Public health experts have noted the unexplained increases in childhood asthma and autism spectrum disorders over the past few decades. A recent review has linked such ills to the coincident increases in obesity in women of childbearing age.
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A co-founder of the "March for Science" says that it's "time for everyone to get on board." Okay, sure. We'll get on board – pending satisfactory answers to serious science policy questions.
Among the conclusions from a newly-released study focusing on women's military service during the Vietnam War – both in uniform and as civilians – one is rather eye-catching: That longer service corresponded to greater happiness and life satisfaction decades later.
Recently a baby boy was born in India with two penises and four legs. How do '"parasitic twins" develop and what causes this? And what conditions prompt duplications in the female anatomy?
A recent study featuring Robert Marchand, a 105-year-old French cyclist, produced a conclusion that was at odds with conventional thinking, in that significantly improving one's aerobic fitness after the age of 50 or 60 was, in fact, possible.
Multivitamins are likely the most widely used supplements in the U.S. Research has failed to substantiate that for healthy adults they're useful for health preservation, or disease prevention. A new collaborative study has analyzed the accuracy of their labels, producing conflicting results.
ACSH's "on-site mother" Marge Bloom turns 90 on Saturday, February 4th, 2017. We get to see plenty of her, but the rest of you have not been so fortunate. Until now. Happy Birthday Marge!
While government tried to figure out what to do with itself over the past few weeks, we were spreading science across America.
Wouldn't it be nice to stroll along your favorite beach and not see the litter of plastic trash all around. In fact, there is a place where you can stroll and not see plastic at all – since the trash consists of millions of seaside gems. All you have to do is go to Siberia.
The FDA confirmed the presence of of the poisonous substance, belladonna, in the homeopathic teething remedies linked to the deaths of 10 infants. More importantly, its analysis detected amounts that were inconsistent between samples, meaning some of the levels were much higher than what the product's label indicated.
Though pneumonia and infection are among the litany of known complications after water birth, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) just reported two cases of Legionnaires’ Disease in newborns in Arizona born this way. Further investigation identified an infant death in 2014 in Texas from Legionellosis.
To understand the high cost of prescription medicines we should "follow the money." With apologies to Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, it's time to "watch the river flow."
Otto Warmbier, the Ohio college student detained in North Korea, returned to the United States in a "coma" that has endured since March 2016. With an etiology already in dispute, there's a tendency for wrong information to spread. So let's shift gears to focus on comas, in general, to clarify any falsehoods.
In what basically amounts to an exercise that combines psychology, marketing and food salesmanship in equal parts, researchers at Stanford University learned something fascinating: If you jazz up the names of vegetable dishes, more diners will eat them. And giving them healthy-sounding descriptions, like "light 'n' low-carb," discouraged consumption.
1. "Democracy Dies In Darkness" - that is the tagline for the Washington Post these days. And yet they promote darkness about science. Last Tuesday they were hosting a panel on "how science and technology are changing our food systems", yet what did they leave out? Anyone who knows anything about science or technology and food.
Instead, it was mostly organic salespeople and scaremongers.
The EDF is quite insistent that we're poisoning our children with lead, and it wants the maximum permissible levels in foods and drinks for babies to be much lower than what the FDA allows now. Is this position defensible?
We have been reading a bunch of nonsense about artificial sweeteners causing elevated blood glucose for years. A study out of Britain puts this to rest – and does so in no uncertain terms.
Dr. Tim Farnum, an anesthesiologist and founder of the nonprofit Parents Against Underage Smartphones, is spearheading legislation that would ban smartphones for children under 13. Should it hit the 2018 Colorado ballot the proposed law, if passed, would be a first. Unsurprisingly, it has generated controversy.
There are evil people in this world. Then there are the people who ran the despicable Breast Cancer Survivors Foundation, who gave little to charity while taking the majority of the money for themselves as administrative costs.
With the overload of information — bad, good and worse — from all media mediums, at all times, public confidence in it on the whole is plummeting. That's according to a new report identifying that only 37 percent of the public trusts evidence from medical research. Compare that to 65 percent who prefer experiences of friends and family to guide them.
For a continent that (bizarrely) prides itself on turning away from religion, Europe has ironically replaced it with all manner of postmodern nonsense and pseudoscience. Welcome to the New Dark Age.
Sometimes the CDC really gets it right, and let's give 'em credit! That's certainly true in the case of "chronic" Lyme disease. The agency explains that the symptoms some people suffer after successful Lyme treatment may be due to other tick-borne disease. But the chronic administration of antibiotics isn't necessary to treat a non-existent illness.
How profound. This concept, from the preeminent Harvard scientist and noted optimist, is worth examining in the context of biotechnology.
The real world implications of electronic medical records extend beyond the conceptual panacea, for better or worse. And then there's a rarely-addressed adverse effect. Let's take a look.
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