Fresh off poisoning thousands by introducing tainted, illegal additives into vaping devices (including dangerous synthetic marijuana, which just resulted in a conviction), the marijuana supplement industry (cannabidiol, CBD) is under scrutiny again.

This time it is Rooted Apothecary LLC, of Naples, Florida, for illegally selling unapproved products containing cannabidiol with unsubstantiated claims that the products treat teething pain and ear aches in infants, autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as well as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, among other conditions or diseases.

In India, farming is being held back by the efforts of activists like philosopher Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., who charge $40,000 per speech to tell Western audiences that more science in their country is bad. 

Experts argue just the opposite, it is instead activism holding India back that has made farmers less able to to compete in a global market. 

Scientists have written a paper talking about how they "rediscovered" a pesticide that had never really been forgotten but had been ignored because it was created during the Nazi regime and really expensive; DFDT, a chemical relative of DDT. German scientists called it "Fluorgesarol"(1) and "Gix." DDT is dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane and DFDT replaces the chlorine atoms with fluorine so it's difluorodiphenyltrichloroethane.(2)

It’s so good to see some climate scientists at last starting to speak up about the awful over the top things Extinction Rebellion activists are saying, though I wish more would speak up and speak up more strongly.

Rupert Read is a philosophy professor. Don’t watch his video if you are like the children and adults I help who get terrified of climate change.

Yes we do need to act on climate change. But we need to be informed by science. He is surely well grounded in philosophy. However, what he says in the video about climate science is mistaken.

There is a war on opioids and legitimate pain patients have been caught in the stigma of recreational abuse. High-profile class action lawsuits against drug manufacturers are going to create an "icy chill" for pain medication just as they ran antibiotics out of the country.

A new paper finds that instead of leading to more honest replies, presumably because people don't think about the response, time pressure questions actually increase the likelihood of socially desirable answers over honest ones.

There’s a longstanding belief in the field of psychology that limiting the time subjects have to respond to questions will result in more honest answers. Certainly, many of us who have participated in personality tests have heard the directive to “say the first thing that comes to mind.”  However, a recent study demonstrates that the quickest answer — especially if it is not the most socially desirable — still may not be the most truthful one.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already re-configuring the world in conspicuous ways. Data drives our global digital ecosystem, and AI technologies reveal patterns in data. Smartphones, smart homes, and smart cities influence how we live and interact, and AI systems are increasingly involved in recruitment decisions, medical diagnoses, and judicial verdicts. Whether this scenario is utopian or dystopian depends on your perspective.

When papers came out stating that cutting back on red meat didn't make any difference in your real risk of getting cancer, because a normal diet did not cause any more cancer, it came under fire by critics who had spent an alarming chunk of their careers criticizing modern diets.

The most recent preprint in the ArXiv this evening is an APPEC report on the neutrinoless double beta decay. This is the thick result of a survey of the state of the art in the search for a very (very) rare subnuclear process, which can shed light on the nature of the mass hierarchy of neutrinos. Oh, and, APPEC stands for "AstroParticle Physics European Consortium", in case you wondered.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Eli Lilly and Company's Reyvow (lasmiditan) tablets for acute treatment of migraine headaches in adults. Though used colloquially by everyone who feels like their headache is bad, a clinical migraine is an intense throbbing or pulsing pain in one area of the head that often brings nausea and sensitivity to light and sound. 

The effectiveness of Reyvow for the acute treatment of migraine was demonstrated in two randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials. A total of 3,177 adult patients with a history of migraine with and without aura treated a migraine attack with Reyvow in these studies.