt Sally had, suggesting heredity played a role? Maybe there was an environmental/lifestyle cause; spending too much time near smokers, back in the day when smokers were not isolated from the rest of society.       

How does frequent social media use impact our mental health? A recent study attempted to pinpoint the effects of spending hours on Twitter and Facebook, but the inherent difficulty in analyzing human behavior limits our ability to find a precise answer.

A detailed investigation has exposed troubling connections between Scientology-affiliated lawyers and anti-GMO, anti-vaccine groups. For years, these forces have colluded to attack safe medicines and pesticides, while slandering scientists and organizations that challenge activist rhetoric as "Monsanto shills."

Imagine you need emergency surgery, but the hospital’s computers are down – victim of a malicious ransomware attack. Processing blood-typing must be done by hand, delaying the results; X-rays can’t be transmitted to the radiologist on call for review. The hospital is refusing to pay the cyber-terrorist's ransom demand. All the while, your medical records (and you) are in limbo.

Less really is more, bagel rolling, how lucky we are, and the power and limitations of “following the science.”

For most of us, hiccups are a minor nuisance. But for a very few, it can be a chronic and debilitating condition. 

Facebook has proven itself incapable of reliably preventing the spread of "misinformation." If we needed more evidence, the company recently threatened to "restrict" the account of a prominent researcher for talking about science.

COVID-19 remains a seasonal respiratory virus, and the pandemic has waxed and waned with our summers and winters. A new study tries to quantify the impact of three climate variables: temperature, humidity, and ultraviolet light. The study also updates our understanding of PM 2.5.