Halloween is the time of year when you are most likely to find out your significant other is a vampire - or vampire hunter. Sure, vampires can't be real and never have been, there can't really be hunters for those any more than there are ghost hunters, but History Channel is stuffed with people hunting ghosts, so let's light a science candle rather than curse your supernatural darkness and tell you how to get rid of your partner's garlic breath after they return from a night of slaying.

Halloween is just a few days away so prior to worrying about razor blades in candy or kids getting run down in the streets you may want to think about pumpkins.

They are full of toxic chemicals. Even organic pumpkins.

Andy Brunning, of the Compound Interest site, made this graphic for Chemical  &  Engineering News, but they have nothing to do with this article about the dangers of pumpkin chemicals. Theirs is informational, the snark is all mine.

Harvard University, and its anti-science allies like The Guardian(1) paper in England, are again claiming that meat causes diabetes.

If you are a parent, or know a parent, you have had someone claim that if their kid eats sugar they get 'hyperactive' - that may happen, but only because a child has been told they get hyperactive and act that way, the same way if you tell a child rum cake has rum they may act drunk.

Biologically, it doesn't work that way. Sugar can certainly help you if you are diabetic(1) and "anti-sugar rhetoric is simply diet-centric disease-mongering engendered by physiologic illiteracy,” according to Edward Archer, PhD.(2)

A new study sought to analyze the chewing nature of four types of gum bases and along the way determine bubbling capacity also. Gums are generally oils, resins, and elastomers generally held in pleasant form by the gum base. 

So gum base is important to manufacturers. Chewing gum is a $25 billion per year business, 1,740,000,000,000 sticks. If humans chew each stick for 10 minutes, that is over 33,000,000 years we spend at it - annually. 

Common sense says that if you have a lot more people walking, often in dark costumes, and just as many people driving, plus more people drinking alcohol than would otherwise occur on a Tuesday, pedestrian fatalities will go up. 

Common sense is right. They will.