During the Obama administration, he was concerned about vaccines causing autism and it showed when it came to guidance about swine flu vaccines. His administration banned multi-use vials because of his party's insistence that preservatives caused the disorder.
A new paper tries to "suggest" that a silent killer may be among us - particulate matter so tiny you need an electron microscope to detect it, left behind on furniture by smokers who sat there at some point in the past. Even movie theater seats. And then vapers may be doing the same thing, with nicotine.This particulate matter, inference goes, jumps from their bodies onto seats, where it waits for you to perch, then leaps onto your body, worms its way through your skin, enters your organs, bioaccumulates, and causes cancer.
There could be a lot more COVID-19 cases than the 164 instances CDC lists, even up to 9,000 in the U.S., but even that would not be reason for alarm.
A new paper reports again about the successful cultivation of red romaine lettuce, Lactuca sativa cv ‘Outredgeous’ plants from surface-sterilized seeds grown in Vegetable Production Systems growth chambers on the International Space Station during the years 2014 to 2016.Unlike what you'll get in Chipotle, this lettuce is free of disease-causing microbes and safe to eat.
While 2020 looked to be another year when corporate media journalists would provide the same old Product X "linked to" Disease Y "a new study finds" articles as they have for the entire century, the latest coronavirus, COV-19, has saved us from all that.While in the past people were willing to pretend concern about what diseases the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences was willing to correlate to useful products on a spreadsheet, those days are gone. Chemophobia is a luxury for the idle rich, much like organic food or the anti-vaccine movement.When people do have something to be concerned over, data dredging goes by the wayside. Reality sets in. Science is back to being a force for good.
March is the time of year when even people who aren't college basketball fans get involved - because of March Madness pools, online or in the office. Most, even experts will fail, because they do one thing wrong - they start in the beginning, which this year is March 17th, with dozens and dozens of teams, and work their way toward the NCAA Final. Yet that is the wrong way to go, according to a new study. Most people will be lured by the prospect of an upset along the way and are out of it by the Final Four.
The Organic Trade Association has canceled The Organic Center's Annual Benefit Dinner due to venue concerns about coronavirus in Anaheim during the Natural Products Expo West, where the dinner was going to be held. Naturally.
Packages and labels can be a bit of a mess in the 21st century. What is GMO plastic? Who knows? Yet a company named World Centric is selling ZeroWare 2.0 Reusable Dishware - "alternative" tableware they note is not only free of melamine, which they claim is killing people, but is also made from "Non-GMO plastic."Naturally, I asked their PR rep what Non-GMO plastic was and got no response. Every one of these shady companies claims they are about science and health, but they are about money and will ghost anyone who asks an obvious question, like how they can be an alternative to GMO plastic when plastic has no organism to genetically modify.
On most comedy television shows with episodes dealing with kids and sports, there is likely to be a joke about snack culture; it has to be organic, free-range juice boxes, etc.The jokes are there because for the script writers, snack culture wasn't a thing for most of them when they were children, nor was it for most parents. The audience will laugh but the screenwriters and the audience are the ones who made snack culture during and after sports the cultural norm. Gatorade was only invented at the University of Florida (home of the Gators football team) when they were adults and didn't become popular until the 1970s, so we can't blame Baby Boomers for this one.
What do you conclude when different foods are claimed to be eaten on surveys by people who have one type of stroke but not another?Not much. But it will still be a food frequency questionnaire epidemiology paper, the bane of public trust in science. What about confounders? Were people on medication, like statins? The people who had strokes were 59-60 when they enrolled in the survey, so what about their lifestyle choices prior to that?
A new paper claims that the Mediterranean diet may increase "longevity" and it created its mystical conclusion using the favored magic wand of food studies, epidemiological correlation, sprinkled with biological speculation.You may be old enough to remember other claims using similar kernels of scientific truth that became popular diet fads; cigarettes, grapefruit, cabbage. the Adkins diet, Paleo.
A new paper says scientists can make their work more appealing to the public by making it more personal. I learned of it through a paid university PIO but few scientists will see the irony in that.I certainly agree with the point. I have been part of two communities, science and the military, that in defiance of public perception are filled with hilarious people who have great stories. But when the recorder comes on, it's often like talking to someone in marketing who hasn't been cleared for media by their boss. They clam up or give canned answers.
You might know blue whales are an endangered species while pandas are not. Yet there are 25,000 blue whales and only 2,000 pandas. There are 100,000 sea otters yet they are still classified as endangered. Who drew that line between endangered and not endangered? And why are there suddenly so many more endangered species? A new tiny species might be discovered and someone is immediately petitioning government to declare it endangered, even though there may be lots of them and western ecologists just don't know it.
