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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is in the process of making a remarkable decision and one that will have repercussions throughout the US.  Its proposed safe levels in water for the “forever” chemicals perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) and its sulfonic acid (PFOS) are at extraordinary odds with other national authorities. 

In what may be the dumbest anti-vaping story ever published, The Guardian just highlighted a parent who gave his teenage son cigarettes to help him quit vaping. There's so much wrong here.

If this isn't newsworthy then I don't know what is. At the very least I can promise you that the article is even dumber than the title. Enjoy.

The death penalty is controversial enough on its own, but when you look at some of the dreadful methods used, mostly due to ignorance and incompetence, there is no way that these executions pass the "cruel and unusual punishment" test that the Supreme Court used in its 2008 decision on lethal injections. They are torture, plain and simple.

Carbon offsets seem like an ideal corporate solution. Trade your excess carbon for some organization producing "too little" carbon and balance the books. If only nature used double-entry book-keeping. As this reprint from The Conversation points out, "Satellites detect no real climate benefit from 10 years of forest carbon offsets in California."

Science is not easy. It isn’t easy to do or to write about. But some do it better than others in both instances. Consider this example concerning the massive decline in the Pacific Snow Crab population.

In 2002, a scuba diver ran out of air deep inside an undersea cave near the Island of Šolta, in Croatia. To avoid a gruesome drowning death, he supposedly stabbed himself in the chest. Did it really happen?

For the reduction and eventual elimination of animal testing, change is in the air. And it could occur faster than many previously believed. It appears that more powerful voices are joining the choir.   

There’s another “study” of the war on opioids for acute surgical pain. It turns out that the spouses of patients may be the ones filling those prescriptions. Oh my! Are these spouses diverting the opioids? Are physicians unethically prescribing them? How many are becoming addicted? The insanity of our drug laws.

Obesity is complex!
Disregarding competence for more diverse views
Disneyland’s E-tickets
Are our cars spying on us?

Thirty years ago, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) launched a PR campaign against a plant-growth regulator called Alar, effectively eliminating the use of the chemical in agriculture. What's the legacy of this infamous anti-chemical scare? The New York Times continues to attack good scientists on the say-so of environmental groups. The paper is trashing its credibility.

Remember Frances Kelsey? Jonas Salk? Everett Koop? They inspired us – they invigorated trust. Who leads the public health march now? And why don’t they inspire us?

Not-so-recent data from the National Firearms Survey garnered headlines when it showed that the number of individuals carrying a handgun in public places doubled between 2015 and 2018. And that was before the Supreme Court's decision on New York’s carry law.

Animal research’s benefits are clear – but public awareness of what it involves is not.

Some scientists say we need tighter gene-editing regulations to mitigate the serious risks associated with the technology. There are some critical flaws in their argument.

California Governor Gavin Newsom wants to mandate that public school students get their COVID shots. He's also fighting to exempt the state's correctional officers from a vaccine requirement. Let's examine the consequences of hypocrisy.

Just what we need: another COVID variant. This one is called Delta AY.4.2 and it's now circulating in the UK. It might be a bit worse than the already awful Delta variant. Should we be concerned? And what does this suggest about COVID in the future?

This article is written by Dr. Peter Attia [1]. It is helpful to understand the study of health, especially in the time of COVID. Summarizing it does not do it justice - so we are reprinting it from his website, with their permission.

Perhaps I should not give this study any oxygen, but the cherry-picking of words is so egregious that it must be called out. I am talking about a study done by the Lown Institute, a “nonpartisan healthcare think tank.” As Becker’s Hospital Review reports, “Overall, Lown found that “racial segregation is common in urban hospital markets.” Segregation? Does that word inform or inflame?

Pig pandemic, beef monopoly, agrivoltaics?, and deep listening.

Once, a long time ago, it seems, individuals used rules-of-thumb, fancy name heuristics to navigate transactions – social or commercial. As the scale of our interactions grew, rules-of-thumb gave way to algorithms, which were, in turn, unleashed to create new algorithms based upon artificial intelligence. Somewhere along the way, those artificially intelligent algorithms became dangerous. What is high-risk artificial intelligence? Spoiler alert – it is already upon us – welcome to our version of Skynet.

Most of us, up until COVID-19, would greet one another with a hug, handshake, or kiss. How did we learn these social conventions? More interestingly, how did the fist-bump or the high-five come in and out of our lives? The answer lies in how information spreads or diffuses throughout our networks. Therein lies an important finding, in the time of COVID-19.

“Scientists initially estimated that 60 to 70 percent of the population needed to acquire resistance to the coronavirus to banish it. Now Dr. Anthony Fauci and others are quietly shifting that number upward.” NY Times December 2020
“Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the US, Experts Now Believe” NY Times July 2021
Is this poor communication, flip-flop, or evidence of conspiracy?

Europe, as opposed to various national authorities, is well poised to provide funds to support the broken antibiotic market. If this ever comes to be, how will products deserving of such support be chosen? Separately, will European regulators continue their slide back to requiring infeasible clinical trials and thereby limiting access to new antibiotics in Europe or will they wake up?

A new study suggests that smokers who take up vaping may "relapse" to cigarettes. But this is more a problem of definitions than evidence that e-cigarettes don't promote smoking cessation.