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How do mosquitoes find us? The question has spawned a multi-bazillion-dollar industry of gadgets, gizmos, and potions that work—for the people selling them. Now, a new Science Advances paper may actually have the answer. Here’s a very simplified version—just enough to give you the buzz.

Science has improved our lives in countless ways. Our food is safer than ever, once-deadly diseases are now preventable, and we have sustainable energy like nuclear power. Yet few people appreciate this progress—because our social media feeds are flooded with endless pseudoscience. Here's how one scientist is fighting back.

Across various fields, we constantly attempt to refine, control, and optimize complex systems. But whether it’s chatbots reshaping beliefs, cows engineered for more nutritious milk, drugs that suppress desire, or regulators chasing vanishingly small risks, each effort reveals the same tension: control involves tradeoffs. The issue isn’t whether optimization works—it’s what it costs and whether we notice it in time.

If sugar were considered addictive, everyday consumption would be a different issue. In that world, longstanding assumptions about responsibility, risk, and regulation would start to unravel and result in a fundamentally different conversation about health and governance.

From protein cereal and bread to protein popcorn and gummies, the protein craze is off and running.

We’ve reached the Final Four of our nutrition bracket, so it’s time to break down some of the hottest claims in nutrition right now. Our contenders? “Cane Sugar > HFCS,” “Fewer Ingredients = Better,” Protein Maxxing, and Fiber Maxxing. Only one will take the title.

“Bring out your dead” may be Monty Python’s medieval call, but counting them is still modern and often messy. Death certificates are less purely objective records than narratives assembled under uncertainty, shaped as much by omission and interpretation as by biology. Now, with COVID’s toll under examination, we’ve turned to machine learning—because if humans are biased, surely the algorithms we train will be better… right?

Catch the highlights on Dr. Bloom's two-part March Madness Supplement Smackdown series. Dr. Bloom breaks down eight of the worst supplements in two teams: Placebo Region, and Emergency Room visit.

Physicians don't receive enough training in nutrition. This has become a flashpoint in Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) and healthcare circles. Fair-minded people can disagree about how much training physicians should have in any particular area, but increasing the amount of nutrition education seems like an unobjectionable idea. However, the devil is in the details of how any new medical education would be rolled out.

Perhaps Netflix should stick to science fiction. It has gotten very good at sci-fi series—but real science? Not so much. Its new documentary, The Plastic Detox, follows a familiar formula: take a real issue, strip out the nuance, and replace it with something far more frightening than it is accurate.

Every so often, nutrition makes claims that require readers to suspend not just disbelief but basic understanding of physiology. One of the latest suggests that collagen, a protein usually marketed for skin, hair, and nails, could outperform whey in increasing lean mass and strength. If true, this claim would challenge what we know about protein quality, amino acid composition, and muscle protein synthesis.

A recent study in Nature Communications suggests that Americans living closer to nuclear power plants face higher cancer death rates. As interest in nuclear energy grows again, results like these can quickly influence public opinion and policy discussions. However, before making broad claims, it’s important to examine how the study was carried out—especially whether “proximity” truly reflects actual radiation exposure.

RFK, Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement hinges on the assumption that our country was once far healthier than it is today. The problem? It never was. By almost every metric, Americans lead longer, healthier lives now than their ancestors ever did. Let's take a closer look at the evidence.

AI has all but overtaken the thinking universe. Training an early version of ChatGPT consumes about 1300 megawatt-hours of electricity, roughly the amount used by 130 American homes. It takes a human brain no more energy than a conventional light bulb to perform the same task. The energy used by AI could be significantly reduced if we could get a bio-brain to do the work.

From tiny cells to vast cities, life persists by keeping chaos under control. The same thermodynamic forces that cause coffee to cool and batteries to drain also shape the challenges of public health. By examining populations through the perspective of entropy, systems theory, and the “boundaries” that organize living systems, we can better understand why health crises—from pandemics to metabolic diseases—require different kinds of collective responses.

Ethylene oxide rarely makes headlines, yet it quietly sterilizes about half of all medical devices used in the United States. Now, the gas is at the center of a heated regulatory battle after the EPA proposed repealing a Biden-era rule that significantly limited emissions from sterilization facilities. The debate underscores a deeper conflict between different cancer risk models, legal limits on regulatory authority, and the practical reality that modern medicine depends on ethylene oxide.

The terms “synthetic” and “ultra-processed” are widely (and opportunistically) used as warning labels and marketing strategies. Although they sound scientific, both rely on the same flawed logic: judging substances by how they are made rather than what they actually are. The body responds to molecules and nutrients, not to whether they came from a factory, a farm, a kitchen, or a pinball arcade.

The story is dramatic, but less explosive than one might imagine.

Regulators are moving toward policies targeting ultra-processed foods, but a fundamental issue remains unresolved: what exactly qualifies as one? Like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous struggle to define obscenity, UPFs often seem obvious until we attempt to draw a clear line. A new proposal suggests flipping the problem on its head by defining which foods are not ultra-processed.

Part 2. Every March, sports fans fill out brackets and pretend they can predict the unpredictable. Inspired by that tradition, this tournament pits some of the worst dietary supplements against each other in a battle for the title of March Badness. Some are useless, others are risky. The result? Nothing gets a trophy this year.

If there is one claim that should irritate any nutritionist who values scientific evidence, it is the promise that hydrolyzed collagen can reduce wrinkles and visibly improve the skin.

Public goods create a peculiar dilemma: everyone likes the benefits, but paying for them is another matter. Economists call this the free-rider problem—people can enjoy protection, clean air, or herd immunity even if someone else pays for it. Attempts to solve that problem often introduce a less celebrated, increasingly vocal counterpart: forced riders, people who feel they are paying for something they never asked for.

Drug policy and microbiology might seem like completely different worlds. But both are shaped by the same evolutionary principle: when pressure is applied, systems adapt. The rise of a new opioid called cychlorphine illustrates how drug markets evolve in ways strikingly similar to microbes developing resistance to medicines.

Public health has its own bracket of champions: breakthroughs that eliminated deadly diseases, revolutionized surgery, and opened entirely new doors in medicine. From vaccines to mRNA technology, these sixteen advances didn’t just win scientific matchups—they helped humanity cut down the nets against some of its toughest biological opponents.

Amid an explosion of aging research, there are plenty of “biohackers” out there jumping the gun without waiting for proof of efficacy.