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Three hundred fifty thousand of you are predicted to die every year from heart disease caused by exposure to plastics, a new Lancet study says. But you can rest easy: the headlines don't match the threat. You are unlikely to be in a bag, plastic, or otherwise, anytime soon. Here's why.

This week’s reading list is your passport to places you didn’t know mattered and policies you didn’t know would hit your wallet. From Trump-era pharma tariffs to copper that powers your phone, and a banned library lecture that shouldn't be controversial — this is your brain on curiosity.

Red 40, Yellow 5, and Blue 1 may soon be history. Not because science says they're dangerous, but because the court of public opinion has ruled against them. In a move fueled more by consumer fears than by conclusive evidence, the U.S. government has decided to scrub synthetic food dyes from our plates, ushering in a new era of regulatory caution that looks much more European.

While flu and measles are making the rounds and COVID is still lingering, the only thing spreading faster than viruses is confusion over who’s really at risk. It turns out we still are unable to craft smart, evidence-based public health policy when it comes to aging.

It is easy to promise readiness for the next disaster; it is much harder to maintain the political and public will to prepare. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed leadership failures and systemic design flaws that left us exposed. We built a pandemic response system optimized for appearances rather than effectiveness. A recent review moves past partisan narratives, offering a sharper, more unsettling diagnosis: our institutions failed because they were designed against our very human nature.

Nobody denies that science is plagued by an epidemic of fraudulent and politicized research, nor that it wastes billions of taxpayer dollars. But is the problem severe enough to justify completely eliminating public funding for scientific research? Let's take a look.

When Mark Hahn asked me about "poisoning mosquitoes with human blood," I couldn't resist chuckling. It kicked off a lively conversation covering everything from mosquito-borne diseases to an exciting new painkiller — all in a day's work dissecting science for a curious audience.

You’d probably be horrified if a stranger licked your face on the subway.
But if that stranger has four legs and a tail, suddenly it’s "adorable."
Spoiler: Your pooch's mouth isn’t clean — it’s a petri dish with a tongue.

While HHS Secretary Kennedy frets over food dye in Froot Loops, his 2023 attack on Gardasil — a vaccine proven to prevent deadly cancers — reveals a troubling willingness to distort life-saving science for political points. RFK Jr.'s bizarre blending of misinformation and misplaced outrage underscores the urgent need to separate fear from fact when public health is at stake.

Colorectal cancer, long associated with aging, is rising alarmingly in younger adults, especially those born in the 1980s. Investigators are looking past family history and lifestyle to mutational signatures, telltale scars etched deep into our DNA, pointing to possible early-life exposures that set cancer’s deadly wheels in motion long before symptoms appear.

"Sugar is addictive." It's a widespread, well-researched claim — and it's probably false. The assertion oversimplifies complex eating behaviors driven by an even more complicated cluster of influences. While sugar intake can stimulate reward pathways in the brain similar to drugs, it lacks several key characteristics of true addiction, leading to a less satisfying but more accurate conclusion: We've picked a convenient scapegoat instead of solving our real nutritional problems.

What starts as digital applause can quickly devolve into a chorus of chaos. In the Wild West of online connections, praise, poison, and pseudoscience often sit side by side, especially when the topic is science and the target is women.

We’re often told to “follow the science” — a comforting phrase that suggests clarity, objectivity, and consensus. But in today’s hyperpolarized world, even science itself has become a political Rorschach test. A new study in Science reveals that Democrats and Republicans cite science differently and effectively operate from separate scientific realities.

“Rapid unscheduled disassembly” — the corporate version of “oops,” made famous by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Whether it’s exploding rockets, free-riding empires, AI on fast-forward, or a measles bioweapon conspiracy, this week’s reads ask: is breaking stuff the new innovation strategy?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and I rarely see eye to eye, but I’ll grudgingly admit he’s not entirely wrong about food dyes, though not for the reasons he thinks. His claim that dyes are fueling a national cancer “explosion” is both alarmist and unsupported by data. Still, in the risk-benefit world of medicinal chemistry, there’s a good argument to be made for flushing them, for reasons both scientific and literal.

The Trump Administration has gutted many areas of healthcare funding and research, especially in infectious diseases. One area that has been particularly hard hit has been research, prevention, and treatment for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). While the COVID-19 pandemic is still fresh in everyone's mind, the HIV pandemic seems to have slipped from the general public's awareness. It's time for a refresher on just how bad the 1980s were.

What if the next big thing in nuclear energy was a dusty old idea from the Cold War era? Once considered to power nuclear bombers, molten salt reactors (MSRs) are in the spotlight, promising safer, cleaner, and more efficient power without the pressurized headaches of traditional designs.

Imagine receiving the news that you're developing an extremely aggressive cancer — and that the only way to prevent it from spreading through your body is to amputate a limb. Shaken by the diagnosis, you research similar cases and come across what appears to be a lifeline: an alternative, marginal treatment not recognized by the scientific community yet praised in countless online testimonials as a possible solution.

One in three dementia cases could be prevented with something as simple as treating hearing loss. As scientists present compelling new data linking hearing loss to cognitive decline, the U.S. Supreme Court is simultaneously considering whether insurers must cover preventive care at all — a collision of science and politics.

Cannabis laws in the U.S. are what you’d get if a biochemistry textbook and a Kafka novel had a love child — nonsensical, inconsistent, and somehow both legal and illegal at once. THCA (which is not psychoactive) is now banned in Tennessee because when you light it on fire, it turns into THC (which is psychoactive), but whether that’s legal depends entirely on where you're standing when you use it. As if that’s not ridiculous enough, here’s some chemistry to make it worse.

Recent reorganizations and "reductions in force" at the FDA have damaged the very backbone of our public health system. Gutted by Administration-initiated layoffs and seemingly ideologically-motivated cuts, the agency tasked with keeping your food safe and your medicines effective is now stumbling through a bureaucratic fog in which innovation stalls and risks multiply.

Opinions regarding “safe” and unsafe foods vacillate more than hem-length fashion. While we disregard emerging data, fail to conduct sound research, and bury science at odds with popular and political platforms, blaming the “food victim” by denying medical benefits for allegedly food-related diseases – the latest proposal – doesn’t seem the most prudent course to safeguard American health.

They say you can’t turn lead into gold. But try telling that to a policymaker pitching retraining programs. Transforming coal miners into coders sounds efficient, even inspiring. But without foundational skills, all the job training in the world will, like the alchemists, yield only lead.

China’s dominance of the market for "active pharmaceutical ingredients" — critical components of drugs — has given it powerful economic leverage and introduced significant risk into the American healthcare system. That must be considered in the imposition of tariffs on Chinese products.

“Food is medicine” makes for a great bumper sticker. However, as a health policy, things start to fall apart. The MAHA model, born from a blend of good intentions and Instagram-friendly catchphrases, skips the messy parts: the collision of biology and policy in creating the chronic disease crisis it claims to cure.