This morning I took a shot on Twitter at Skybound Games, which is a presumably small company that wants to make a go of it in comics and custom collectible stuff, but are now on their third missed date for something I ordered and have also irked fans of another collectible product.Good thing for them I am not Charles Dickens, The Man Who Invented Christmas, because if I were, people would be reading my letter 150 years from now. Dickens is, of course, the author of "A Christmas Carol", which not only rejuvenated his career after a few flops (and over the skepticism of his publisher, because it was a relatively minor religious holiday, and adding in ghosts was garish in their minds), it made Christmas the phenomenon it is now.

The Guardian is a left-wing newspaper in the U.K. and so it's no surprise that they cop to a lot of the issues that left-wing people in the UK agree with - all modern biology leads to Frankenfoods, all energy except solar and wind are bad, vaccines causes autism (they seems to have finally reversed course on that one), and while I noted in Science Left Behind that kooky progressives believe in a lot more woo than the normal public - from psychics and ghosts to UFOs - I didn't think they thought chemicals were traveling back in time.

Science changes over time, that is no secret. We used to think we understood black holes, and that wasn't really true, and unless we use Dark Matter as a vague black box like aether, 100 years from now what we believe today in that regard will likely be regarded as quaint.Even on more terrestrial topics, as our understanding gets greater the facts change. We once weren't sure what set off the dinosaur extinction, now that is known, but there are still lots of mysteries. And Darwin's evolution led to an Upright Man understanding of homo sapiens, where Neanderthals had underdeveloped brains and Cro-Magnon was us, the next step, but now science has shown that evolution is a lot more random and fickle than that, just like it should be. 

Robert Krulwich, "the man who simplifies without being simple", has announced he is retiring, at least from his recurring gig at RadioLab, where he has been for the last 15 years.Not many people graduated from Columbia Law School and then immediately quit to cover the Watergate hearings as a journalist but Krulwich has lived his life the way he approaches science. At an obtuse angle, searching for a better way. 

Sometimes lies on social media get immediate condemnation and sometimes they are even spread by people who should know better - X is a fascist or even entire science websites are fascists.How does that happen? Four experiments with participants from Prolific Academic and Amazon Mechanical Turk, published in Psychological Science, provide some insight. The quicker a lie can be made to "go viral" the less blowback due to being unethical it will receive. Seeing a fake-news claim times reduced how unethical participants thought it was and even to share that headline when they saw it again—even if it was clearly labeled as false and they disbelieved it.

A new paper warns us all that hair dye and other products have been linked to cancer - minority women impacted most.There is one huge reason not to take it seriously, if you accept chemistry, biology, or toxicology: The senior author is from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which for the last decade has competed with the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and Ramazinni Institute (Picchiatello) for how best to erode confidence in science and health among the public, by using statistics to undermine scientists.

Though deemed safe by French science bodies, sales of the Transform and Closer brands were suspended by a French court at the request of environmental groups in 2017 anyway. Now they have made the ban official, siding with claims that sulfoxaflor may be able to harm bees.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating a multistate outbreak of hepatitis A illnesses potentially linked to blackberries from the grocery store Fresh Thyme Farmers Market in Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.As of today, CDC reports 16 illnesses, with the most recent illness onset date on November 15, 2019.

Most people know that domesticated dogs and wolves share a common evolutionary tree, and that the branches were entangled for quite some time, but nothing drives that home more than a two-month-old canine puppy found in the permafrost of the Belaya Gora site in Siberia.Is it a dog or a wolf? It was a male and radiocarbon dating gave the age range but DNA sequencing has been unable to determine the species.Here is another amazing find from the Belaya Gora site!Radiocarbon dating says it 18,000 years old.

This week you have likely been deluged with fast-talking influencers on television talking about how to stick to your diet this holiday season. They don't know what they are talking about, next week the same group of thin, hurried, fast-talking, overconfident people will be making gift recommendations.Calories are a marathon, not a one-day spring. If you are fat, binging for one day didn't cause it, it is the chronic overeating that did. I lived in Manhattan, with some of the best Italian food on earth. Somehow I gained 10 pounds? There was no mystery, it was eating stromboli every day and pretending it was a treat rather than a lifestyle.