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A warning just published by the British Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency alerts women and their healthcare providers that some medications and herbal preparations can interfere with the efficacy of emergency contraceptive pills.

A team of international researchers, in collaboration with the World Health Organization, recently assessed the share of global disease burden that was directly attributable to environmental risks. Their findings were published in the Journal of Public Health.

Some people just come right out and ask if you will simply repeat, in public, what they say. In fact, it is such a given in the anti-science community, where the technique is so common. Amazingly, brazenly, those folks often just blatantly ask each other to parrot their work, no matter how flawed it is. Here's how Friends of the Earth does it.

With medical letters and the general health of the presidential candidates recently being the big topic of discussion, who's medically fit or unfit in 2016?  What condition would cause you, or a major party, to disqualify someone running for President of the United States? (The answer is different for a physician.)

Karl Meltzer's newest feat, setting the land speed record traversing the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia, was unquestionably remarkable -- and newsworthy. Yet among its media coverage, two of the most prominent reports played up the angle that one particular aspect of his achievement — the ultra runner's food consumption during his historic dash — was in some way bizarre. However, for the most part, that was just not the case.

In the science community, when dealing with people who are either evangelists in a war they know little about or are simply anti-science, this is known as "moving the goalposts." Basically, you just keep changing your argument every time the old one is shown to be invalid. That is what Greg Glassman, CEO of CrossFit, is doing.

Activity trackers of all sorts have become must-have piece of technology — the theory being that they can encourage people to move more. But can activity trackers added to standard behavioral interventions help people lose more weight and maintain the weight loss longer? A recent study says ... not so much.

AMR is inevitable. As people keep finding ways to kill the microbes that infect us, those microbes, through evolutionary processes, will mutate to counteract them.

The UK’s report, A review of Antimicrobial Resistance,  is a well-considered blueprint of a financially viable way forward. While it may not find its way to your nightstand, it should be required reading for our legislatures.

I must admit that I still love books, not e-books, but the physical object and that lets me wander through bookstores making serendipitous discoveries. To my great joy, I found this new release, The Kingdom of Speech, as I was about to leave my local bookstore. Here is my report.

Golden rice — bioengineered to contain beta-carotene — has the potential to decrease the toll of blindness and mortality due to vitamin A deficiency in the developing world. A new study modeled this potential when varying degrees of substitution and beta carotene content are involved. For the poorest, the benefit can be substantial.

In an excerpt from Morning Consult, Dr. Robert Popovian, Senior Director of Pfizer US Government Relations, offers five suggestions for policy makers about pricing, cost, and value of innovative therapies.

First came the mosquitoes.
Now, the houseflies.  They buzz around the TV screen, land on your head, and they won't leave you alone! What do these trespassers actually want anyway? And why do they like us humans so much?

For this issue, why should an economist lead? Why not a health economist? The answer: Many of the urgent problems are economic, so we need an economist, especially one versed in macro-economic issues and the world economy. To stop the global rise of drug-resistant infections, there's a supply-and-demand problem that needs to be fixed.

The international protest "March Against Monsanto" was never based on truth. The movement perpetuated myths about GMOs to demonize a company that has a really bad PR department. But now that Bayer is buying out Monsanto, what is MAM to do? It's now promoting everything from anti-vaxxer propaganda to historical conspiracy theories.

For various reasons, fruits and vegetables grown out-of-season don't taste as good as the in-season variety. And some foodies turn their nose up at greenhouse-raised tomatoes. But a team of researchers from Purdue University wanted to determine if it was possible to enhance their flavor.

A water birth video recently went viral without much mention of safety. Proponents of this fringe delivery method are solving a problem that we don't have. Human birth is an unpredictable and often traumatic journey — so why add a risk factor to an already-risky endeavor?

Questions were raised about Hillary Clinton's health after a recent public dizzying episode. Her doctor released a "summary update" on the presidential candidate's health, "since the release of [her] previous medical statement in July 2015." What does this letter mean?  Not everything and not nothing. 

What exactly happens to the lungs when someone stops smoking and starts vaping? A new study in Clinical Science tries to answer that question. The authors sought to evaluate the impact of smoking cessation on lung function and smoking related symptoms, using electronic cigarettes.    

Ovarian cancer is the most deadly cancer of the female reproductive tract — at least partly because it is not found until it has progressed. New research on mouse models of the disease suggests that there may be a way to halt that progression — by disinhibiting the body's immune system and allowing it to attack the tumor(s).

A proposed resolution by the New York State PTA, to be voted on at their November convention, supports mandatory labeling and a GMO ban from school food. The resolution, which is shocking coming from an organization that, is packed full of pseudoscientific thinking and anti-biotechnology propaganda.

For the second time this year, the EPA has published a report placing glyphosate in the "not likely to be carcinogenic to humans" category.

1. In the 2008 campaign, both Senator's Obama and Clinton promoted fear and doubt about vaccines, thinking they were capitalizing on the anti-business sentiment of their voters. Really, they were both against science, something they criticized the opposing party about when it came to the climate. In 2016, it seems like only the kooky fringe is against vaccines, wealthy elites from the coasts relying on poor kids for herd immunity on one pole and sub-literate people catering to a naturalistic fallacy on the other. 

Claims that the “the science isn’t settled” with regard to climate change are symptomatic of a large body of ignorance about how science works. So what is the scientific method, and why do so many people, sometimes including those trained in science, get it so wrong?
The first thing to understand is that there is no one method in science, no one way of doing things. This is intimately connected with how we reason in general.

Bayer, the German conglomerate, has agreed to buy Monsanto, the seed and pesticide company, for $66 billion, ending speculation about the acquisition. Now, the speculation turns to American anti-science groups and how they will continue to demonize a company that isn't part of evil America, but instead is based in the Europe they love to invoke.

Sure, there are chemicals in your dust: phthalates, phenols, flame retardants, etc; they come from your furniture, flooring, toys, and cleaning products. None is toxic to your children, but one could be harmful in the fight against antibiotic resistance.