The same mRNA technology that gave us effective COVID-19 vaccines could yield a new generation of highly protective seasonal flu shots. When will we see these upgraded influenza vaccines? Perhaps sooner than you think.
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When it comes to environmental politics, history and improved scientific understanding often fail to inform. And according to guest writer Angela Logomasini, an author and Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, alarmism and irrationality are prominent in the current debate involving flame retardant chemicals.
The scientific publishing industry is thoroughly dishonest and corrupt, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the journal Science are now also a part of the problem. Here's a disturbing case in point.
Friday's Chicago Tribune ran an interesting story on how quality control problems at many dietary supplement manufacturing plants were causing unsafe products that were making people sick.
Interesting, yes, but they completely missed the point.
The article mentioned a few cases, including a factory where a half of a rat found next to a scoop used to fill containers with protein powder. This puzzled me, since I cannot imagine how a half of a rat could possibly climb all the way up a table.
A retired psychologist attacked an article of mine about deranged Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo's views of public health policies toward the COVID-19 pandemic. His assertions ranged from the preposterous to the merely inaccurate.
AI. Blah blah blah. You can’t turn on the news without hearing about it constantly. So I decided to see if it knew chemistry. With a few exceptions, it did very well. Even when I tried to trick it.
When you have a baby on the way, everybody has "helpful" advice that isn't all that helpful. Most of it, in fact, is downright useless, and some of it is potentially very harmful. We'll start with the latter and revisit the useless in part two of this series.
Pesticides can be very dangerous; they're also vital tools farmers use to produce our food. Here's a guide to help you navigate the media maze of sloppy reporting on pesticide safety.
1. A website called the National Observer is an "online only" publication whose editor has been accused of political boosterism and using her publication to attack opponents of her family.
Perhaps the worst laboratory accident in recent memory occurred in 1996, when Karen Wetterhahn, a chemistry professor at Dartmouth, spilled a couple of drops of dimethylmercury on her glove. Thinking nothing of it, she simply changed gloves. Ten months later she died from mercury poisoning.
When it comes to the Zika virus, a quaint anomaly for decades, those who live in rural areas have much different ideas than urban dwellers on how to prevent the mosquito-transmitted infection from becoming a major health problem in the United States.
Who's smarter, an 85-year-old billionaire in terrific health or a "sue and settle" activist group that undermines science?
Methanol sounds scary but fear evaporates quickly when people find that even if you consume nothing but aspartame all day, you will get about half the methanol that's in a banana. Yet charlatans continue to claim artificial sweeteners will give you cancer.
ACSH has not published a study on this topic, but it took Google 0.17 seconds to come up with this:
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No Link Between Cell Phone Use and Brain Tumors, StudyMedical News Today, UKA new study has found no link between use of cell phones and the risk of developing a brain tumor. The study is published in the ...
Caveat Emptor. Consumers and journalists beware Anti-biotechnology activists engaged in a week of "direct action" at Starbucks Coffee shops this week aim to target you over the next few days with false and misleading information about food safety, nutrition and the environment. The same people who brought you a long list of other false health and environmental scares including the infamous Alar in apples scare, the Dow-Corning breast implant campaign and dozens of other debunked fears are at it again.
Caveat Emptor. Consumers and Journalists beware-Biodevastation activists aim to target you over the next few days with false and misleading information about food safety, nutrition and the environment. The same people who brought you a long list of other false health and environmental scares-including the infamous Alar in apples scare, the Dow-Corning breast implant campaign-and dozens of other debunked fears are at it again. This time the scaremongers are targeting such safe foods as milk and other dairy products in your local supermarket and at food retail outlets such as Starbucks.
The National Institutes of Health announced an initiative to study Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) utilizing data science. While pouring money into ASD research seems like a fine idea, the initiative and any corresponding announcements about results should be approached with caution.
With so much disinformation on the Internet, debunking junk science and bogus health claims could be a full-time job. Indeed, "debunkery" is one of the main reasons why ACSH exists. Narrowing down a full year's worth of nonsense into the 10 worst bogus health stories is quite a challenge. But we never shy down from a challenge. Here are the stinkiest stories from the past 12 months.
The Centers for Disease Control says that the “American food supply is among the safest in the world.” But a read of some recent news reports about toxic metals in baby food may have you feeling somewhat concerned. So what's really the state of the supermarket aisle? Let's take a closer look.
There are two ways that the media get meta-analysis claims wrong. And here's how to spot them.
Today, there is simply too much known in far too many diverse fields for any person to hold it all in their brain. This means that, no matter how smart one might be, there are times when we have to push the “I believe” button and simply accept the statements of others. The problem is that these others are too often wrong, the topic is too often very important, and the statements made are too wildly disparate. We feel we must choose, yet we don’t know how.
The "One Chip Challenge" – a ridiculous exercise in pain endurance – where people are dared to eat Paqui brand chips "flavored" with increasingly hot peppers may have been the cause of death of a 14-year-old boy who ate a single chip. But Paqui tries to portray their product as "healthy," for example, GMO-and-preservative free. What a bunch of BS.
Some activists are claiming that a "cocktail" of harmless chemicals is somehow doing something greater than the individual harmless chemicals can. These people don't just deny chemistry, toxicology and biology. They deny simple arithmetic.
In 2015, the American Council on Science and Health joined every reputable science body in being critical of yet another International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) monograph. In recent years they had become prone to selectively choosing studies to include in their analyses, almost as if they predetermined a conclusion and then found studies to match it.
One religious group forecast an apocalypse a few weeks ago. They used the Bible as its source. More recently, a newer religion warned of their apocalypse. But those followers cited Science magazine.
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