Like " I had insomnia last night" and "I am so OCD", medical terms often become colloquial. So it is with people who say they had a "stomach flu." There are stomach virusus, but what many…

As the world's most powerful economy, we read a lot about how America needs to do more to use cleaner energy, and less of it.  The data show we already do. Energy is a basic need, like food, and…

Chicken eggs are already used for growing viruses that are used as vaccines, such as the flu jab but science is going one better; chickens that are genetically modified to produce human proteins in…

One to two percent of people have celiac disease, and the first thing they will tell you is that it is not a fad diet, no matter how many books or Dr. Oz segments tout gluten-free. To celiac patients…

Anti-science activists are having a field day on social media, happy that a poorly designed study can let them claim that human sperm is being damaged by modern pesticides, even though the study…

The Doomsday Clock, a public relations stunt created by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1) remains stuck at two minutes until midnight. Just like it was in 1953, the height of the Cold War,…

     Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) consists of Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis. Both are the result of dysregulation of the immune system leading to intestinal…

When a sneeze happens, around 100,000 contagious germs for things like the common cold, influenza and tuberculosis move through the air at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour.  It sounds…

In the past 30 years, food allergies have become increasingly common in the United States. Changes to human genetics can’t explain the sudden rise. That is because it takes many generations for…

The new year has only just begun, yet by Valentine’s Day some 80 percent of us will have already given up on those well-intentioned commitments – at least according to University of Minnesota…

Have your friends recently begun obsessively folding their t-shirts, or explaining how they have got rid of a book that no longer “brings them joy”? If so, they’ve probably been caught up in the new…

You may be told that you have individual choice about whether or not social media privacy (or lack thereof) affects you; don't join social media, or delete your account.  Not so, according…

After two percent of astronomers threw out one arbitrary definition of planet and replaced it with another arbitrary definition of planet, our solar system went from nine planets to eight. Pluto…

A team of sociologists say they know of a sure way to hurt environmental protection: Elect a Democratic president.  An analysis of over 20,000 people from the General Social Survey between 1973…

In the previous post I discussed, among other things, a purely empirical observation on the mass spectrum of elementary particles, which I summarized in a graph where on the vertical scale I put the…

Thanks to social media, advice on how to prevent a cold is everywhere and 51 percent of parents taking the  C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health admit to believing in…

I have long been of the opinion that writing about science for the public requires the writer to simplify things down to a level which is sometimes dangerously close to mislead the uninformed readers…

Oumuamua the object which passed through our solar system in October 2017 with a trajectory that indicates it was not of this solar system was never photographed.  We only saw a point of light…

Another post to help people scared of perfectly normal harmless events because of the sensationalist press and false prophets. This is just the moon passing through Earth’s shadow as it does usually…

Is there sex-specific epigenetic regulation of fear memory? A new study says yes, for mice anyway, and if it later is found to be similar in humans it could explain why fear and stress-related…