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A judge in California is going to determine whether or not coffee causes cancer.

Think about that. We live in a society where judges and lawyers -- not medical doctors, scientists, or even a group of really clever AP biology high school students -- get to determine the credibility of biomedical research. The stakes are high: If coffee is deemed carcinogenic, then the State of California will be required to give up all pretense at common sense and sanity.

To give just a small flavor of the level of insanity California has reached, attorney Raphael Metzger and his group's trial lawyer NGO Council for Education and Research on Toxics (CERT - founded by U.C. Berkeley Professor Martyn...

Good science journalism is hard to find. In a world of fake news, the public needs trusted guides to help them understand complex issues.

The website Undark, whose stated mission is "true journalistic coverage of the sciences" seems a promising venue. Its editorial staff and advisory board contain some fairly well-known and respectable names.

That's what makes the website's publication of a Monsanto conspiracy article so troubling and, quite frankly, bizarre. The piece, written by Carey Gillam, deploys distortions and half-truths early and often. Literally, the very first sentence is a...

1. Discussing Vermont's bizarre and arbitrary GMO warning label law, set to take effect July 1st, Congressman Bob Gibbs of Ohio takes the evidence-based approach, and notes that thanks to biotechnology, the lives of the world's poorest are being saved - and the lives of everyone are being made better:

Numerous studies have been conducted to analyze the safety of GMOs. Countless reports show that GMOs are perfectly safe for humans while the American Medical Association even states “there is no scientific justification for special labeling of genetically modified foods.” The National...

If you're like me, you've eaten a fair amount of frozen pizza throughout your life and experienced few or no side effects. That's because this classic American cuisine carries no serious health risks. Provided you don't eat inordinate amounts of it, pizza is a perfectly fine meal choice. But it won't surprise regular ACSH readers to learn that our friends at EWG don't share my affinity for pizza rolls. “A slice of health problems: Frozen pizza chemicals linked to cancer, DNA and immune harms,” the activist group announced to its supporters in a July 29 blog post:

Although almost everyone has had this popular food item in their freezer at...

In the modern cultural climate, where the belief is you are what you eat, sometimes you can become convinced you get what you don't pay for -- and then sometimes you just go ahead and pay for self-identification.

If only there existed a large body of experts that acted in the interests of the public.

There are, in groups like the American Council on Science and Health, Genetic Literacy Project, ...

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), presents a new tool for determining the environmental impact of the 57,000 typical food products found in UK grocery stores, specifically Tesco. It then meshes that data to show which nutritious foods are produced in a manner sustainable to Earth.

The tool

Of course, the tool is an algorithm designed to look through a large dataset and draw conclusions about the environmental impact of producing a specific food product. This is not an easy task, primarily because our food labels do not indicate the actual percentages of each ingredient; they only list their order, from most to least. The research algorithm generates a “first estimate,” a rough approximation, of...

Two weeks ago, we reported on a bizarre decision by the online news arm of the journal Science: The outlet had reprinted an article from a politically slanted environmentalist website that hyped concern over a particular chemical. The article fell quite short of the high standards we associate with the journal.

Now, Live Science has done something similar, but it's far worse. Normally a reliable source of information (and an outlet with which ACSH has a reprinting agreement), Live Science published an article that is a dream for anti-pesticide and anti-chemical fearmongers.

The...

Chris Portier, Ph.D., an activist statistician who pushed to get the common herbicide ingredient glyphosate listed as a "hazard" for carcinogen labeling purposes while with the International Agency for Research on Cancer, only later revealed he was on the payroll of an anti-science litigation group that was targeting glyphosate at the time - Environmental Defense Fund.

A court deposition and the implicit threat of perjury should he lie forced Portier to disclose he was also being paid by a lawyer who wanted to sue over glyphosate once he helped get it declared a "probable" carcinogen. That left glaring questions: How did the law firm learn of the IARC...

world_peace_215759200 Credit:Shutterstock

Ignore the doomsday prophets claiming that chemicals are ruining us, sausage is killing us, and violence is out of control.

It makes for great fundraising but the reality is that the world is safer, we are living longer and better than ever, and thanks to advancements like natural gas, people have energy without harming the poor. The poor are doing better than ever - fewer than 10 percent...

Diesel exhaust is linked to an increased risk of lung and bladder cancer, according to a report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). The latest assessment reclassifies diesel exhaust from probably carcinogenic a categorization the group made in 1988 to level I, carcinogenic" to humans.

Given the additional health impacts from diesel particulates, exposure to this mixture of chemicals should be reduced worldwide, stated Christopher Portier, chairman of the IARC working group.

But it s important to keep two things in mind when analyzing the results. First, the IARC review was based on an occupationally exposed population, meaning...