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Aspirin shortages in the UK have left some patients wondering what to do if they can’t find it at the pharmacy. If someone turns to an old bottle in the medicine cabinet and notices a faint vinegar smell, it’s easy to assume the aspirin has gone bad and should be thrown away. In reality, that smell is far less alarming than it seems.

Stories about celebrities taking propanolol, a beta-blocking drug, are all over the place. It's being used to ward off stage fright. Does it really work, or is it just more celebrity nonsense? Hint - it works.

While much effort has focused on avoiding anthrax, history has also seen attempts to explore using the bacterial spores to inflict harm.

The term 'exploding trees' has been trending on social media, given the frigid cold temps blanketing the Midwest, and some influencers out there are fueling the misinformation. So what's the science say? Hear us out.

National Pie Day is here, which is strange because pie needs no holiday—it’s already the undisputed champion of foods. Still, if society insists, we might as well use the occasion to study pie’s rich history, questionable physics, and weaponization.

Twelve years ago, ACSH produced a video based on our publication titled: The Effects of Nicotine on Human Health. In a recent interview, ACSH's Director of Bio-Sciences, Cameron English, and Video Producer Ana-Marija Dolaskie revisited the topic to discuss how much, if anything, has changed on vaping and its safety, and whether or not the video's core message remains true today, more than a decade later.

The Kilauea volcano, in Hawaii, has been acting up lately, and all kinds of nasty stuff is pouring out of it. But perhaps the chemical of most concern – sulfuric acid – doesn't come from the volcano itself. It results from the expulsion of huge amounts of sulfur dioxide gas, the chemical precursor of sulfuric acid. Let's take a look at some hideous chemistry.

In a world where nutrition headlines swing wildly from fear to hype, even cheese can suddenly become a “brain-boosting” superfood. A recent Swedish study sparked excitement by suggesting that high-fat cheese might lower dementia risk—but the real story is far more complicated.

Imagine a world where your pill could actually tell your doctor: “Yes, I’ve been taken.”
That’s no longer science fiction. MIT engineers have created a revolutionary smart pill that reports from inside your stomach the moment it’s swallowed.

After nearly three decades of scientific review, regulatory reversals, and political hesitation, perchlorate is back on the EPA’s agenda—this time by court order. The Agency’s proposed national drinking water standard reflects less a newfound public-health urgency than a legal obligation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Yet this long-delayed regulation may finally force meaningful action where it matters most: the cleanup of contaminated military sites and surrounding communities.

As our tools get faster and smarter, what happens to the slower, human ways of knowing, reading closely, listening deeply, and caring attentively? Whether it’s the shift from a culture of books toward more fluid, AI-shaped communication, the way war supercharges innovation, or medicine’s growing dependence on screens, scribes, and algorithms, the pattern is familiar: “productivity” rises while human-centric nuance is endangered. Together, these readings probe the price of progress, who pays it when context, empathy, and reflection get compressed into data.

A new social-science paper delivers a surprisingly unsettling result: give dozens of expert teams the same data and the same question, and you get a wide range of answers. Even more striking, those results don’t scatter randomly—they tend to drift in the direction of the researchers’ own views.

Surgeons are supposed to have the steadiest hands in the hospital, But is that hard-earned skill, or just professional mythology reinforced by loud confidence? A delightfully tongue-in-cheek study found that while surgeons were fastest and most successful, they were also the most profane.

Despite years of scientific consensus debunking the "Blood Type Diet," the D’Adamo family has successfully transformed a biological myth into a commercial empire. By leveraging pseudoscientific claims about blood antigens and lectins, they have created a self-sustaining cycle of books and supplements that prioritize marketing over medicine.

Music tastes vary wildly: one person melts into Mahler, another lives for Sinatra, and someone else wants Snoop on repeat. But while most of us chalk this up to preference, neuroscience suggests something deeper may be happening. For some people, music simply doesn’t deliver pleasure the way it does for everyone else.

GLP-1s are basically appetite’s off-switch: suddenly you’re “full” after three bites. Congrats on the smaller meals and better numbers—just don’t act surprised when your nutrient intake also quietly declines. Weight loss is great; losing the nutritional plot along the way not so much.

Omega-3 supplements based on fish oils may have cardiovascular benefits for some people. But how do you know if you are one of them?

Health chatbots are not popular because patients believe artificial intelligence is smarter than their doctors. They are popular because chatbots offer something rare: time, attention, and the feeling of being heard. Their success tells us far more about what patients are missing from modern medicine than about the power of AI itself.

Alright folks, hot off the presses: the new US Dietary Guidelines for 2025–2030 just dropped, and I’ve got my very first thoughts, a hot take. Let’s raise some real questions.

These four pieces sketch a portrait of modern knowledge: abundant, persuasive, and riddled with blind spots. Kale’s “superfood” halo dims when we look closely at what the body actually absorbs, and food’s “dark matter” reminds us that nutritional science is still mapping vast unknowns molecule by molecule. That same uncertainty echoes in Tyler Cowen’s warning to trust literatures over single studies, especially when storytelling blurs the line between insight and embellishment. The promise of Medical AI becomes another version of the same question: can we use better tools to make decisions more accurate and timely without sacrificing the most human parts of care?

Dietary guidelines are never just scientific documents; they are also political and rhetorical ones. The new “Final Dietary Guidelines” read less like a neutral public health manual and more like an urgent manifesto about a food system gone off the rails. In this framing, “whole” becomes synonymous with trustworthy, while “processed” signals suspicion. That tonal shift—arguably as significant as any specific nutrient target—sets the stage for how the guidance will be interpreted, accepted, or resisted.

Had a chance to navigate the cough and cold aisle of your pharmacy? Good luck getting what you're looking for. And even if you do, it may very well not work.

Ladies, what if you could screen for cervical cancer from the comfort of your own home—no awkward exam, no long drive to the doctor, just a simple swab you mail in? This isn't some distant future... it's a brand-new guideline that's about to change everything for women's health, and it's a massive win that could save countless lives.

In 18th-century France, science was a men’s club, and women were expected to be ornaments. One aristocrat, the Marquise Émilie du Châtelet, quietly took on Isaac Newton, translating the Principia into French, correcting Newton’s mistakes, adding groundbreaking commentary, and shaping the idea of the conservation of energy. If you only know her as Voltaire’s lover, you’re missing the real story: she was one of the sharpest scientific minds of her age.

The Tuskegee syphilis study stands as one of the greatest moral failures in American medical history, a reminder of what happens when vulnerable people are treated as expendable in the name of research. The safeguards created in its aftermath were meant to ensure such abuses never happen again—but a new, CDC-funded study in West Africa raises disturbing questions about whether those lessons are being forgotten.