1. I forgot to link to our article in The Telegraph last month. We are the American Council on Science and Health, but since America leads the world in science output, Nobel prizes and adult science literacy, our scope is truly international. In our piece, we discuss what is ailing European science and why they consistently lag behind, and that reason is the timidity of their precautionary principle plus being hijacked by a bureaucracy that makes improvements easy to block and expensive to implement.
2. On NPR, Dr. Alex Berezow talked about the difficulties in creating a DUI test for marijuana. Marijuana has gone from being an irrational target in the war on drugs to having laughable medical claims attached to now being a revenue windfall for hungry bureaucrats, all without a serious discussion about ways we'll prevent people who are impaired from killing someone behind the wheel of a car.
Right now, people basically have to confess because it is detectable for too long. What would it take to have a good, field-usable test? The Council has the answer.
3. For the USA Today audience, we tackled a science mystery. What Cubans did to cause the mysterious hearing loss and mild brain damage suffered by some of the 21 diplomats and staffers from the U.S. embassy in Cuba. This is a communist dictatorship legendary for brutal tactics - even against their own allies, like Che Guevara. So it is plausible they are trying to do to us what they did to Angolans. But why, when they have long wanted sanctions to be lifted so they could benefit from American wealth? That Raul Castro has been cooperative says the culprits may not have been officially sanctioned.
4. Dr. Jamie Wells represented us at the Susan G. Komen foundation in Philadelphia. Here she is with founder Nancy Goodman Brinker.
5. Anika Chaturvedi, a sophomore journalism major minoring in political science, could teach a lot of young science journalists about how to write a solid health article. Here Chaturvedi is in University of Georgia's Red and Black publication, talking about the tanning products we warned the public on recently.
Naturally, partisan anti-science bullies like the discredited former journalist Michael Balter and his funders at US Right To Know, immediately sought use the Internet to pressure Chaturvedi into never writing about health again. We're hoping that young journalists know that when decrepit cranks immediately attack your work because it is dangerous to their clients, you are probably in the right place.
6. Dr. Alex Berezow was on The Michael Medved Show. He calls Berezow "one of America's best science writers" and I couldn't agree more. If you do not have it syndicated in your area, Medved has agreed to let us share it with you. You can download it here.
7. The Scientist magazine highlighted the work of Dr. Julianna LeMieux after we criticized U.C. Irvine in California for accepting $200 million in return for embracing homeopathy and other "integrative" medicine. Where are all the activist groups who usually shriek about corporate influence when it comes to science? Nowhere to be found. The reason is because homeopaths, naturopaths (probably anything that ends in -path), supplement hucksters and believers in the alternatives to medicine are all on the side of the anti-science movement, and they pay the bills for that $1 billion a year industry. When it comes to funding their woo, activists are just fine with corporations.
8. Finally, in the People Who Hate Us category. Attorney Lisa Graves, the former lawyer for the Clinton administration who is now a politically-motivated science denier for hire (Center for Media and Democracy, Sourcewatch, etc., which have never criticized a Democrat), has produced yet another hit piece on the science community at the smear site she calls PR Watch. The site exists so she can do good works for the anti-medicine, anti-food and anti-energy companies who pay her bills. She says flame retardants will kill us all and that anyone asking for a plausible biological or toxicological mechanism as to how it can happen is a shill for Big Sofa. Deaths from the compound she is promoting a ban on for her clients? Still zero.
