If your child is allergic to milk, flavored plant juice alternatives like rice and soy, when fortified, can fill in some gaps, but outside necessity, they are not nutritionally equal to dairy, no matter what marketing departments claim.

Once upon a time, the US government protected consumers with Standards of Identity, they sued a cheese company for putting how much milk was in a slice of its cheese because of even the inference it had as much calcium as milk. 

No more. Squeeze any plant and add some vanilla flavor and you can call it milk and Washington, DC does not think that is deceptive.

The US FDA has approved Opill (norgestrel) for oral contraception as an OTC product, the first daily oral contraceptive approved for use without a prescription. That means as soon as the company can get it in drug stores, convenience stores, grocery stores, and online, they will.

According to surveys, half of pregnancies each year are unwanted, but in the modern health care system it can be difficult to get an appointment for a prescription, so this will make contraception readily available without waiting months. 

Norgestrel is well-established, it has been available for prescription use since 1973, so the company just had to show consumers would use it without as doctor telling them what was on the label. 

Environmental Working Group's annual organic food public relations piece, its 'Dirty Dozen' list, is out, and blueberries are the new target for their clients.

EWG produces the Dirty Dozen list by looking at USDA data on pesticides and suggesting detection of a pesticide will give you cancer.

Forget their non-existent command of science, this annual fraud is egregious because they don't list the pesticides used by their clients. Organic pesticides, which can be up to 600 percent higher than conventional, are not included. If they were, the entire Dirty Dozen list would be organic produce.

In 2012's "Science Left Behind", I noted a claim by a politician opposed to natural gas - after environmentalists had previously lobbied for it (see also: ethanol, hydroelectric) - who stated that extracting it was causing earth to deflate.

It wasn't the craziest thing in the book, that more soldiers on Guam would cause the island to flip over or that organic food used no pesticides would also have to be in the running, but people who believe it are going to believe it, just like media outlets touting a claim that we are pumping so much groundwater that we are moving the planet off its axis.

Since 1950, life expectancy has increased from an average of 46 to 73 years. Much of that is due to science, though you might not know it from accounts by activists and their political allies in corporate journalism. Medicine is better, food is more affordable, energy is more available at least, and the wealthy under solar panel schemes even get it free.

In humans, females are generally regarded as nicer - though not necessarily to each other. In many mosquitoes there is no pretense at all, males wander around pollinating and eating nectar while female bite you.

China is a communist dictatorship and known to be notoriously lax when officials are not around. Lab employees have been jailed for selling experimental animals in wet markets.

Wet markets like the one in Wuhan, where COVID-19 erupted and devastated the world, where two labs working on coronavirus exist. Where a database of coronavirus has been taken down so no outside scientists can compare pathogens.

During the Obama administration, government decided the way to reduce climate emissions was not to build nuclear plants or something sure to work, it was to mandate and subsidize...CFL bulbs.

That's right, the fluorescent lights that everyone had hated for decades were now going to be given to everyone at reduced cost - while everyone also paid higher utility bills to pay for the bulbs they didn't want but were told they needed to get because incandescent bulbs were being banned.

It was an idea only government could come up with and think it was smart science or economics.

Four years ago California voters passed Proposition 12, which goes around the often do-nothing legislature in Sacramento, which banned any sales of pork in the stare if the processor did not use California standards.

California also does this to companies in things like light bulbs and cars and even gasoline, which leads to higher costs. The state imports nearly all of its pork so the the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation sued on Constitutional grounds, saying that under the Commerce Clause one state could not dictate to all the others how it would occur.