Is glyphosate damaging essential microbes in soil? A multi-year study sought to answer the question using real-world conditions.

Glyphosate (e.g Roundup) is the most popular weedkiller in the world, and that has made it a target for some disreputable competitors, primarily those in the organic food segment, who promote their own chemicals as alternatives. Their chemicals, they claim, don't harm soil but glyphosate does.

The world is aging. After centuries of relentless growth, many advanced economies are getting older, and even in poorer nations, the share of elderly people is rising. Larger and older populations are creating historic pressures on health care systems across the world.

Brown adipose tissue is different from the white fat around human belly and thighs. Brown fat helps to turn calories into heat and it was once thought that only small animals like mice and newborns had brown fat but some adults retain it.

If some people have it, perhaps others can activate it also, and a study found a previously unknown built-in mechanism that switches it off shortly after being activated.  Which means it doesn't help against obesity. A group discovered a protein responsible for this switching-off process called AC3-AT. Mice that genetically didn't have AC3-AT were protected from becoming obese, partly because their bodies were simply better at burning off calories and were able to increase their metabolic rates through activating brown fat.

By and large, particle physicists confronted with the need to awe and enthuse an audience of laypersons will have no hesitation in choosing to speak about the Higgs boson and its mysteries - undoubtedly a fascinating story that requires one to start with the 1960ies and the intuition of a handful of theoretical physicists, and then grows epic in a crescendo of colliders that sought and missed the Higgs boson, and then the LHC which finally found the elusive signal of production and decay of that particle.

Most people who try a diet don't succeed in keeping weight off long-term and that is trumpeted as a huge failure of dieting by people who, wait for it, are often selling a competing diet.

The health truth is that even if you fail, you improved your health. Claims that people whose weight go up and down are dying earlier are just the same bad epidemiology that has journalists lamenting that International Agency for Research on Cancer activists claim pickle juice and aloe vera cause cancer.(1)

You're not  a Frank-people because you eat Doritos, despite what people writing lifestyle/diet books and New York Times journalists who gush over them want you to believe.

Such claims are pure food populism by rich white people for rich white people. It's not science, it's instead not even right enough to be wrong.

If the government promises every home a great gardener, most people recognize they won't get a great gardener at all, they will probably get someone who couldn't get a better job while the lawn service they used to use is priced out of reach.

There has always been disparity in health care, but that was aggravated when President Franklin Roosevelt instituted wage caps during World War II. Companies who wanted to compete for quality workers could no longer offer more money so they offered "benefits." Like health insurance. 

After Chris Wild took over the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a UN-funded body in France that looks for statistical links between food/chemicals and cancer, they made a switch in their policies regarding participation; an epidemiologist who had ever consulted for industry could no longer vote on what to label a carcinogen.

Even though it was hypocritical - epidemiologists working for trial lawyers or environmental groups were recruited - few inside IARC objected. Nor did anyone think they might. Environmental groups have manufactured an ethical halo so well that even their lawyers look like better people than other lawyers. They are, they assure us, poorly paid evangelists for health and safety against Evil Corporations. 

Last week I was in Amsterdam, where I attended the first European AI for Fundamental Physics conference (EUCAIF). Unfortunately I could not properly follow the works there, as in the midst of it I got grounded by a very nasty bronchial bug. Then over the weekend I was able to drag myself back home, and today, still struggling with the after-effects, am traveling to Rome for another relevant event.

Despite Vermont's Agricultural  Innovation Board (AIB), created to inform regulatory recommendations using science, flatly stating there was no basis for a ban on a class of safe pesticides called neonicotinoids, and agreement by Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, the Vermont Senate just passed House Bill H706, which will ban such insecticides despite decades of safe use.