Prior to natural gas hydraulic fracturing making played out gas wells viable again, America was in a real climate emissions pickle. In 1994, Democrats finally won their war of extinction on nuclear energy, they cheered as President Bill Clinton and Senator John Kerry(1) created regulations that act as bans and eventually forced through a series of anti-nuclear activists at the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

For years, many have feared that artificial intelligence (AI) will take over national security mechanisms, leading to human slavery, domination of human society and perhaps the annihilation of humans. One way of killing humans is medical misdiagnosis, so it seems reasonable to examine the performance of ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that is taking the world by storm. This is timely in light of ChatGPT’s recent remarkable performance in passing the US medical licensing exam.

Many women eat healthier during pregnancy, but that may mean whatever version of 'healthy' is trending in any given year. Sugar-free, low-fat, gluten-free, paleo, organic, it all has proponents, it all has suspect epidemiology papers claiming it should be a reason to buy some New York Times bestselling diet book built around it.

If a vaccine requires cold storage for shipping, many areas where infrastructure doesn't hold up are unable to receive them. A possible solution to this problem is a mobile vaccine printer that could produce hundreds of vaccine doses in a day.

The printer produces patches with hundreds of microneedles containing the vaccine. The patches can be attached to the skin, allowing the vaccine to dissolve without the need for a traditional injection. Once printed, the vaccine patches can be stored for months at room temperature.

In their paper, the scientists used the printer to produce thermostable Covid-19 RNA vaccines that could induce a comparable immune response to that generated by injected RNA vaccines, in mice.

Today I am traveling to Banff, a pleasant mountain resort in western Canada, to attend a workshop on systematic uncertainties. Yes, you heard that right - a bunch of physicists and statisticians will be gathering in a secluded location for a whole week, with the sole purpose of debating on that exotic topic. How weird is that? I bet most of you don't think much of systematic uncertainties. What are they, anyway?

Known unknowns

In 2016, The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act amended the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and created a mandatory requirement for EPA to evaluate existing chemicals using transparent methodology and risk-based assessment. Not simplistic epidemiology.

This was actually a good thing. We want to make sure people are still safe as new data arrive and since they were using science and not statistical correlation, we could have confidence in the results.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a United Nations epidemiology group headquartered in France, could be in ethical hot water again over the claim by a Ramazzini Institute leader that seems to know in advance that IARC will consider aspartame a carcinogen - a designation which leads to automatic warning labels or even bans in places like California, which under Proposition 65 turned over its science to IARC last century.

Alcohol is a legitimate class 1 carcinogen that is prized by most of the world. While claims of health benefits were always suspect epidemiology, so were claims that even a glass of wine during pregnancy would cause birth defects. The dose still makes the poison but as modern science journalism became more advocacy-driven, claims that any dose is probably a poison became common.

New results show that the number of reported cancer cases in the National Cancer Database during the COVID-19 pandemic declined by 14.4 percen, which means over 200,000 cancer cases were not diagnosed and/or treated.

The reasons were unclear, perhaps concern about catching COVID-19 or being symptomatic but not wanting to go to the doctor because of media claims about those unable to get care for SARS-CoV-2. The results are more obvious; a lot of people are at greater risk. 

New research shows that dairy products have made life easier for thousands of years. Even in places that are a challenge for anyone, like the Tibetan Plateau - the “roof of the world.”

Genetic engineering due to natural selection at several genomic loci certainly made early Tibetans better able to survive high elevations, but those did nothing for calorie requirements. A new study finds that dairy made it possible. Ancient proteins from the dental calculus of 40 human individuals from 15 sites across the interior plateau show that dairying was introduced onto the hinterland plateau by at least 3,500 years ago.