Fake Banner
Minnesota Trial Lawyers Want To Ban Neonics - Here Is Why That Is A Mistake

Minnesota is having a challenging year, so challenging they are approaching California as the wackiest...

The Toxic Masculinity Of Disney Movies

Once upon a time, stories were just stories. They were fantasies that took people to a new world...

AI And The Poetry Problem

Artificial Intelligence is artificial, but it is not intelligence. That could change some day but...

Morte Alla Francia Italia Anela - The Secret History Of Organized Crime In 1343

Italy as we know it today had not been such since the days of the Roman Empire. You can see that...

User picture.
picture for Hontas Farmerpicture for Ilias Tyrovolaspicture for Fred Phillipspicture for Tommaso Dorigopicture for Robert H Olleypicture for
Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

Blogroll
Joel Moskowitz, Ph.D., of Berkeley is the kind of anti-science "truther" that even most west coast activists steer clear of, because he makes all of the social sciences look bad by association. Worse, he is a "social" psychologist, which for the last 20 years has been beset by fraud and retraction. 

But at Scientific American, which has become the home of activist crazies, he fits right in.
Scientists have written a paper talking about how they "rediscovered" a pesticide that had never really been forgotten but had been ignored because it was created during the Nazi regime and really expensive; DFDT, a chemical relative of DDT. German scientists called it "Fluorgesarol"(1) and "Gix." DDT is dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane and DFDT replaces the chlorine atoms with fluorine so it's difluorodiphenyltrichloroethane.(2)
When papers came out stating that cutting back on red meat didn't make any difference in your real risk of getting cancer, because a normal diet did not cause any more cancer, it came under fire by critics who had spent an alarming chunk of their careers criticizing modern diets.
Once upon a time a food company spent years in court defending itself against a government lawsuit about a marketing claim on their package that looked misleading. 

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission told Kraft they could not advertise that their cheese "singles" contained 5 ounces of milk because of the implication the cheese might have as much calcium as 5 ounces of milk when, in fact, they really only had as much calcium as 3.5 ounces of milk.  Sounds trvial, right? Not at a time when the  FTC and FDA defended the public from even subtle marketing deceptions.

Fast forward to today, when plant juice calls itself milk and Non-GMO Project sells a non-GMO rock salt to a consumer base that does not know that in salt, there is no O for a G to M.
A new review of other papers claims that unless women stopped drinking alcohol a year prior to conception they probably gave their kids future congenital heart disease.

The authors are not kidding. And binge drinking was correlated to 52 percent higher birth defects for males.  

The confounders are obvious, as they are for any exploratory paper: drinking was self-reported, congenital heart diseases are the most common birth defects, and the authors hand-selected studies that affirmed their hypothesis.
The organic food industry, even large players like Whole Foods, created a disturbing trend; lying to customers about whether or not organic food uses pesticides or chemicals.

In reality, organic food is covered in pesticides. If they were not, instead of only being an average of 13 percent more expensive than regular food (thanks to Amazon squeezing efficiency, it was 20 percent and higher when Whole Foods was a separate company) it would be 80 percent. Pests and other natural blights would devastate their crops.