If you were long concerned about Russians exploiting American media for their gain, you turned out to be right. But before they were meddling in American elections, they were meddling in American science. The Obama administration Director of National Intelligence warned that Russians were using offshore "donor advised" funds to launder dark money anonymous donations to activists opposing natural gas - Russia's top export. And they did the same thing with food, their second largest export.

A new study shows there is a reason USA Today is the most popular newspaper in America - they won't specify "laparoscopy" when "minimally invasive surgery" gets the point across to more people.

While America leads the world in adult science literacy, that is still with under 30 percent of the population. To really reach the public, we need to use language that won't be a turn-off. Jargon may make us feel smarter, but it makes people who lack the vocabulary feel dumber, and that is a violation of smart journalism.

A U.C. Riverside environmentalist is sounding the alarm about your commute. 

Professor David Volz and colleagues hand-picked 90 commuter students who were given silicone wristbands to wear for five days. The goal was to find organophosphate esters on the wristbands, because some papers link those to harm in zebrafish and some epidemiologists will link anything to anything in humans.  They found one, TDCIPP - chlorinated tris - at higher levels and speculate that it is oozing out of car seat foam and into our bodies.

Just correlation, no testing

I got an email from an analytics group pitching an article about Valentine's Day movie results. 

It promised:

"If you’re planning to celebrate Valentine’s Day by watching a romantic film you’ll probably end up watching Isn’t It Romantic, according to the latest" blah blah blah (which) "analyzed Google Trends data of IMDBs list of ‘100 romantic films for Valentine's Day’ to reveal which films were the most popular in February 2019.

A new paper by epidemiologists in Europe will overturn centuries of diet and health thinking; the thinking that eating too much makes people gain weight.

Instead, the new statistical correlation argues, the weight gain is due to pregnant women who used cosmetics containing parabens, which triggered epigenetic changes in the babies, who then grew up to be fat. It is yet another thing you can blame on your mother.

When it comes to the political divide in America, the key difference in science is that academia has mostly Democrats while private sector scientists are mostly Republicans. There are big tents in a two-party system so a liberal New York cop will have nothing in common with a San Francisco progressive but they will both vote Democrat and this big tent philosophy covers science as well. Republicans are considered deniers of climate change and evolution while Democrats deny vaccines and agriculture, and the rest of the tent has to endure them.