1. Washington Free Beacon was rightly skeptical that a groundskeeper occasionally used a weedkiller containing glyphosate and got Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma from that and linked to our science showing it is impossible. 55,000 full-time agriculture workers spraying it all of the time had no increases. But that is why trial lawyers love to go in front of juries and plead emotion. And now 9,000 more cases are lined up, just in the U.S.
But the lawyers are the only ones who will really win. Should it survive appeal, the jury will have cost Bayer $289 million. But the cancer patient will only get about $20 million of that.
2. Here is why you shouldn't get your science from GQ. Their author basically believes in homeopathy and suggests sperm counts are declining because of Big Plastic. Queue music from "The Graduate." And if any nonprofit or scientist got a grant from Chevron 30 years ago and agrees with the U.S. government that BPA is harmless, well, you are causing French men to be loss spermy.
This is not a new conspiracy tale, but it is always a surprise anyone claiming to be a journalist still falls for it. Pete Myers, the swami of doubt behind the activist trade paper Environmental Health News, is always grooming journalists and editors to promote his decades-long fundraising issue. Here he is in a FOIA document trying to help an NRDC lawyer game the journal Science. He ghost-wrote the pitch to them for Erik Olson. Imagine if a corporation did such a thing for a scientist. The activist community would be outraged and demand they be banned from all media. But among one of their own, the ends justify the means.
3. Unlike the pliant writers and editors at GQ, IFL Science sees the wisdom in skepticism about bombastic claims, such as in linking to our work showing the flaws in academic claims they can create 8,000 new antibiotics just by pressing some keys on a computer.
4. At the Brain Bar event in Budapest, Dr. Alex Berezow gave a talk called "Why doomsday prophecies are all wrong" and it has been posted to YouTube so you can view it here.
5. Dr. Jamie Wells is on the board of the Miss America Outstanding Teen competition and here she is with this year's winner, London Hibbs of Tyler, Texas, a Junior at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing & Visual Arts.
6. The Russian media front group Star2 says we caused global warming. Or something. It is hard to figure out, the guys behind "The Illuminatus Trilogy" were more coherent than this conspiracy linking meat to global warming. Like most environmental claims, "it takes a gas to raise a pound of beef" was fabricated for a press release, it was never real. It certainly isn't accurate. And the belief that all grazing land for cows would otherwise be amber waves of grain is only promoted by city folk who have never visited a real ranch.
They claim we were behind every other defeat for scaremongers also.
This is actually not a new theme. There is a cabal of anti-science journalists, all orbiting the New York University Journalism Institute led by Perri Klass, MD, and the whole group is undermined in credibility by science deniers such as Charles Seife and Dan Fagin and Liza Gross and Paul Thacker, who routinely claim that the American Council on Science and Health is secretly controlling the bulk of independent science media, some 300,000,000 readers in the last 12 years, and that is impeding their political agenda. All for 1/1,000th the budget of their activist friends trying to tear down America.
If that is true, we are a heck of a smart way for the pro-science community to use tax-free dollars, so please donate here. Imagine what we could do to distrust of science if we were only outnumbered 500 to 1!
