If you are part of the $29 billion organic food masses, you can breathe a sigh of relief about the latest Salmonella recall - this one is not in your stores. I'm so relieved I am putting up a link about it.Stallings Head Cheese Co., Inc., of Houston is recalling 4,700 pounds of hog head cheese that may be contaminated with Salmonella, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced today.Hog head cheese? You betcha. Hog head cheese is a gelatinous mixture of meat from a hog's head. It's popular in Cajun cuisine. Hey, don't make fun.  People in California eat salad and I don't understand that either.

So Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola both introduced new ad campaigns. Pepsi went the traditional route (i.e. boring) once again and signed another fit superstar to sing about how awesome their soda is.  Thanks,  Beyoncé, it's all been done, but I am thrilled you got $50 million to endorse it. Credit and link: GQ MagazineCoke did something really weird, for being supposedly an evil, mercenary, Big Corporation bent on exploiting children at all costs - they addressed the claims about soda and obesity in their ads.

Psychiatrist Dr. Eric Hollander says the hygiene hypothesis -  the idea that by eliminating some harmful organisms we are weakening our immune systems - may be a reason to study the use of ingesting the eggs of parasitic worms to treat autism.He gets to jump on a few hot button cultural topics that way, autism and a medical idea that has caught on with the usual anti-science hippies and the more normal crowd who got sold the idea that anti-bacterial soaps were necessary if they care about kids.The kicker is that the psychiatrist got the idea when he noticed one of his patients’ behavior improve while self-medicating with Trichuris suis ova (TSO), the eggs of a whipworm. That passes for a journal paper in the social sciences.

"Believe it or not—and I suspect most readers will not—there's a liberal war on science. Say what?"So begins famed skeptic Michael Shermer's review of "Science Left Behind" in his Scientific American column this month.  Now, in the book, I make it pretty clear that liberals are not the problem, progressives are, but a baffling number of people on the left seek to use the terms interchangeably. Why, I don't know, there was never a need for two words if they are the same thing, but it explains why at San Francisco protests you can see people claiming to be Trotsky-ites palling around with people claiming to be Lenin-ites with people claiming to be Mao-ists selling Che Guevara t-shirts; they don't know what words mean.

Diagnosed rates of autism around the world have increased a lot over the last decade and a half but there is ongoing debate about whether there are actually more cases or if it is instead a cultural phenomenon, namely that we're getting better at detecting the disorder and more willing to label kids as having it. Some also contend that the increase in autism is due to whatever they happen not to like; vaccines, GMOs, etc.How can you know? To prove that diagnoses have gotten better, rather than there being a true increase in autism, you'd have to know what would have happened to today's kids 20 years ago. Would they have been diagnosed with autism?  Or ADD? Nothing? 

TrackingPoint isn't just making a “smart gun”, they are making a “Precision Guided Firearm.” It has a computerized scope that provides a hunter with metrics like wind speed, incline, temperature, distance to target and more.  You can even stream the scope to an iPhone, so more experienced hunters can help younger hunters with spotting, by being able to see exactly what they’re seeing...but through the shooter's scope, not a separate optic.It's more like a HUD for missiles in a fighter jet than a gun. It's difficult to miss.

The Smithsonian  wants some help in making their citizen science efforts a little more relevant to the public. So if you are not a zoologist and can take their eMammal Survey it will help them get some 'baseline' values of what people know about critters.

"Melanie's Marvellous Measles", which says measles are good for kids, went up for sale at Bookworld, Australia's largest online bookstore, and the backlash for the science and medical community was immediate.It falsely describes the deadly disease as something that will make children stronger. Cases of kids dying from measles in Australia are quite rare, because the country discovered science in the last hundred years.

James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, wrote in a paper "We now have no general of influence, much less power ... leading our country's War on Cancer."On the $100 million U.S. project to determine the DNA changes that drive nine forms of cancer: It is "not likely to produce the truly breakthrough drugs that we now so desperately need," he said. And on the idea that antioxidants such as those in colorful berries fight cancer: "The time has come to seriously ask whether antioxidant use much more likely causes than prevents cancer."What does he mean? 

When anti-science eco-terrorists threatened to destroy a plot of genetically modified wheat at the government-funded Rothamsted agricultural research station in their "Take The Flour Back" campaign last spring, the backlash against them was swift. Anti-science progressives who have counted on liberals quietly enduring them in common cause for decades suddenly found that was no longer the case. Liberals had  enough of being dragged into the anti-science mud on energy,  medicine and food, three of the most vital issues facing the world.