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Your education dollars at work

We were all over media last week, including in not-so-flattering ways, thanks to a cabal of anti-science activists.

There are two ways that the media get meta-analysis claims wrong. And here's how to spot them.

A group of leading scientists in England is making headlines for writing a scathing letter attacking one of England's leading medical journals, the Lancet, for promoting unfounded health scares.

Once the weapon of choice for prepubescent teens, cyberbullying is now deployed, with ruthless efficiency, against PhDs who have committed the unspeakable crime of conducting research on, and publicly advocating, GMOs. The goal is straightforward: Biotech scientists must be destroyed professionally. Failing that, they must be destroyed emotionally. 

In a confusing study from the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, researchers compared 71 women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a hormonal disorder affecting up to ten percent of women of reproductive age, to 100 healthy women of the same age and weight and found that women with PCOS had higher levels of bisphenol A (BPA) in their blood.

Pop quiz: What do The New York Times, Jeffrey "the yogic flying instructor" Smith, and the National Resources Defense Council have in common? Answer: They all shamelessly lie about glyphosate to make money. (And you get extra credit if you answered "They are all bad sources of science information.")

Opinion piece alleging that artificially sweetened sodas are as likely to cause obesity as sugary drinks is not remotely a scientific study, despite the headlines implying that it is.

To err is human, but unfortunately, so is coping with mistakes and errors. A controversial paper on vaping, which has been retracted, demonstrates the more subjective, human side of science.

We thought we hammered an Israeli study on artificial sweeteners pretty hard in our Sept 18th Dispatch article Israeli study on sugar substitutes is complete bullsweet.
Maybe we did, but we were seriously out-hammered by Matt Raymond s piece Of Mice and Media: A Credulous Response to an Iffy Sweetener Study.

A journalist decided to tackle her favorite food concerns and check them out with experts from nearby medical centers the answers surprised her.

Your donations at work: We were at the FDA, the National Institutes of Health, as well as Congress. And that's only when we weren't getting hate mail from anti-science activists, who simply can't accept that they're slowly losing ground in popular culture.

Though politicians and the public love to hate Big Ag and Big Pharma, everybody comes begging for help when the going gets tough. The arguments against biotechnology have been made exponentially weaker by the success of the coronavirus vaccine.

This article originally appeared on http://www.Spiked-Online.com.
The new US protocol that says scientists with corporate connections are unfit to judge drug safety smacks of modern-day McCarthyism.

In Part 1 we discussed the RO1 grant, the bread and butter of academic research funding. Here, in Part 2, we delve into what happens to a grant after it is submitted – and how select grants are awarded funding.

The Trump administration is considering a proposal to require all published research that has received federal funding to be made immediately available to the public at no cost. You would think that making our published science available for free would garner applause, but you would be wrong.

At American Thinker, Dr. John Dunn lauds American Council on Science and Health Scientific Advisor Dr. Frank Schnell, former toxicologist for the U.S. government, and his concern that the EPA long ago ran out of problems to solve, so they have been manufacturing new ones by redefining hazards until they cover something.

1. Washington Times used our work debunking claims about phthalates in macaroni and cheese to show how New York Senator Chuck Schumer is going to chase any environmental fad - especially if it makes science and technology look bad. It appeals to his base. The "analysis" was hand-picked by a group co-founded by a guy who thinks food is "spiritual". 

Starting in March 2020, studies began to show that smokers were under-represented among COVID-19 patients, suggesting that something in tobacco may offer protection against SARS-COV-2 infection. The evidence remains inconclusive, but it seems that some public health experts and journalists don't want to get to the bottom of this mystery.

What is complementary-alternative medicine anyway? Alternative to what? If a practice is not science-based, it is not medicine. Now we learn that Cleveland Clinic has sold out this concept for herbal treatments. Sad.

Sometimes we write in other places, sometimes our work is featured in other places, and sometimes other places use us for their conspiracy stories about science. Last week, we completed the trifecta!

Mainstream news outlets have gone after COVID-19 conspiracy theorists with a passion. But when it comes to equally important science topics, they have no problem ignoring evidence and promoting conspiratorial nonsense. This blatant hypocrisy causes confusion and fuels the public's skepticism of science more broadly.

Twitter is not that mythical town square where you can get on your soapbox and be heard. It is more like a carnival barker seeking attention by being outrageous. It is not a forum for truth or to communicate science.

A new paper seeks to inform concerns about e-cigarettes, purportedly used as harm reduction and smoking cessation techniques, being a gateway to smoking. The conclusion by Hongying Dai and Jianqiang Hao is that e-cigarettes, and especially flavors, do lead to both cigarette smoking and an unwillingness to quit. There is just one problem: there is no data showing that.

The 2021 annual conference of U.S. Mayors adopted a resolution to create community “Blue Zones,” as part of the Well-Being Initiative to Combat Disease and Comorbidities. The Blue Zones program is derived from the work of Dan Buettner, a National Geographic Fellow, who identifies regions around the world where people purportedly live extraordinarily long and happy lives.