You may heard "chestnuts on an open fire" at Christmas but they are a lot of rarer than they once were. That is due to nature, and importation of a fungus that decimated 4,000,000,000 American Chestnut trees and caused this beautiful hardwood to disappear from eastern forests.

But after 28 years of research, an academic group solved the problem using a gene found in grains, strawberries, etc. It is completely harmless but prevents the tree from developing sores. It is nature fixing nature.

There was once a time when theoretical physicists were prized because they were basically smarter than most people - about one or two things.

I can save you some time. If the first few episodes of "Star Trek: Lower Decks" are any indication, CBS All Access won't be retaining a lot of new subscribers who signed up to watch it.

It's no secret that "Star Trek" from the 1960s and "Star Wars" from the 1970s hold a grip on cosmic fiction in culture, and they do so without much overlap. Their hardcore fandom, outside 'nerd' sterotypes on television shows, is pretty distinct. I prefer "Star Trek" because it's a little lighter in tone than the Sturm and Drang of the "Star Wars" universe, and that makes it perfect for a comedy.

Thanks to President Clinton's belief in supplements and alternatives to medicine, in 1994 FDA lost the ability to regulate a whole lot of products - as long as the products made supernatural claims and not medical ones, and put a disclaimer on the packages that no science was involved.

Center for Science in the Public Interest is a litigation group which claims to be consumer advocates over eeeevil corporations. They were formed by a group who worked for Ralph Nader and specifically wanted to sue food and beverage companies. A few years later the two co-founders left, leaving Michael Jacobson in charge. Jacobson is a microbiologist so why he felt he could correlate infant formula to lower IQ in kids was a mystery.

Michael Jacobsen is also a sexist demagogue who'd be forced to resign if he tried to do today what he did to female PhDs who stood up to his uninformed conspiracy theories before social media existed - suggest such women were using their feminine wiles to get all of those male scientists to side against him.

In 1787, U.S. Founding Father Thomas Jefferson wrote "Notes on the State of Virginia" and included five chapters relating to science. Of its climate he wrote a note about warming: "From the year 1741 to 1769, an interval of twenty-eight years, there was no instance of fruit killed by the frost in the neighborhood of Monticello."

A short while later, Noah Webster, later famous for his dictionary, went after Jefferson, noting that thermometers, which Jefferson loved, were terrible ways to record data and his micro-climate observations didn't mean anything.

The American Gastroenterology Association is paid to advocate for its members, so it's reasonable to assume they'll endorse anything that will make gastroenterologists more relevant.  But there are limits; they won't endorse fraud.

Perchlorate can harm infant brain development, say environmental lawyers. It is a rocket fuel ingredient in your water, say their marketing teams.

Both of those are true. Yet meaningless. There hasn't been a single instance of a child getting brain damage from perchlorate in water, it can only even be detected in water because in modern times we can detect anything in anything. Perchlorate is one compound in rocket fuel, but we share 50 percent of our DNA in common with bananas. That does not make you a fruit.

Surgisphere, a company that bills itself as having one of the largest and fastest hospital databases in the world, was riding high a few days ago. Their data had led to papers in both New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, they moved WHO to stop clinical trials because their data showed no benefit but some risks of hydroxychloroquine.

Not bad for a company with three employees and 170 Twitter followers.