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Twice a year, when I visit my in-laws in Poland, I get to dabble in the soft science of linguistics in my futile attempt to learn the Polish language. Few people outside my immediate family can understand me because what I think of as “speaking” others perceive as caveman-like grunts with a Yankee accent.

There sure are a lot of toxicology "experts" out there on the web, and they really don't like anything that is sweet (except maybe when they sell it). We recently wrote about sucralose (Splenda), which is trashed by these "Internut" know-nothings despite the fact that its safety profile is about as good as you'll ever see. But, these I-nuts are even more verbal about aspartame -- and the more verbal they are, the more they get it wrong.

Injuries are part and parcel of soccer. Sure enough, they do not seem to be decreasing, even though most top-level teams have embedded sports medicine into their operations. But if teams applied the same approach to the act of kicking a ball, as it does to overall skill development, rates of injury could decline significantly.

As people tend to get older, decisions about topics such as health and retirement can be a bit more challenging. The difficult decisions we make later in life are often important and can impact our lives substantially, meaning there may be fewer opportunities to recover from any bad decisions we make.

1. An unknown environmental group got a gaggle of activists together and tried to get us banned in Google as a spam site. Google is terrific about responding, of course, but they are also good about checking on those things to see, so we were back up and running soon enough.
They also paid someone to do a Distributed Denial of Service (DD0S) attack, which knocked off our site for a little bit. We are still tracking the location of the attack but our server company kicked into gear to stop them.

Vitamin D is one of a list of nutrients thought to be valuable in preventing, or treating, a long list of conditions. But according to researchers from the University of Alberta, for most conditions linked to vitamin D the evidence is weak, if not completely non-existent.

Attorney Bill Marler has collected $600 million suing and settling foodborne-illness cases. Right now, he's zeroing in on Chipotle over its E. coli and norovirus outbreaks. If your company does not want to be sued for poisoning customers, don't sell these six things.

The American Council on Science and Health is pleased to announce that the Board of Trustees appointed eight new members to our renowned Board of Scientific Advisors yesterday afternoon.

Researchers at Notre Dame University have been able to engineer a switch on immune T cell receptors, enhancing their capacity to recognize foreign proteins on cancer cells, which allows for precision targeting and killing.

Can calorie labeling really help people eat less? And if so, what type of label works best? A new study indicates that labels do help — and it may not make much difference for many people what type of label is presented.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer says it doesn't know if coffee causes cancer, which is a switch from 1991 when the agency, an arm of the World Health Organization, said it did. That's bad news for those who want to trust IARC's recommendations, because its reasons to reverse course on coffee are no more valid than its reason to have declared it possibly carcinogenic to humans in the first place.

Five different drugs, or drug combinations, are now available to help with weight loss. But which would be best for particular individuals? A new study provides some answers to this important question.

Often, experienced chemists can look at the structure of a chemical and make good guess about whether it will be toxic. But "eyeball toxicology" is not foolproof. Many of us got it wrong with sucralose. We were suspicious that it might be toxic. But it isn't, and here's why.

A recent meta-analysis published in BMJ Open journal suggests that LDL, which is commonly known as 'bad' cholesterol, does not increase the rate of death from heart disease. But before dumping your statins, it's important to review key flaws in the data.

When the sun is out, the boats are charged up and in the water: but swimmers nearby could be in trouble. Often undetected, electric shock drowning (ESD) is the cause of several fatalities each year, and it's entirely preventable.

Researchers have developed a new method of predicting disease progression in gliobastoma patients who have undergone standard treatment.

Have you ever met someone and, right off the bat, had the feeling that you could trust them? Next question: Was that person good looking? It turns out that if they were, your decision to trust them may have been out of your control. A new study shows that the same is true with "tweens." It's something to consider as our children venture out into the world on their own.

It is hard to believe that some cancers miraculously go away for good, but it does happen. Over 1,000 case studies document cancer sufferers who experienced spontaneous regression of their tumor. So why does this happen, and is it possible to exploit it to benefit cancer patients?

For parents, it's axiomatic that steering young children into sports is good for their overall health. But just like almost everything else, too much of a good thing can also backfire. Playing a sport too rigorously can produce devastating injuries for teens who are still developing, as can playing one sport exclusively year-round.

We've all stayed up too late to finish a project or study for an exam, depending on caffeine to keep us going. But according to a new study, that chemical assist won't work for more than a couple of days.

Patients who are too ill to eat have been fed by temporary tubes for many years. But, large numbers of nursing homes are now rejecting these tubes in favor of tubes that are implanted into the stomach, often leaving patients with no choice but to undergo surgery that they may not want, or need.

New sleeping recommendations have been released, and just in time to confirm what millions of Americans already knew: We are so sleep deprived. Yawn.

Nearly half of all Americans will receive a diagnosis of a mental health disorder in their lifetime. Yet at the same time the media continues to disproportionally associate mental illness with violent crime, despite that less then five percent of violence in the United States is attributable to mental illness.

With individuals afflicted with Kennedy's disease, muscle cells and motor neurons die over the years because they accumulate a protein that is mutated. Researchers have discovered that this protein has a self-protective mechanism through which the effects of the mutation are delayed.

The aftermath of the heparin crisis should put to rest any notions that there's a conspiracy to suppress a cure for cancer; to control your mind with fluoride; to hide a link between vaccines and autism; or to treat Americans as guinea pigs for GMOs. If there was any truth to those beliefs, somebody would have uncovered it by now.