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Are you your dog? Is your dog you? The science.

1. I was on a podcast with Julie Gunlock of the Independent Women's Forum to talk about Rachel Carson and her book "Silent Spring", which argued that manmade chemicals affect the health and safety of humans.

A doctor talking about gun safety is not advocating gun control. Let's get politics out of medicine.

Policy decisions should be based on evidence in order to provide the most benefit for the health and safety of the public. However, there are scant guidelines for making sound evidence-based policy focused on the intersection of science and society. The Brussels Declaration offers a 20-point blueprint for a set of principles to guide policy makers in this area. 

"Every night on the television news now is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation," lamented the former vice president in his opening remarks for the Climate & Health Meeting. After all these years, he still has a warped penchant for apocalyptic exaggeration. 

Thanks to an arcane FDA law that protects American companies, Marathon Pharmaceuticals has repackaged an "orphan drug" used in Europe – and is now allowed to charge 5,500% more than if we bought it from there. And that's not even the whole story.

Not only does bariatric surgery provide substantial weight loss to the obese, but it can also ameliorate the metabolic derangements of diabetes and decrease their need for medications. And, a new randomized study found, these beneficial results aren't transient — they were still apparent five years post-surgery and were superior to the results of strictly medical treatment.

Tattoo artists must lean over their customers and maintain steady positions, sometimes for hours at a time – and the physical strains they endure can be significant. That's the key finding of the first-ever study of its kind, researchers say, measuring neck- and back-muscle stress at work.

Since “fake news” seems to be the current buzz-worthy expression, let's point out that we don't have to look very far to find common medical falsehoods that originate in the Land of Celebrity. Like bubble-headed actresses who get attention for no good reason, here are some phony claims that lead the way.

Many people take multivitamins "just to be safe." That may not be a good idea, and now a new paper suggests that people who consume too much vitamin B3 might be at higher risk of developing eczema.

Kim Jong Un's half-brother Kim Jong-Nam was assassinated – with a poison. No one knows what it was, but that hasn't stopped chemists from speculating. Here are a few of the intriguing possibilities. They are almost certainly wrong.

Three separate bills have been introduced in the U.S. Congress that are designed to drive a stake into the vampire-like Independent Payment Advisory Board. It has no members, little funding and bipartisan support for its demise.  
 

Public health experts have noted the unexplained increases in childhood asthma and autism spectrum disorders over the past few decades. A recent review has linked such ills to the coincident increases in obesity in women of childbearing age.

A co-founder of the "March for Science" says that it's "time for everyone to get on board." Okay, sure. We'll get on board – pending satisfactory answers to serious science policy questions.

Among the conclusions from a newly-released study focusing on women's military service during the Vietnam War – both in uniform and as civilians – one is rather eye-catching: That longer service corresponded to greater happiness and life satisfaction decades later. 

Recently a baby boy was born in India with two penises and four legs. How do '"parasitic twins" develop and what causes this? And what conditions prompt duplications in the female anatomy?

A recent study on how olive oil affects HDL and LDL (good and bad cholesterol in your body) has us wondering.. Is all cholesterol created equal?

Who knew that you would wake up one day, only to find that you have 79 organs – rather than the 78 you went to sleep with? It didn't exactly happen this way, but the classification of the mesentery as an organ is an important discovery with many medical implications. 

A new report, entitled "Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance," addresses three major applications of genome editing. However, it includes a focus on making changes in the DNA – germline editing –that can be passed down through generations. 

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan recently announced their intention to "cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children's lifetime." But if that's their goal, then perhaps their initial funding ought to be aimed at fighting the underlying cause of so much of the world's suffering – poverty.

A recent study featuring Robert Marchand, a 105-year-old French cyclist, produced a conclusion that was at odds with conventional thinking, in that significantly improving one's aerobic fitness after the age of 50 or 60 was, in fact, possible. 

Kombucha, a fermented tea product, has theoretically been around for a couple of thousand years. But so far, no one has collected data on its benefits! We doubt that there really are any — though marketers say it will prevent, treat or cure everything from cancer to allergies.

Instead of offering an organ to someone else, what if a person wants to sell one for their own benefit – to help pay off college debts, or for a down payment on a new home? If it's ethical to donate an organ to someone in need, why isn't it to sell an organ to somebody in need? Could the free market help fix the organ trafficking dilemma?

With the legal and political advances in marijuana legislation steps ahead of medical research and science, a false perception of safety coming from dispensaries exists. Meanwhile, researchers have discovered many bacteria and fungi contaminants that could pose great risk to the most vulnerable.

A Chinese group just pulled off something that has eluded chemists for decades. Chemists made and isolated a simple, but highly-unstable creation called pentazole for the purpose of studying it as an explosive. And they didn't even blow themselves up.