Activists who just happen to take donations from competitors to normal farming - e.g. organic industry trade groups, corporations, and foreign nationals laundering money through offshore donor-advised funds - get paid to claim farming is a problem.(1)

Every country has people claiming to be native now, whereas in previous generations if you were born there, you were native. In reality, outside the cradle in Africa, no one is native.

Everyone was an immigrant, and over time everyone calling themselves native to an area now stole land from someone else and colonized it. It's impossible to know who were the first to arrive but science can use inference, and new evidence of human occupation in southeast Indonesia dating back 42,000 years provides some idea of the time and the route taken by some of the first humans to arrive in Australia.

I remember having been flamed, a long time ago, when in this column I ventured to claim that there was an inflation of physics conferences and workshops around, which to me looked both counter-productive (if there are too many such events, they become a distracting factor from research work, and returns are diminishing) and, I went as far as to propose, even unethical in some cases. I do not like being flamed, if only because it is yet another unproductive distraction, so I will not fall in the same mistake again here; rather, I have to observe that these days I am rather on the offending camp, so who am I to cast the first stone?

Each man kills the thing he loves, sang Jeanne Moreau in a beautiful song some thirty years ago. But the sentence is actually a quote from Oscar Wilde - aren't all smart quotes from that amazing writer?
Anyway, in some way this rather startling concept applies to every man except researchers in fundamental physics - both male and female, in fact. There, all of us love our Standard Model - it is a theory so wonderful and deep, and so beautifully confirmed by countless experiments, that it wins you over forever once you reach enough understanding of its intricacies. And physicists have tried, unsuccessfully, to kill the Standard Model for over fifty years now. 

Anomaly! Anomaly!

During last evening's Republican National Convention, speakers repeatedly invoked the fentanyl crisis and blamed lax border control and unchecked illegal immigration. Democrats, on the other hand, blame Big Pharma, and argue corporate exploitation of supply chain monitoring loopholes fueled the US opioid epidemic.

They are both right. Every high-profile death related to fentanyl had it purchased illegally, that is due to crime syndicates, while the other side argues that it doctors and pharmaceutical companies caused the addiction which forced them to go the illegal route.

Misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories have always been with us. The belief that Republican Vice-President Dan Quayle couldn't spell 'potato' or that Democratic President Barack Obama was not a citizen are common modern ones that still get repeated as facts.

A recent paper did something interesting with data from 100 hypertension trials around the world - it compared blood pressure reductions by the type of healthcare professionals who led the interventions.

The results were that pharmacists achieved the greatest improvements, followed by community health workers. The authors believe that, unlike in the government-controlled medical environment, especially if patients are subsidized or free under the Affordable Care Act, doctors and nurses don't spend much time, while pharmacists and community health care workers have calmer, more empathetic demeanors.

Alzhiemer’s, the most common form of dementia, is increasingly prevalent.

If epidemiologists were held accountable for the high costs, drug shortages, and food and chemical misinformation they cause, nonsense like claiming a type 2 diabetes drug that is popular off-label for weight loss in rich people also prevent dementia would stop.

Yet the reason so many "studies" by epidemiologists are being pushed onto the public now is because it is a fad. Fads, creating them or capitalizing on them, is big business for lawyers on one side and corporations on the other, and epidemiologists capitalize on that.

A new analysis has found that cirrhosis, a liver disease that occurs when scar tissue prevents the liver from functioning normally, occurs twice as often in trans adults as those whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.