A fruit fly brain may sound meaningless but there is a reason that Howard Hughes Medical Institute spent $40 million and 12 years to map it. And that reason is us.The hemibrain connectome and its clock neuron circuity contains around 25,000 neurons, which can be grouped into thousands of distinct cell types spanning several brain regions and is the largest synaptic-level connectome ever created. It covers central fly brain circuits critical for associative learning and fly navigation. 

Are you more likely to buy salt if the label on it notes it is "Free of Nuclear Waste"? Don't deny it if you are one of the people who buys any of the 65,000 products that Non-GMO Project has sold stickers for, like salt. Not only can't GMOs be harmful, only a handful of foods are even made using that process, and yet it adorns tens of thousands of labels.But awareness and truth are not their goals.Like a "free of nuclear waste" sticker, Non-GMO Project wants you to think the food sold by their non-clients is harmful using the "nocebo" tactic - they want to convince the public the lack of something makes you healthier. Like nuclear waste, or unicorns, or GMOs, or ghosts. 

On his website Kevin Klatt, Ph.D., R.D., notes that a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial is the gold standard for research, but when it comes to food it's not so simple. There is no true placebo when a sugar pill has calories.

Guidelines for increased vegetable consumption asa way to improve to improve outcomes for prostate cancer survivors are based on expert opinion, inference, and statistical correlation, but a recent randomized clinical trial that included 478 patients found no difference in prostate cancer progression over two years among men with early-stage disease.

Once upon a time, if you were going to find a pocket of concern about vaccines and autism in America, you had to find a relatively small radius around a Whole Foods store. Rich, white people, who bought organic food and lots of supplements were going to over-represent when it came to denial of vaccines.

Breast milk has become popular due to both well-meaning (statistical correlation to everything from higher income to higher IQ) and mommy-shaming (if you use formula, you are a bad parent) groups that it may actually be putting more kids at risk.If you simply can't express enough milk, or don't want the hassle, you may be tempted to buy breast milk online. Obviously the hope is you get a reputable source but if you do run into problems, Aoife Finnerty, adjunct at the University College Cork, outlines the legal situation.

Though today we associate Amazonian with the basin in South America, to the Greeks they were Scythians - from southern Siberia - and those Amazon women were feared warriors.For the first time, remains of these ancient Siberian soldiers have been found in the same tomb. This is the 11th find at the Cemetery Devitsa site, and they seem to have been garrison troops at the camp while others were off fighting. And they fought a lot, they dominated the Pontic steppe for 400 years, until the Macedonians began to push them back and then Mithridates of Persia finished the job.

A recent article in NPR applauds Anaheim for using goats to keep grasses mowed. While there is nothing really wrong with that as fire prevention, any more than it's wrong for Michael Pollan to cultivate his garden in Berkeley while preaching about organic food, it is very much the kind of gimmick only wealthy elites engage in, because it sounds "natural" - which also sounds like Michael Pollan. 

For those of you shocked that Netflix would run a show by a merchant of woo like Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop company, don't be. Science media knows they've hated science forever.

In 2019, 23-year-old Emily Goss was a like a lot of people. She believed in supplements because they are a $35 billion industry exempt from FDA oversight since 1994, when President Clinton signed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act for his constituents, because, let's face it, they believe in alternatives to medicine and science a lot more than that other political party.