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.
If you are an African-American hypertensive at high risk of developing associated cardiovascular disease, a new paper from Maharishi Institute - where yogic flying instructors get trained to levitate(1) - says Transcendental Meditation will prevent abnormal enlargement of your heart and reduce chronic heart failure.
New survey results in the Journal of Media Psychology find that how much you enjoy or hate the new "Star Wars" movie will depend a lot on your expectations. Nothing shocking in that, but there is a twist.And the twist is not that the new movie will make a fortune this week no matter what reviewers or the more rabid fringe of the fan base say. That is entirely predictable.
The anti-vaccine movement tries to portray itself as scrappy grassroots outsiders standing up to Big Pharma and Big Government, but it's nothing of the kind, finds a recent Washington Post exposé.The National Vaccine Information Center, which claims to be the largest "awareness" non-profit opposing vaccines, actually gets almost half of its funding from corporations. And their largest corporate benefactor is the osteopath Joe Mercola, head of a $100 million empire that sells alternatives to medicine for nearly everything. And who funds lots of groups opposed to science, from medicine to food.
Two years ago we were helping my mother-in-law get settled into her new place and, with the manual labor done and my usefulness diminished, she and her daughters talked details and I sat in a chair. A Hallmark movie was on. I had never seen it before but I was convinced I had.After about 10 minutes, when a seemingly avoidable misunderstanding occurred onscreen, I began taking notes on my phone and talking about the action. My family asked what I was doing and I declared that this was brilliant storytelling. This formula could work with anything, it was that rock solid.
Board games, where you play on an actual board, were once common in every household. Games have a long history, thousands of years, but board games took off in diversity in the 20th century, thanks to "Monopoly" and then others.It's impossible to predict the future so they may never again reach the peak popularity they once had, or they may stage a resurgence as young people want to take a break from an increasingly digital society. They may even become bigger than ever. I never once played Texas Hold 'em as a young guy in Pennsylvania but in the 2000s it took off nationwide and has now become the most popular form of poker.(1) My kids have never played draw or stud but I showed them how to play Hold'em.
Filtered coffee has been linked to lower risk of type 2 diabetes by an epidemiology group.That's an awfully narrow claim, right? Like a baseball player arguing he led the team in 9th inning doubles in the month of August.(1) Coffee has already been touted as a way to lower risk of type 2 diabetes for a while. Before you get too excited about this "filtered" coffee preventing diabetes, we need to remember what they are measuring - numbers, not coffee. This is not a science finding, it is an "exploratory" result. Drinking coffee, filtered in paper or Turkish in a pan, is not going to prevent diabetes any more than a juice cleanse prevents whatever that stuff is claiming to prevent.
A joke in nutrition circles is that while you once needed to be rich to be fat, now you need to be rich to be thin. Scientific progress has given us cheap food, anyone can afford to eat well, and after an existence of worrying about food availability it takes generations for culture to change to not eating as much as we can. Rich people, though, have gym memberships.
A cross-sectional study has found that head and neck injuries related to cell phone use increased steadily over a recent 20-year period.But that may not be meaningful in a relative risk way. The sample was just over 2,500 cases from 1998 through 2017. Media will trumpet 300 percent since 2007 but that doesn't make injuries common. It just means that as phones changed from phones to messagers to full-on portable televisions and computers people are able to walk and be distracted more.
When Al Gore was Vice-President in 1994, he forced the U.S. EPA to mandate ethanol in gasoline by breaking the Senate tie in favor of environmentalists who had been pushing ethanol as 'sustainable biofuel' for decades. His vote forced gasoline manufacturers to include it despite science concerns it would drive up food prices and increase pollution. While biofuels were and are a viable field of study, the concern was that dumping money into corporate subsidies was going to hold progress back.(1)
In December, people begin to think about the new year, and that means resolutions to lose weight. Exercising is a lot of work and feeling hungry much of the time is not desirable so many will instead opt for diet plans. One popular diet is the Atkin's Diet, where natural sugars are replaced with protein, while another is the Ketogenic Diet, where sugars are replaced with fatty foods. Both seek to put your body into a metabolic state called ketosis, where elevated level of ketone bodies replace glucose.
"Epstein didn't kill himself" is a conspiracy meme that has been everywhere lately. If you are not familiar with the name Jeffrey Epstein, he was a billionaire and convicted sex offender - but as a billionaire he was connected to almost everyone in politics and culture, so when he was found dead in his jail cell, denied bail on a new charge, there began concerns someone had him killed to keep him silent.
I got an email from a young person at a university stating they were working on a research paper, and while many in the science and scicomm community are jaded about such requests - we are doing someone's homework for them, it is said - I always answer. It's a nonprofit, answering is the job.The questions were rather specific to GMOs so I stuck to that, but of course I write about a lot more than agriculture while the rest of Science 2.0 writes about virtually every area of science.The 5 questions I answered below and I added some more thoughts for this article:1. Why did you create Science 2.0?2. Why did you choose to write about GMOs? 3. What impact do you think the anti-GMO activist have on the scientific community?
