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Are open methods, open data, and access are essential requirements underlying transparency. But are they enough to establish the integrity of research? How frequent is “research misconduct,” and what factors would encourage such behavior? A new study reaches some tentative conclusions. 

New COVID-19 cases (infections) and deaths began a steep decline in January, followed by fewer deaths a few weeks later, resulting in lower case-fatality rates. Vaccination rates began to increase during this period, but not everywhere nor for everyone. Did these public health benefits result from increased vaccination rates?  

A Texas wedding this past April became an unintentional experiment in vaccine efficacy. All 92 guests were vaccinated but COVID disease broke through in six people. Four of them got one of the mRNA vaccines and developed one mild illness. Two got Covaxin, a vaccine developed in India. Both became very ill and one subsequently died. The culprit was the dangerous delta variant.

Cultivated meat refers to a “meat-like” product grown in a laboratory, not a cow or pig raised listening to Vivaldi. As the market for plant-based “meat-like” products rapidly expands, is there a place for food produced in the laboratory?

Plant-based meat alternatives are a rapidly growing market, bound to be accelerated by Beyond Meat’s recent introduction of a plant-based chicken alternative. A new study makes a nutritional comparison that significantly goes beyond the required Nutritional Facts panel.

The world, or at least the media, has been captured by the space race of two titans of industry, Sir Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. While the amount of CO2 created by their flights is, in itself, insignificant, if space travel is truly for tourists, those amounts will surely rise.

The DEA lifted its 2007 ban on methadone clinics sending out mobile units to reach people in communities underserved by the clinics. But patients are required to take the methadone in the presence of clinic staff. A better solution is to let doctors prescribe take-home methadone, like they do in Canada, UK, Australia--and they were permitted to do as an emergency measure during the pandemic.

A new study suggests that vaccine lotteries won't boost COVID-19 immunizations. Politics and hypocrisy may help explain why these incentive-based campaigns yield disappointing results.

Usually an excellent source for science-based commentary, The Conversation recently published, to put it charitably, a questionable article about the dangers of the weedkiller glyphosate. What did the authors get wrong? Almost everything.

Those of us who are non-millennials may remember back to the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s when the hottest environmental issue was acid rain. In fact, acid rain generated as much controversy and international conflicts as the big environmental issue of today, climate change, with scientists, policymakers, and politicians engaging in heated battles over this issue.  

Pesticides can be very dangerous; they're also vital tools farmers use to produce our food. Here's a guide to help you navigate the media maze of sloppy reporting on pesticide safety.

So far, 11 different variants of COVID-19 have been identified and assigned a Greek letter for identification. Although delta (originally from India) is making all kinds of trouble worldwide, it will eventually be replaced by something worse. All the more reason to get vaccinated now.

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.