In a new epidemiology paper, men taking cholesterol-lowering statin drugs had different  prostate cancer screening results than non-users - in statin users, screening did not increase the incidence of prostate cancer as it did in other men.

The data came from the Finnish Prostate Cancer Screening Trial which started in 1996–1999. A total of about 80,000 men were included in the study, of whom just under 32,000 were screened with the PSA test every four years. 

Sometimes people ask me if there is an evidence-based way to manage the stress of dealing with difficult relatives at Thanksgiving, and my short answer is "chloroform."

In modern hippie dippie wellness culture, that may not be the response people are seeking, they may want validation of essential oils or an app, but one thing most people don't realize is that stress is not about fads or even other people. We manage stress, we only think it manages us. 

This year, you're going to pay 24 percent more for a turkey, a tough bite out of the wallet for poor people and a dose of reality for economists and armchair pundits who claimed prior to today's "stagflation" that higher prices are no concern.

Imagine how much higher prices would be if food suffered the yield losses that occur without modern pesticides. This year I am thankful for my health and my family but also science. Outside my house are signs thanking healthcare workers, delivery people, and farmers - and if they made one for science, including vaccines and pesticides, I'd own it.

A survey of 1,111 Americans who own houseplants wanted to find out which varieties are most popular and how much people spend on the hobby, but they also found out how much they anthropomorphize their leafy little friends.

During the pandemic, 68 percent of Millennials took up a new hobby and nearly as many grew their houseplant collection.

Perhaps that's become part of the new cultural dynamic. 57 said having a houseplant supported their mental health while 81 percent say houseplants are a reasonable substitute if they are far from nature. 

A demographically representative sample of 5,000 single adults between the ages of 18 and 98 finds a big switch in a post-pandemic world; only 78 percent believe being physically attractive is most important, compared to 90 percent in 2020.

And marriage is back. The number of singles who want a partner desiring marriage jumped from 58 percent  two years ago to 76  percent this year, with men and younger adults leading in the change.  Now, 42 percent of men are ready to find a long-term romantic relationship while women are just at 29 percent.


Not this year, men are leading the charge in heart's desire.

Recent survey results of 118 eight-to-twelve year-old children examined total hours of media consumed, hours of video game play, and number of media used concurrently. Then the authors correlated those to things like behavior, sleep, and psychological issues.

Do you remember the DAMA-LIBRA experiment? It is a underground detector made of sodium iodide crystals buried under the rock of the Gran Sasso mountain in central Italy, which took data for over a decade in the search of the elusive signal that slowly-moving, massive particles would produce when they bounced off atoms of the active detector material. 

There is nothing even remotely resembling collapse of civilization in the IPBES or IPCC reports. So why do so many people say that’s what they are about?

I think it may be at least partly a misunderstanding of what the IPCC mean by “transformative change”, a misunderstanding which sadly is promoted in many articles in the mainstream media. If anyone says this, they haven't read the reports themselves, or at least not carefully.

The IPCC’s “transformative change” is not a collapse. Nor is it austerity. It’s positive, it’s growth in everything we value.

Do cats adjust their behavior to what works to get what they want or do they nag humans until people begin to respond in more agreeable ways?

Some cat owners, and probably most dog owners, might argue that cats engage in the latter and when it seems like the former it is just a lucky meeting of personalities. A new study in Animal Cognition finds they 'read the room' better than expected.

Cats were presented with a solvable task (an easily accessible treat in a container with a loose lid) and an unsolvable task (a treat in a closed container) in the presence of either an attentive or inattentive caregiver.

For the last 10,000 years the earth has been in a warming cycle. The latest ice age ended around that time, a recurring phenomenon in nature where 90,000 of every 100,000 years were ice ages.

How warm has it gotten compared to other warming bursts since the last ice age ended? A lot. Maps of global temperature changes for every 200-year interval going back 24,000 years finds that the magnitude and rate warming over the last 150 years far surpasses the magnitude and rate of changes over the rest of the period - including when we were leaving an ice age.