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The recent fires in Canada that resulted in a few days of heavy smoke-related air pollution in the Northeast have momentarily grabbed our attention. The very vocal "enviro-fearful" are concerned with more fires to come; the quieter "enviro-fearless" shrug it off as bad forest management. Each side accuses the other of bias in their interpretation of these events. There's another predictor of the future that has no such prejudice, and they're signaling their alarm by getting out.

Change your words when you speak
Ernie Pyle
Finding a Solution to Food Waste
Instant Pot explains venture capitalism

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that "the liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint. There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good." Mask and vaccine mandates, therefore, are, under some circumstances, constitutional.

Pfizer has just completed phase 3 trials of a new antibiotic that's active against highly resistant Gram-negative infections. It's a real superbug fighter. But what took so long?

Masks were once confined to those celebrating Halloween or as historical notes about historic plagues. But they returned to command our awareness in the Age of COVID. There are differences of opinion on how efficacious they are: the overall benefit versus how much damage they might have done. A new study speaks to their physiologic harms.

Over the last few years, it’s become clear that using a patient’s race as a variable in some predictive models – like those involving kidney function – leads to poorer outcomes. Meanwhile, removing that variable leads to improved prediction of patient risk, more prompt treatment, and presumably better outcomes. A new study shows that by taking the race variable “out of the equation” the predictive model fares worse. Should we consider race as a determinant of health?

On May 29, the Vogtle 3 nuclear reactor was brought to 100% power for the first time. It's getting closer to adding another 1100 MW to the grid, with its sister plant, Vogtle 4, not far behind. This is significant because the Vogtle reactors are the first new nuclear power plants built in the U.S. since the 1979 Three Mile Island meltdown.

When a guy is standing at a urinal in a public men’s room how do subsequent urinators choose where to stand? This vital matter is the subject of an academic paper which I will try (but fail) to explain. Who cares? We both know this is thinly-disguised juvenile (and hopefully offensive) humor. In honor of June 21st - National Urine Day!

The chemistry of global warming (GW) driven by heat-trapping air pollutants is measured and reported. Various mathematical models have been used to project future global scenarios. Since natural sources of greenhouse agents are largely beyond our control, here we focus on anthropogenic sources mainly involving combustion – typically byproducts, rather than end products. I use statistical methods to estimate the situation in 2050.

With COVID-19’s “public health emergency” barely behind us, lawyers and policymakers are taking advantage of public sensitivity and planning for the next plague. How good their solutions are remains to be seen, but novel suggestions, and attention to new technology and historical practices, are few and far between.

Remember herd immunity, the early aspirational goal of our COVID strategy? It has arrived, at least according to some recent findings of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWR).

For the past five years, the DEA has classified fentanyl-related substances as Schedule 1 drugs, hoping it will reduce fentanyl-related overdose deaths . Deaths have nearly doubled since then. But, inexplicably, some in Congress think that placing fentanyl-related substances permanently on Schedule 1 will bring the overdose rate down.“

Both political parties use misinformation
Feynman’s learning technique
Anxious carnivore?
Car Dealers “one of the most important secular forces in American conservatism”?

Can a degradation product and chemical used to make sucralose – sucralose-6-acetate – damage our DNA? As is often the case, it depends. Here, it's about your metric of DNA damage and your exposure. Leaving the scary headlines and media confabulation behind, here's a breakdown of the study. 

It is a palliative care initiative in which clinicians inquire about and implement final wishes for patients who are expected to die imminently. The staff recognize that in their final hours, most people have fears, regrets, and maybe a last, often simple wish.

Negotiating for Medicare drug pricing - will it be the end of the world for Pharma?

It is increasingly clear that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to transform our lives in myriad ways, from weather prediction to military planning and in innumerable medical applications. I recently encountered first-hand a new, significant advance – the use of AI to improve the detection of lesions during colonoscopies.

For many complex medical devices such as endoscopes, sterilizing with ethylene oxide is the only method that does the job without damaging the device during the process. Approximately 50% of all sterile medical devices in the U.S. make use of ethylene oxide. The EPA’s ethylene oxide risk assessment demonstrates what happens when faulty data and bad modeling is used as the basis of regulatory policy.

It's not often that one stumbles across one million pennies in their attic. But this is just what happened to a California family. Those folks found sacks of pre-1982 pennies weighing 2.7 tons. Could there be a better time to look at the fascinating and colorful properties of copper? I think not.

Fast fashion refers to quickly designed clothing, easily produced from low-cost (cheap) materials and offered in trendy stores. Zara might be considered a fast fashion’s model. But what becomes of those no longer desirable clothes when the trend changes and the fashion shifts?

How to manage climate change remains a contested policy area, both nationally and internationally. Who will pick up the tab for the changes? One group of scientists has taken the moral high ground, saying “other agents bear substantial responsibility for the cost of redressing climate harm: the companies that engage in the exploration, production, refining, and distribution of oil, gas, and coal.”

Chemistry is hard enough to understand. But this already-convoluted field of science can be even worse because of some stuff that defies logic. Here are five examples.

Economists and policy analysts have long understood that enforcing drug prohibition indirectly increases the drug overdose rate. Now there’s empirical evidence showing it directly increases the overdose rate as well.

Taurine, a dietary supplement, is in the news because of a paper in the journal Science that showed multiple beneficial effects in mice (anti-aging, mental health, weight loss, etc.). Normally, I'm quite skeptical about such claims, but there is some pretty impressive evidence in mouse models, so I'm not so sure. Here's a short lesson on taurine.

There's much discussion about banning gas stove tops because they emit nitrogen dioxide (NO2). Claims are also casually made about these burners with little scientific support about the harmful effects of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and propane/natural gas emissions. Here are some obvious falsehoods and hidden biases in gas stove−childhood asthma research.