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Like a series of bad sequels, the media is back with yet another terribly botched story. This time, the claim is that using household cleaning sprays is like smoking 20 cigarettes per day. Wrong again.

Yet another food-cancer story is in the news. But folks, there's little "there" there. It's a correlational study, and the risks for several types of cancer don't increase much at all. This is a finding that should not keep you up at night.

This summer, a new mosquito emoji will be available for use in your texts and tweets. Global health advocates hope that it'll be used to raise awareness about mosquito-borne diseases. Get ready to give your messages about malaria, Zika, dengue, and yellow fever a little more buzz. 

Over the last decade, the gene-editing technology CRISPR – Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palidromic Repeats – has nearly become a household word. Now, there's a new publication dedicated to the process. It's a peer-reviewed journal and its inaugural issue just came out.

When two scientists have contributed equally to a project, the authorship can be sticky. Whose name should come first? It turns out that there may be different factors at play. One group sought to determine if gender was one of those factors – and the answer just might surprise you. 
 
 

A new proposal for changing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has riled up people for several reasons — some of which are likely sound. But one complaint certainly isn't: The idea that SNAP participants would be shabbily treated because their food boxes would include canned items. That's because there's nothing wrong with them.

A new law passed by a slim margin in the Netherlands reflexively making anyone over the age of 18 an organ donor, compelling them to have to take specific action to opt out. Should the U.S. follow suit?

We shouldn't let politics, on either side of the aisle, distract us from talking about food distribution and how to help small, rather than large, American business.

Given the countless books written on babies – month-to-month pregnancy guides, labor and delivery primers, and others particularly on sleeping and feeding – information overload is very real. But then again, there are books like The Baby Whisperer that make you glad you added it to your family library.
 

The only honest people are journalists. Such self-serving naïveté appears to be the creed at the website Undark. It's an outlet that claims, apparently with a straight face, to be interested only in "true journalistic coverage of the sciences."

Biosimilars are less expensive generic versions of expensive biologic medicines. Rheumatologists, who prescribe a lot of these medications, have a few concerns about how they're approved. Namely, if these meds provide identical treatment as biologics, and that they're expensive. A position paper and accompanying editorial have been written focusing on these issues.

With concerns about global food insecurity and the increasing demand for animal protein, the efficiency of sources producing that protein is being questioned. It turns out that conventional measures may be inadequate. And, at least when it comes to farming efficiency, tuna is not the "chicken" of the sea.

He oversleeps, can't find his jacket and still wins gold at the Olympics. The tale of 17-year-old Red Gerard's victory has lessons for us all.

The CDC screws up yet again. This time it's meth.

A recent study shed light on something we've known for some time, but haven't quite lived by: Eating slowly could curb weight gain. Here's why this makes sense. 

We can do a lot of things in under 24 hours. Now, we can add to that list sequence a human genome and diagnose a genetic disease. This amazing feat was done recently and shows just how quickly personalized genetic information is revolutionizing medicine.  

Lack of genetic diversity can have dire consequences: illness, early death, even extinction for some species. A couple of cases in point — dogs and coffee — seem otherwise unrelated. But both can suffer deleterious effects because of uniform gene pools. But in both cases, genetic engineering could help.

American snowboarder slash Superwoman Chloe Kim just won her first Olympic gold medal in the Women's Snowboarding Half-pipe. But even she isn't immune to getting hangry — hungry + angry. We feel you, girl.

Disparities in physicians, based on gender, make the news when women appear better than men. This study runs counter to the popular narrative – and it's just as flawed as the other studies. Why didn't it make bigger headlines?

We have yet another tragic flu story in the news. This time it's a 38-year old mother who died because she thought the flu drug she was prescribed was too expensive. The only problem? The media got everything wrong. The flu drug would not have made any difference. 

No, I'm not speaking of Jonathan Goldsmith, the guy who just pretended to be The Most Interesting Man in the World. I'm speaking of the real deal, my grandfather, Dimitri Berezow -- a man who survived Stalin and Hitler, cheated death on multiple occasions, and went on to live the American dream. His was an impossibly unique story – one that seems too extraordinary to be true (and yet is) – capped with a cautionary tale about modern healthcare.

Anti-sugar activists have gone so far as to require warning labels about the health risks conferred by sugar-sweetened beverages — in San Francisco. Fortunately, the District Court of Appeals has struck down that ruling because the label wasn't based on validated scientific findings. Whew!

Errors in our scientific beliefs are not always due to Big Industry and its evil intent. Science is a human enterprise, constrained by human foibles. Sometimes we just get it wrong.

This flu season, one product is making its comeback: orange juice. Sales of OJ seem to have gotten a boost — after years of decline — due to consumers' fears of getting the dreaded illness. 
But is dosing yourself with high amounts of Vitamin C warranted for this year's flu from hell?
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Meaningful use reform (in the funding bill just signed by the President) is vital toward curtailing the onerous nature of Electronic Health Records' implementation. When satisfying government IT requirements becomes more important than the needs of a patient getting cancer surgery or a doctor’s providing that care, we are really missing the point.