New York Times Style columnist Nick Bilton worries the Apple Watch might give you cancer, so he consulted...Joe Mercola.

Yes, that Mercola, the famous homeopath who has been fined by the federal government for making bizarre unsubstantiated medical claims that probably sound legit to osteopaths and residents of Marin County, California, but make no sense in the evidence-based world.

Pity poor Albert Einstein. He is on more Facebook posters endorsing more causes and claims than he could ever have dreamed possible; sometimes he even uses modern colloquialisms in the quotes.

He's Einstein - if he said it, it must be smart.

There is just one problem, aside from the fact that he never said most of the things those glorified infographics claim he said - he was only smart about one thing. If you are taking his word about anything else, you are no different than if you take a Starbuck's barista's word on bST in milk. 

When the traditional American mafia was at its apex, they would 'launder' their money through legitimate businesses. If a mafia drug lord wanted to have anything approaching a worthwhile life, cars and rings and goomahs, but did not want to go the route of Al Capone and be busted for tax evasion, he had to find a way to make enough money appear to be legitimate that the illegal money can be used. So they would invest in businesses that provided them with income that could be taxed and explain their lifestyles, allowing them to use the much greater illegal money.

Though we once got a promise to restore science to its rightful place, instead it looks more and more of the same anti-science mentality we got from President Clinton in the 1990s: Catering to environmental fringe groups - even going to far as declaring a small oyster farm "heavy industry" in order to shut them down.

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, as staunch a liberal as we can get, tried to take a stand for science and small business but was unable to prevent the Department of the Interior from "using scientifically unsound, and at times bizarre, tactics to prove the oyster farm had to go."

Spores on the conidiophores of the fungus Penicillium notatum. Dr. Fred Hossler/Visuals Unlimited/Corbis

We used to recycle patient urine - to get penicillin.

Why? Because in 1940, during a World War, it was an intensive process. Getting usable penicillin from Penicillium notatum mold was no easy feat, says PBS: “In spite of efforts to increase the yield from the mold cultures, it took 2,000 liters of mold culture fluid to obtain enough pure penicillin to treat a single case of sepsis in a person.”

The Food Babe, Vani Hari, recently got renewed attention for a post she wrote in 2011 about the perils of air travel. Like much of what she says, it was unmitigated nonsense except for obvious stuff, like 'drink water' and move around every 30 minutes. Those are fine, though 150 people getting up in a tiny walkway every 30 minutes because they drank all that water is going to be nothing short of hilarious.

Do you have a hypothesis but think replication is a waste of time? Do you have no underlying theoretical basis for your field but feel like your particular study is well-controlled?

You may not be as scientific as you think you are.

The precautionary principle has been around in all countries and for centuries, it seems. 

The ancient temple of Perperion, south-east of the Bulgarian capital Sofia, contains a vampire burial site containing skeletons which all have an iron rod impaled through their bodies where their heart would have been - further evidence that people really did believe that vampires could rise from the dead if they were not buried properly.

Professor Nikolai Ovcharov, called Bulgaria's Indiana Jones, has also found 700-year-old corpses ‘nailed to the ground with iron staples driven into the limbs’.  There have been two vampire burials found around there in the last two years.

20 years ago President Bill Clinton and Senator John Kerry, currently Secretary of State, satisfied election pledges to voters and killed off nuclear energy in America. They insisted any nuclear power meant nuclear bombs, which was a public relations campaign of anti-science groups like Union of Concerned Scientists and Greenpeace but squarely in defiance of the evidence.

Nuclear power had already been on hiatus and America dramatically increased its use of coal. The resulting increased on CO2 emissions led to escalating concern about global warming but rather than accept their role in greenhouse gases, environmental corporations instead continued to lament affordable energy and demand more bans, taxes and regulations.