Baby Boomers, the generation that gave us rampant alcoholism, divorce, over-medicated American culture, and denial of science to protect the environment, are now being targeted by marketing groups with claims you don't need medicine, you can cure disease with...food.

I'm not being mean to baby boomers, they also were the first generation to have a polio vaccine and they ended Smallpox. They paid the taxes that funded an optimistic War On Cancer and the successful moon landings and Medicare. I was just noting that if you are in the spin business, you can frame broad demographics, especially tens of millions of people, any way you want.

And that is being done with a report saying baby boomers thinks food - specifically organic food -is medicine.

In today's politicization of science news, California, which just got scolded by EPA for trying to put cancer warning labels on a weedkiller (of all things) pivoted to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos.

Last year, the scientifically wacky 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California - the most overturned appeals court by the Supreme Court of the United States - tried to order EPA to ban chlorpyrifos even though they hadn't seen any data showing it causes any defects in people. 

If you don't trust Centers for Disease Control claims on vaping, opioids, or pre-diabetes, you are not wrong. In the last decade they became increasingly unreliable for anything where they don't just gather data from states, like vaccine rates and how many people vomit after buying unpasteurized milk

On numerous other issues, they seem to pick a position and then torture data until they confess. And that is a concern about all their findings. In the case of gun violence there is a concern about their numbers they replaced one hospital in a small (60) sample with one that had more than 100 times greater non-fatal gun injuries its predecessor ever had. The new hospital added over 22,000 gun injuries to the 2015 national estimate which made gun violence look more common.

Since 1981, the beef industry had reduced emission intensity by 14 percent and reduced emissions due to land use change by 42 percent, yet in Australia, as in other developed countries, activists have done with emissions what they did with low-fat diets: Exaggerated a problem that does not exist to get money advocating for a solution that won't make any difference.

Australians seem to be willing to stand up for reason at a time when American (and British) journalists are more interested in evangelizing claims by their political allies.

Supplement salespeople, senescence biologists, and demographers have been scrambling to find ways to say their products or research are the secret to longevity. And super-centenarians, those who live to be 110, are most prized of all in those efforts.

But commonality is hard. Some drink alcohol, some don't touch it, some smoke, some don't eat meat, but it turns out many of them share a common trait - lack of an accurate birth record, finds a recent study.

In 2006, a provocative article in Trends in Plant Science claimed plants handle information in ways that resemble sophisticated animal nervous systems, even though they don't have brains.

Sorry vegans, you are eating another form of sentient life, creatures that can feel happiness or sorrow or pain, make decisions and even possess consciousness.

But the chances of that are “effectively nil,” retired plant biologist Lincoln Taiz and colleagues write in an a Cell article.

Millennials can't be blamed for lower alcohol consumption, that's just smart health thinking. But they are a barometer of future drinking habits.

Across all age groups, around 40 percent of 1,166 U.S. adults say they're drinking less than they were five years ago. A year ago 31 percent of drinkers said they were drinking less while 56 percent said they stayed the same. Of course, that means up to 11 percent could be drinking more but even that is an improvement over two generations ago, when the majority in their 20s increased alcohol consumption.

Until about 8,000 years ago, the British Isles were instead a peninsula attached to mainland Europe by a now-submerged world archaeologists call Doggerland. As the Ice Age ended, sea levels rose and former villages were swamped - but one event turned the slow rise of the sea into an apocalyptic terror. An underwater cliff collapsed along the edge of the Norwegian continental shelf that runs for six hundred miles along the Atlantic Basin and over 50 Mount Everests, of rock broke off and slid into the deep ocean, reaching a speed of 90 mph underwater. 

A decade ago, if you wanted to find a wealthy neighborhood, you looked for a Whole Foods. They knew that if they stuck a store in a wealthy location they would also find opposition to science, medicine, and agriculture - their ideal customers.

Now things are less clear. A new national study of grocery stores' impacts on nearby home values found the biggest payoff in neighborhoods with a Trader Joe's. The average home value near Trader Joe's is $608,305, compared to $521,142 near Whole Foods. They also sell lots of organic stuff but don't have employees pretending you're bad parents if you don't buy it, so perhaps that is why more wealthy people are going there. Which makes them open more stores which will allow them to sell Two Buck Chuck.