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Your donations at work: We were at the FDA, the National Institutes of Health, as well as Congress. And that's only when we weren't getting hate mail from anti-science activists, who simply can't accept that they're slowly losing ground in popular culture.

Treating breast cancer with a very high dose of chemotherapy doesn’t improve survival any more than if a standard dose is used. And as guest writer Nicholas Wilcken writes, a recent paper has now capped decades of research debunking the idea that, if only we could give a high enough dose of chemotherapy, we could cure breast cancer.

I offer full disclosure right up front: I love FoxNews. It is my favorite channel. Other than a brief peek at NBC's Today show at 7am each day, FoxNews is the only channel I watch. I find them to be, as their logo brags, "fair and balanced." It seems that many other Americans agree with me: FoxNews is frequently cited as being #1 in national viewership of cable news channels.
But despite my great allegiance to Fox, I think there is room for improvement at that network. A lot of room.

ACSH has not published a study on this topic, but it took Google 0.17 seconds to come up with this:
Results 1 - 30 of about 156 related articles. Search took 0.17 seconds.

No Link Between Cell Phone Use and Brain Tumors, StudyMedical News Today, UKA new study has found no link between use of cell phones and the risk of developing a brain tumor. The study is published in the ...

Skepticism is hard. As a recent best-selling book noted, doubletalk is a pervasive part of an attention-driven, media-dominated economy. But we can't just choose to doubt everything all the time, or we'd never be able to get out of bed in the morning for fear of the floorboards inexplicably collapsing. So we each come up with our little rubrics for deciding what to discount.

It was little over a month ago when the headlines blared, sugary soda kills 184,000 worldwide. Now, a new analysis of that claim from STATS.org reveals the numerous statistical and epidemiological fallacies underlying that claim, rendering it wholly unbelievable, likely the work of ideologues, not scientists.

Coke does not think that doling out 1/1,000,000th of their annual revenue is causing any group to go from hating soda to promoting it. Yet simplistic conspiracy theorists often insist it must be so.

In the Fall of 2021, the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine announced that “licensees may face disciplinary action should they “generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation.” Meryl J. Nass, MD, a Maine family practitioner, had her license suspended for this in January 2022. She is suing, claiming a first amendment right to her speech.

If you watch TV, ads for Coca-Cola's Smart Water are inescapable. Also inescapable is that the ads suggest that the stuff will make you smart or perhaps offer some other health benefit. But the only thing smart about Smart Water is Coca-Cola's ability to make you shell out money to buy something you could pretty much get from a fire hydrant in Newark.

Most of my dieting or weight-conscious friends rely on the bevy of artificial sweeteners on the market to aid their quest of finding “their svelte outer selves.” For example, we have saccharin, the oldest of the bunch, sucralose, aspartame, and stevia, available in rainbow-pastel-colored packets for the asking. Is one better than the other?

If you're worried about Monkeypox, school shootings, car accidents, or any other possible threat to your health, stop this instant. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has identified a greater risk for you to fret about—frozen pizza.

Fox News claims Americans are obese primarily because they eat too many carbs. The science behind this idea is still not compelling.

Science should always be open to new approaches and ideas. Perhaps this seems self-evident, but although this may sound good in theory, many scientists view new approaches challenging their long-held beliefs with skepticism or downright hostility. Rather than rationally examining ideas that cause discomfort, ideas are off-handedly dismissed, and the people advancing them are attacked. This is the scientific version of “cancel culture.”

When words like "world-renowned" are used in the medical realm (especially by people selling something, like an unnecessary product or procedure), beware. And then prepare yourself with a healthy dose of skepticism.

CNN's science team must have been in a coma when they swallowed whole a nonsense study about 9/11 dust raising cholesterol in kids. They look pretty foolish, but not nearly as much as the study authors. It will be some time until anyone can "top" this. Don't hold your breath. 

This ancient warning resonates today as measles, a highly contagious and once nearly eradicated viral illness, experiences a resurgence. Fueled by misinformation and vaccine hesitancy, recent years have seen a troubling increase in cases, threatening the progress of public health efforts.

Science and law are both relatively recent human creations. Applied science made its appearance well before its written version. The people of the British Isles erected Stonehenge, and the Egyptians built the pyramids. The science of that time was goal-directed, finding a better way to live in the world and connect with the controlling powers of their gods. Today, science has taken on new roles, especially in understanding those controlling powers and seeking ways to better predict and manage them.

In case you've been waiting around for a really stupid article, your wait is over. And a gratuitous shot at Dr. Alex Berezow. Just for the hell of it. Happy holidays!

Organic food gets by on marketing and labels. The difficulty seems to be that labels like organic have no legal meaning, FDA Comissioner Gottlieb is setting his sights on the problem. 

Sometimes it's good to recognize your limitations.
For example, I could describe how DNA works, or how to make crystal meth, poison your neighbor or blow stuff up. I won't, but I could. And I'd know what I was talking about.
Perhaps I could also write something about teapots from the Ming Dynasty if I read about it on Wikipedia, but in reality I wouldn't know one if it fell off the Chrysler Building onto my head.

If vaping is a gateway to smoking, where are all the new smokers?

Netflix has declined to carry the agriculture documentary called "Food Evolution", for reasons they refused to specify. Like all documentaries, it is clearly a passion project so when disappointments like that happen, passions run high as well, and lots of speculation occurs among the fans. Some believe it's a conspiracy against science, that Netflix is politically aligned with the groups who make their money scaring people about food. (1) Others give them a pass and say science documentaries are probably just not a draw for their audience.

Since it's all the rage these days to preach about how drugs are killing people left and right, it's only natural that drugs like Valium get dragged into the conversation. But how dangerous is it really? You may be surprised.

We did not evolve in a world of plentiful food; instead nature was out to kill us. Today, food is a commodity and when something becomes a commodity, it takes a while for culture to catch up. Science has outpaced our cultural maturity, and it has led to a certain amount of doublethink about food.

This seems like an opportune time to take stock of how we re doing as an antidote to all that junk science so pervasive in the new media. So this article is entitled ¦..Junk Science Report Card