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The first member of the cephalosporin class of antibiotics was discovered in the 1940s, in a sewage pipe in Sardinia. Now a group has isolated some novel compounds from lichens gathered in northern Quebec. Three of these have modest antibacterial activity. Can chemists make them more potent? 

1. A student at Emerson College has gone John Birch Society, alleging he just sort of knows fluoridated water must be bad for us because he read it somewhere on the Internet and thinks being contrarian to accepted science and medicine is journalism. Well, it is. Shoddy journalism, anyway, and the world is already deep in that.

One of the latest fads—turmeric—was supposed to cure everything from Alzheimer's to baldness. But it doesn't do anything. Why? It's all about how herbs, spices, supplements... are tested. A review in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry makes this very clear. 

Food and nutrition companies always capitalize on whatever fad diets are currently in fashion to shamelessly promote their products. Science is usually of secondary concern. Now, Nestlé wants in on the action, promoting an alleged nutritional drink, claiming that it's low in FODMAPs. Huh? What are those?

New research shows that when it comes to packaged foods and beverages sold in Canada, two of every three items contain added sugar of some kind. That jarring news comes from a report by Public Health Ontario and the University of Waterloo, a joint venture that included studying labels of more than 40,000 supermarket products. 

In 1976, Barry Kidston, a chemistry grad student, would find out the hard way that you had better be careful with your reaction conditions when making psychoactive drugs. He got a little sloppy, and instead of making a pure derivative of Demerol, got an impurity in the batch, which gave him Parkinson's with one injection. Six years later, a group of six "frozen addicts" suffered the same fate. Crazy brain chemistry.

Sex is considered an essential component of life and wellness. Touch, intimacy and the resultant pleasurable physiologic responses bestow a number of benefits. So is sex-on-prescription insurance coverage in our future?  

Ellie is the "first ever digital UV sterilizing pod." Do you still need to wash and sterilize baby bottles? Yes, of course – drinking milk from unwashed containers would make anyone sick. But does everything that newborns place in their mouths need to undergo UV irradiation? Absolutely not. 

The Massachusetts' legislature recently passed a bill titled, "An Act establishing a board of registration in naturopathy," that will give the naturopaths legitimacy. Regarding the health of the people of the Bay State, it's one of the worst moves that officials there could have made. 

Anyone who searches long enough can find that pretty much everything has been linked to cancer. Bacon. Cell phones. Wi-Fi. Even looking at our video correspondent, Ana Dolaskie. At some point the insanity has to stop. Unfortunately, we have yet to reach that point. 

Although surgical masks protect those wearing them, pathogens collect in the mask's filter. The mask then becomes another vehicle for spreading an infectious disease. But not any more, because now there's a very clever solution to this longstanding problem, using table salt. 

If one can get past its superficial reputation, there's value in understanding why photographing oneself has become a global phenomenon, and what in human nature drives billions of people to do it. In fact, researchers have identified three behavioral types of selfie shooters. We know you do it, too, so which one are you?

How are your New Year's resolutions going? Ana Dolaskie's are getting on swimmingly....

Dr. Josh Bloom was interviewed by Dr. Joe Schwarcz, an award-winning chemistry professor, lecturer and author, during which the Council's pharmaceutical expert discussed his recent experience with opioid denial. You're familiar with Dr. Bloom's writings. But for all of you wondering what he actually sounds like, listen to the conversation.

New research shows that the instructions on those little bottles – indicating that dime-sized drop is sufficient – are wrong. To properly coat your hands, you need to apply about 3 mL of sanitizer, or more than half a teaspoon. Here's why. 

The role of infectious pathogens causing secondary diseases is well established. But although suspected, the correlation of childhood infections and type 1 diabetes has not be proven. A recent Finnish study shows a strong correlation between enterovirus infection in children and the development of diabetes. Is this one more piece of the puzzle?

Listen up, slackers: You can no longer use "work" as an excuse to avoid burning calories during the week. Turns out, you could get your best workout in over the weekend, without lifting a finger Monday through Friday.

How to spot greenwashing? When supposedly tiny David vs. Goliath local environmental groups all sprang up after getting money from the same large anti-science foundations.

If Donald Trump's anti-vaccine tweets were not enough to make the scientific and medical community nervous, there is another reason to be concerned. Very concerned. The president-elect met this week with Robert Kennedy Jr., a vaccine denier and one of the most outspoken proponents of the false claim that vaccines cause autism.

A rare genetic disorder that transforms a person's hands and feet, in particular, into tree-bark-like warts and cutaneous horns made news recently. It's truly out of the ordinary. So what's this all about? 

Whether you love him, hate him– or have no opinion at all – Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump's nominee for Attorney General, is right on the money when it comes to addressing the opioid overdose-death crisis. 

Spoiler Alert: If you love fried chicken, and knowing that pigs are intelligent interferes with your love of bacon, do not read this.
“ … Chickens are misperceived as lacking most of the psychological characteristics we recognize in other intelligent animals and are typically thought of as possessing a low level of intelligence compared with other animals.”

The much-anticipated intelligence report, which concluded that Russia tried to influence the recent presidential election, had another startling, yet widely ignored, conclusion: The Russian government promotes anti-fracking propaganda in the United States, via its "news" network, RT.

After being bitten by a mosquito, who among us hasn’t been tormented by the resulting itch? Now, imagine that intensity and urge to scratch spread over your entire body, in a constant and unrelenting fashion – night and day. This condition has a name: chronic generalized pruritus.

A new MIT study projects that innovative, app-based carpooling in New York City could create unimaginable reductions and euphoric efficiencies in taxi traffic. But we need to point out that those brilliant researchers considered everything except for one tiny detail – the psyche of the demanding New York taxi passenger.