Intermittent fasting, and fasting in general, has been a popular fad health gimmick, but the science isn't on its side. Instead, proponents believe mice are little people so if mice weaned on starvation diets lived longer, people would also.
Raw milk, which has been known for over a century to substantially increase the risk for bacterial illness, has led to another permanent government-ordered shutdown. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York entered a consent decree of permanent injunction against Vulto Creamery LLC of Walton, N.Y. so that they cannot prepare, process, manufacture, pack and/or hold FDA-regulated food products until they can ensure that Listeria monocytogenes, which can cause a rare but potentially life-threatening illness, is not present in their facility and their food.
The Justice Department has said that ending the flow of illegal opioids in the U.S. is a top law-enforcement priority but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration doesn't want to wait years for courts to help, they are directly calling on the public to pressure sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to put a crimp on supplement and opioid sales.At the National Rx Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb called on social media companies and internet companies to stop taking money for ads. Good luck with that. What he was really seeking is public help in pressuring them. Facebook and Twitter have repeatedly shown they are modern-day arms dealers and happily sell to both sides, so only the public can put the needed pressure on them.
A new study takes Norwegians to task for continuing to use wood stoves as part of their bucolic northern heritage. Drive outside cities and it is common to see stacks of wood lining the walls of houses and smoke rising from the chimneys, especially on cold days. Due to that heritage, there was even a national "wood night program" on NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, which ran for 12 hours and attracted international attention.
How do you miss an organ important for the function of all organs, most tissues and the mechanisms of most major diseases? Easy, you don't look for it.
The James Webb Space Telescope, originally scheduled to be completed in 2007, now might be ready in 2020. If you still believe anything coming from Big Space. Meanwhile, Big Space claims it is under-funded. While it's true many worthy small experiments can't get the money they need, the reason is not due to the Bush, Obama or Trump administrations, it is because all three of them have watched JWST, the supposed successor to Hubble, bleed funding dry with its constant misses and overruns.
A new paper is proposing that methane due to lakes is scarier than carbon dioxide, but it tells only one sider of the story: methane has much greater warming impact, they rightly note, but leave out that it is so short-lived it is having zero impact on climate change.
New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman is clearly on the campaign trail for his next job, because even in a state that is lawsuit happy like New York he is setting records for most pointless emails about investigations and lawsuits.But now he says the science is on his side, not just his political interpretation of the law, and that will get a response where the usual politics won't. So let's see if this is about science or greed.
The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Paris-Sorbonne, must be a dangerous place to work, because scholars there have found that almost everything is a so-called "endocrine disruptor".They may be correct. If you drink a cup of coffee while reading this, your hormones changed, they were disrupted. If you got angry knowing that the most anti-science country in the developed world, France, put out yet another article that has gone essentially unchallenged by anyone in their whole school much less a co-author with some common sense, your hormones changed. And because they changed, they can be called "disrupted" - if you have an agenda that does not involve science or public health.
A Pew Research Center analysis of science-related pages on Facebook found that people are most likely to encounter "how-to" tips or advertisements rather than stories about scientific discoveries.The reason is simple. Facebook shows people what they want to see based on past behavior. So shocking IFLScience or Buzzfeed 'X Did Y and you'll never guess what happened next!' titles will get clicked on more than articles about nematodes, making the former more likely to show up in the future.
Vegetarians are not winning in the public consciousness but they are certainly winning in media and academia. The reason is simple: claiming something is harmful is a great call to action whereas telling people they are healthier in the modern world than ever before won't raise money at all.The controversial group International Agency for Research on Cancer, which has been shown to have been hijacked by activists who didn't declare conflicts of interest, declared red and processed meat carcinogens on the same level as mustard gas, plutonium and cigarette smoking, and since California is required by law to automatically put IARC ingredients on its Proposition 65, there has been a rush to chase grants reaffirming why they are right.
At a press conference Saturday, a team of scholars presented data that sent an icy chill through the hearts of activists against science and medicine, like Pete Myers of Environmental Health News and Fred vom Saal, who sell natural alternatives to modern products which they claim are all "endocrine disruptors."They showed that regular exposure to lavender or tea tree oil was linked to abnormal breast growth in young boys - prepubertal gynecomastia - because the common plant-derived oils act as endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
USDA has reported that honeybees are down 4 percent for 2017, which set off another flurry of Beepocalypse claims by corporate journalists who desperately want to believe that modern science is killing us. What gets left out of the story is that the 4 percent is down from a 22 year high.There is no Beepocalypse, no Colony Collapse Disorder, no anything. It is just a statistical blip, as has happened in bees since even casual record-keeping began over a thousand years ago.
