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OCA, the notable militant trade rep group famous for creating anti-science Deniers For Hire like U.S. Right To Know and funding many others, has now laid its cards on the table, saying it wants every competitor of their clients gone. The pro-science side always knew that, but it's still odd to see it spelled out. 

Perhaps the most problematic classification system in the scientific community is that of the impact factor, which attempts to rank journals by their relative importance. This factor for a particular journal is equal to the average number of times an article in the journal is cited in a given year. While this sounds useful, in practice, it has been a slow-motion train wreck.

Chinese researchers tested the combined effects of acupuncture and electrical stimulation on individuals suffering from chronic constipation. And they did find some differences compared to controls. But we think they could have contributed more to science's understanding of acupuncture.

Because most kids will forgo eating and sleeping in order to play video games, it is up to parents to regulate the time they spend on them. But, how much is too much? A new study shows that one hour a week is the sweet spot that allows some of the beneficial effects of gaming without causing harm. 

Instead of discovering it, Watson and Crick solved the structure of DNA -- one tiny piece of a very large puzzle. Here, we highlight everything that was known before their 1953 paper.
 

“every time you hand somebody a slice of the cake a tiny little bit comes off, like a little crumb, and you can keep that. […] pretty soon you have enough crumbs to make a gigantic cake.”
 
Medicare pays physicians 106% of the average cost of the drug; the 6% to cover administering the drug – a crumb, Solomon Melgen recognized the crumb. Does his name sound familiar?

For those of you following our series on foreign bodies in the body, fasten your seat belts cause this ride is about to get bumpy. It takes quite a lot to faze Dr. Jamie Wells (and her peers), but for interested observers here's some insight into the medically not-so-mundane world of things that don't belong in certain places.

It is a widely held view that once a medicine has left the pharmacy, its safety and quality cannot be guaranteed. Which means that a vast amount of prescriptions get thrown away despite having never been unsealed and touched by human hands. But there's talk now about how newer packaging technologies can provide safeguards and potentially allow for the reuse of medications.

The story of Liberia’s former research chimpanzees is both well-known and contentious. A non-profit blood bank, the New York Blood Center (NYBC), set up a virus-testing laboratory in the country in 1974, and wild chimpanzees were trapped from their forests and housed within the “Vilab II” facility. They were subjected to medical experiments and were intentionally infected with hepatitis and other pathogens to help develop a range of vaccines.

The outbreak began with a Michigan parent who was diagnosed with shingles last October. Despite acquiring first-hand knowledge of the pain and discomfort of shingles, the parent apparently took no significant action to protect his or her 5 kids. Within a month, one by one each came down with chickenpox. And then it spread outside the family home.

Last year roughly 17,000 car occupants nationwide needlessly died because they failed to take just three seconds inside the vehicle to virtually guarantee their safety. The three-point seat belt, a Swedish engineer's breakthrough invention in 1959, remains the single most effective automotive safety feature ever created. But it's being ignored too often, which explains the current, sharp rise in traffic fatalities -- and the nation's biggest one-year spike in 50 years. 

If you're thinking about going to Consumed the Movie, Amy Porterfield Levy will disabuse you of that notion—hilariously. 

Up to 40 percent of Americans want alternative ways to treat pain, fearing dependence on medication and adverse effects, or inadequate pain control. So-called “alternative treatments” offered by acupuncturists and naturopaths are neither cheap nor covered by insurance. And given a recent study published by the Mayo Clinic, we simply say: Save Your Money.

1. California declares water unsafe, and hands bottled water companies a giant subsidy. What do you do about water? While water is essentially safer than it's ever been, it's still in the news. Flint, Michigan made national headlines for lead-contaminated water even though it's at least 16X more safe than it was when all of the politicians in Michigan blaming each other grew up there.

Not many people in the UK, and probably in the US too, are aware that overweight and obesity are risk factors for several types of cancer. A new report from Cancer Research UK indicates that the majority of those surveyed were ignorant of that fact. This doesn't bode well for the economics of health care in the UK, and the same is likely true for the US since we're even fatter than our cousins across the pond.

In America, despite the public shaming of anti-vaxxers, the anti-vaccine movement remains fairly strong. Yet it has nothing on the anti-vaxxers in France, a country where over 40 percent of its citizens believe vaccines are unsafe, according to a recently published survey of 66,000 people across 67 countries.

Andrew Silver, Inside Science -- Tiny robots taken into the body and controlled by brain patterns could someday help deliver medicine on demand.
The payoff would be tremendous if the technique could be perfected.
"You can get only the dosage you need only at the time you need," said lead author Shachar Arnon, a former computer science graduate student at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel.

The "follow the money" argument is an intellectually lazy fallacy. However, if you really do think that money will change our minds, then write us a check.

It's nearly impossible to get every last drop of liquid foods out of their containers. Ketchup and syrup are among the worst offenders. Up to 15 percent can be wasted due to such inefficient packaging. But a team of engineers, mostly from Colorado State University, has devised a solution to the world's sticky container problem using a super-hydrophobic material.

A purportedly serious publication in a serious forum that was recently published has given rise to a bunch of breathless headlines related to Complementary and Alternative Therapies. I presume that this is what was intended, as the supposed good news story is, in fact, one of the most blatant examples of quackacademic confabulation seen in ages.

It might be wise to consider that while Dr. Amir Attaran was completely wrong in his predictions that the Summer Olympics in Brazil might possibly lead to worldwide Zika virus transmission, there are reasons to believe that the Canadian professor's clarion call turned out to be notably, if inadvertently, beneficial to global health.

Twin pregnancies are at high risk of stillbirths, as compared to mothers carrying just one baby. This risk increases five-fold when they each has their own placenta, and 13-fold if twins share it. Complications can often happen in pregnancies near term that have otherwise gone well, with no single cause identified for this occurrence.
 

By now, anyone who has perused the grocery aisles has seen the plethora of products that proudly proclaim they're "gluten-free." But the number of people that need gluten-free foods — those with celiac disease — hasn't increased. Are people being seduced by ads, or is there some other rationale for making gluten-free choices?

WebMD earned its recently-bestowed moniker, WebBM, by spewing out one poop-related story after another. But they have really stepped in it now. The site, which we will now also refer to as WebD-U-M-B, published an article on fast-food scares that was really, really stupid. 

A major protein inside the egg, called ovalbumin, possesses the sulfur-containing amino acid cysteine. When heated, these sulfur atoms are converted to hydrogen sulfide, the nasty gas associated with rotten eggs and bodily functions. It doesn't take much to wrinkle our noses.