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Truthfully, writing about science and health often involves more reading than writing. With the infodemic on the COVID-19 pandemic underway now for ten months, there are an enormous number of articles to sift through. A new and useful AI tool makes the search a bit easier.

SPOILER ALERT How I make “the sausage” of my writing follows. 

As a science “journalist,” I can get feeds of upcoming articles across a wide range of topics. Each piece competes with the others for my attention with a snappy line or two, which entices more than inform. Those that have piques my interest lead to a page description that can lead to the articles themselves if I am still awake and paying attention. As a result, I read far more science now than at any time when I was an active clinician. For...

In 1812, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte of France was considered unstoppable. The weather did not get the memo and he slunk out of a Russian winter, defeated.

Three years later, he again attempted to conquer Europe and lasted for 111 days. He was hindered by poor military judgment, an inability to maneuver, and superior odds against him. Unless it was the weather again, which is the premise of a new article in Geology.

The author, Dr. Matthew Genge of Imperial College London (1), argues that the Mount Tambora volcano, which erupted in Indonesia and was the most powerful in recorded history (killing 100,000 people and giving us ‘the year without a summer’(2) in 1816), was a hidden corps working against...

A worker stacks cranberries during America s first food scare, in 1959. Credit: PHOTOGRAPH BY TED RUSSELL / THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION / GETTY. Link: The New Yorker

 

No Cranberries for President Eisenhower, read an Associated Press headline in 1959. The dire warning came from the Secretary of the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (predecessor to the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services) who found that some cranberries had tested...

Some websites declare everyone has used or been exposed to glyphosate at some point, providing a treasure trove of potential plaintiffs. One plaintiff’s lawyer claimed,

“It is ubiquitous….[Indeed] it is difficult to conduct a study comparing those who had been exposed and those who had not because it was difficult to find people who had not been exposed, because ‘[i]t’s pervasive.’”

For such a pervasive chemical, [1] Roundup’s supposed carcinogenic impact appears relatively low, with...

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is a non-profit with an agenda to shine “a spotlight on outdated legislation, harmful agricultural practices, and industry loopholes.” Like others in the scientific “scare space,” they believe that BIG government regulations are evil, biased by BIG business; their equally biased special interest regulations are “better.”  Their latest white paper consists of guidelines for radiofrequency radiation, done by their staff, accepted by a peer-reviewed journal based on a study done by the US Dept. of Health and Human Service’s (DHHS) National Toxicology Program. [1]

I have asked two of our scientific advisors Dr. Karam and Susan Goldhaber, to comment on the EWG report, which we will do in a four-part series over the next week. Before I turn the...

What Is an Egg?

An egg is a nutritious food. Eggs provide high-quality protein and a variety of vitamins and minerals. Eggs are relatively low in calories and saturated fat, but their cholesterol content is higher than that of most other foods.

In the Food Guide Pyramid, eggs are part of the group of protein-rich foods, officially known as the "Meat, Poultry, Fish, Dry Beans, Eggs, and Nuts Group." The...

Credit: StarTrek.com

Writing at Reason, Ron Bailey dissects some worrying trends and then highlights some insight on cancer which, I am proud to say, came from us.

One worrying trend for environmental activists remains genetically modified organisms (GMOs). I think the GMO hysteria is basically over because it is off-patent, so the big argument that anti-science cranks have...

Screen Shot 2014-03-17 at 3.11.19 PMWe ve been hearing them for years proposals to tax certain foods or beverages because of their purported health effects. Now a Belgian professor, Olivier de Schutter, has issued a statement, according to a Reuters report, that Unhealthy diets are now a greater threat to global health than tobacco. To cope with the issue, de Schutter draws a parallel between tobacco control, and we guess food control. His statement was issued at the annual meeting...

Those of you who have been following the phony opioid crisis already know that nothing makes sense. Those of you who follow the madness that is called Proposition 65 in California also know that nothing makes sense.

Now we can put them together. If you're expecting this to make sense you will be deeply disappointed. If you're in the mood for something that puts the Crazyometer® needle in the red you will not be disappointed. 

STUPID GOVERNMENT TIMES 2

First, opioid idiocy. Anyone with a functioning neuron knows by now that the decade-long crusade against pain medications has been a colossal failure on every level. Millions of pain patients are suffering because they can't get the pain meds they need. Doctors are suffering...

1. Governments love to pretend to accept science if it means more revenue for government employees, and nothing has been more prone to confirmation bias than that "sin" taxes are for the public good. Yes, they can correlate higher costs to lower uptake but that is simply government fiat handicapping the free market - there is not much evidence that sin taxes lead to better outcomes

Smoking is down, but it did not go down more because New York City dramatically increased taxes on cigarettes. Instead, in NYC the black market took over, then cops were told to enforce penalties on sales of "loose" cigarettes because revenue from cigarette taxes dropped, and a guy died on the street because he was selling them, to national outrage. Smoking went down because we...