The food industry is one of the few businesses that haven't been mired in oppressive regulations and government micromanagement - at least outside San Francisco and New York City - but a new set of regulations are trying to change that as well.Despite any evidence that it will do any good, the Obama administration is expected to all but ban trans fat in a final ruling as soon as next week, even though it has been banned in some places and has shown no benefit. In New York City, diabetes rose after the ban.

Because everyone knows that the best part of waking up is staying in sweatpants all day and eating cereal while watching Warner Herzog documentaries, the chilled out folks on the West Coast are pairing your morning cup of joe with marijuana to start the day. Yahoo! Finance reports that a Seattle pot shop is selling pods of “premium infused coffee” for $10 a pop. Each pod contains 10 mg of THC and fits in standard single-serve coffee makers. Recreational marijuana use is legal there, and of course they love their coffee.

Joe’s Big Idea on NPR. hosted by Joe Palca, had an interview with Caltech astrophysicist Shrinivas Kulkarni who, at one point, said “Many scientists are I think, secretly, are what I call ‘boys with toys.’”Palca repeated that for him, “Boys with toys.”“And I think there’s nothing wrong with that, except...," Kulkarni went on.“Boys with toys,” Palca said again. “...you’re not supposed to say that”, Kulkarni finished. 

Five small studies indicate antibiotics can cure some patients with appendicitis; about 70 percent of patients who took pills did not need surgery.Antibiotics Resurface as Alternative to Removing Appendix - Gina Kolata, New York Times

For year we have been told that Millennials, born after 1982, wanted healthier, nutritious food and it had to come in microwave pouches that were recyclable and in all ways environmentally terrific.Millennials were also being told that, by companies selling all of those features - at highly inflated prices.

After the U.S.started vaccinating kids for measles in the 1960s, children predictably stopped getting measles.What happened next had not been predicted - childhood deaths from all infectious diseases plummeted. Even deaths from infections like pneumonia were cut in half. The same phenomenon happened again, in England, and then across Europe and it still happens today when developing countries introduce the measles vaccine.Why children stopped dying at high rates from numerous and varied infections following introduction of the measles vaccine has been a mystery - but a team of researchers think they have solved it. (Subscription required)

The public relations machine behind government-financed alternative energy corporations talk a lot about solar power in Germany, but the numbers don't add up. Germany didn't want to stand against Russia after the invasion of Ukraine because they need their natural gas from fracking and now the French are complaining about pollution wafting over the border from Deutschland due to coal and oil.They know it is not their own CO2, they are 85 percent nuclear.

Are all of the forces we know just parts of a single, unified force? How is the Higgs boson so light? What is dark matter? Is the world made up of the tiny, vibrating strings described by string theory?Does every fundamental particle we know about have a hidden partner - a superparticle - that we have yet to meet? A popular hypothesis known as Supersymmetry predicts that they do but the first run of the LHC came and went without any of these partner particles turning up.Fortunately for theoretical physicists  there are millions of possible models consistent with natural Supersymmetry and physicists will never build enough particle accelerators to eliminate them all. 

We've been running the Food Demand Survey (FooDS) and each monthly survey has over 1,000 respondents. I took the first years' data, which consists of responses from over 12,000 individuals. This sample is potentially large enough to begin to make some more comprehensive statements about how vegetarians might differ from meat eaters in the US.

Oprah Winfrey, who made Dr. Oz famous by proclaiming him America's Doctor®, is dumping "The Daily Dose With Dr. Oz," a 'radio minute' produced by Oprah's Harpo Productions.