Science & Society

The biggest feel-good fallacy perpetuated by some in science media today is that "the right", whoever they are, is anti-science, while "the left", whoever they are, is pro-science.  It's exactly…

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka for – you guessed it- stem cell research. Or more specifically, “for the discovery that mature…

For some appliances, newer is not always better.  If you have an old dryer, you are better off not replacing it with an EnergyStar, more efficient model.  Unless you want to wait forever to…

Scientists are commonly portrayed as paragons of rationality, subsisting solely on fact-based evidence and hard data; what goes on behind laboratory doors is in large part a mystery to the general…

In my previous article, the fundamental equivalence of foods was discussed recognizing that there is a difference in assessing problems with the food, versus problems with food handling. …

A 45-year meta-analysis of 240 science studies found that 'organic' processed food is the same in pesticides, the same in nutrition and a whole lot more expensive. "...there isn’t much…

The Affordable Care Act controversy rages on. In this week's BMJ, journalist Jeanne Lenzer says the basic assumption that US people don't have enough health care is misleading and in reality,…

Does clean air have a cost where it makes sense versus where it doesn't? What about human life in general?   Economists still try to create a metric and a group from the University of Chicago…

People who are either clueless or shills for anti-science hysteria insist 'something is better than nothing' when it comes to laws about food, and that we can just 'fix' it despite its flaws but we…

It seems that as this discussion continues, more and more concepts become conflated producing all manner of irrelevant comparisons that create more and more confusion. In the first place, we have the…