Nothing brings out woo speculation like health issues.Health books and fad diets are easy sales because everyone wants a short cut and, on the other side, pundits can engage in some causalation and insist they can cure those things you already have.Diet faddists insist, for example, that no one had heart disease or cancer way back when. It was a reasonable guess. Even with the prevalence of guns you are far less likely do die a violent death than at any time in world history, which means you are more likely to die from something else.Yet ancient Egyptians had cancer, they had heart disease - nothing modern at all about that.It may be time to stop looking for magical bullets in sugar or high-fructose corn syrup or vegan diets or going gluten-free.

Despite the rarity of celiac disease, a growing number of people in the Western world are adopting a gluten-free lifestyle. In Australia, for example, for every person who's diagnosed with celiac disease, there are 20 others eating gluten-free food. Many of the people who pursue a gluten-free diet out of choice believe themselves to be gluten-sensitive.

The Johnstown Flood was such a monumental, yet often forgotten, event that when Bruce Springsteen referenced the song "Night of the Johnstown Flood" in a song on his 1982 "Nebraska" album, fans scrambled to find out what the song was. It didn't exist, but Springsteen felt like it should.In 1968, David McCullough, soon on his way to two Pulitzer Prizes and a place as America's foremost modern historian, wrote a book about it.In 1966, Murray Leinster's "The Time Tunnel" left his adventurers unable to convince the Johnstown population of the coming disaster in 1889. The deaths from the flood were at September 11th 2001 Twin Towers levels, yet Alex Berezow at Real Clear Science found it isn't in many history books today at all.

Doggerland, a low-lying landmass in the North Sea, could have been Atlantis just as easily as anything else might have been, and it may have been abandoned after being hit by a 15 foot high tsunami generated by a subsea landslide off the coast of Norway 8,200 years ago. During the last Ice Age, sea levels were much lower; at its maximum extent Doggerland connected Britain to mainland Europe. It was possible for human hunters to walk from what is now northern Germany across to East Anglia. But from 20,000 years ago, sea levels began to rise, gradually flooding the vast landscape.

If you are venturing into a Whole Foods, it lends to a broad stereotype. Epidemiological data has shown that if you want to find an anti-vaccine, anti-science hotbed, take a protractor and draw a circle around a While Foods. Political pundits say if you want to find rich liberals, do the same thing.Clearly some people are not going there for those reasons, they are going because they think that organic food has never been genetically modified or that it uses no pesticides. That's due to smart marketing. Really, really smart.  “Great brands impose a view on you,” a Whole Foods advisor says. And they impose. Don't buy organic food? Some mothers will insist you are a bad parent. 

Academia says publication is not the metric for science - and even decry the 'perish or publish' culture they have created for themselves - but then say their role is vital because corporate research has dropped and they must fill the gap. Their evidence corporate research has dropped? Corporate scientists don't need to publish and so they don't.http://www.nature.com/news/basic-science-finds-corporate-refuge-1.15124

You've heard that dollar bills can harbor trace amounts of drugs. If only that were the worst of it.But those greenbacks in your wallet are also teeming with life. Each dollar bill carries about 3,000 types of bacteria on its surface. Most are harmless. But cash also has DNA from drug-resistant microbes. And your wad of dough may even have a smudge of anthrax and diphtheria.In other words, your wallet is making you a walking petri dish. And currency may be one way antibiotic-resistant genes move around cities, says biologist Jane Carlton, who's leading the Dirty Money Project at the New York University.

Oh Chipotle, you will a hard time not looking silly when you step into science.No one is believing your cheese is more ethical than anyone else's cheese.@onetruecathal @kevinfolta neither. It's an FPC rennet that is not GM.

Is La Cosa Nostra running food safety summits? 'If you don't pay us, you will have an "accident"' messages were sent and the administrators forgot to grease the wheels?Or a secret conspiracy, poisoning themselves so they would have casus belli to declare war on gastroenteritis?We may never know but it's certainly funny - an almost 'flying all over the Eastern seaboard for a week to raise Earth Day awareness' the way the head of the EPA did level of hilarity.

Real, fake, real, fake, a little scrap of papyrus written in Coptic has Jesus Christ, who made bachelorhood cool long before George Clooney, referring to “my wife”. That's a big deal.In 2012, a respected Harvard professor, Karen King, brought the papyrus to worldwide attention.It is certainly old, and written badly enough that it seems authentic, but that doesn't make it authentic. Lots of texts written outside canon make for all kinds of conclusions. But a lack of lineage is a bad sign in archeology and history.And other documents also supposedly found along with it have turned out to be forgeries.