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Scammers like to scare the elderly using coronavirus and Social Security fraud. Now, the AARP likes to scare old people over the food they eat.

A team of scholars at Iowa State Univ. presented research validating what the scientific community has long suspected: Some anti-GMO groups are (1) either sending information to Russian propaganda sites to assist in their efforts to undermine American agricultural dominance or, (2) they're acting as "useful idiots" by promoting concern about America's food supply.

The authors had a clear strategy in mind: (1) Do a study on a common household object; (2) Produce boring data that doesn't surprise any microbiologist; (3) Write a provocative, fear-mongering headline; (4) Market it to a gullible, clickbait-hungry press, exhibiting no critical thinking; and (5) Watch the grant dollars roll in.

The ALA does not approve of e-cigarettes, despite the fact that thousands of smokers have used them to quit. Is their reluctance to acknowledge the utility of e-cigarettes due to a financial conflict?

Any donor may request our latest publication free of charge, and everyone at the event got a copy. If you prefer to avoid paper, it's available as a PDF inside this article. Along with national coverage, the news was carried by regional papers from Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Salt Lake Tribune to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Buffalo News.

We ve been talking about vaccines almost non-stop recently. We would rather not have to, but it seems as if the tide is now turning in the right direction.

In a piece dripping with sardonic disgust, Toronto Globe and Mail columnist Tabatha Southey took on the new curriculum at the august University of Toronto recently. Entitled Anti-vaccine course brings U of T one step closer to offering a masters of pseudoscience, Ms. Southey takes note of the recently-released official report of the approval of a course called Alternative Health: Practice and Theory, to be taught (so to speak) by the well-known homeopath Beth Landau-Halpern.

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. 

It looks like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has become completely dysfunctional. Meanwhile, some of the CDC guidelines on dealing with coronavirus defy logic and science. In all, this is a living nightmare. Who could have imagined what is now happening to science in this country?

In July of 1988, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, the estimated number of cases in New York City suddenly plummeted. The city health commissioner soon needed police protection.
Until that July, the city had estimated that 400,000 New Yorkers carried the AIDS virus. Then the commissioner, Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, reviewed the evidence and reduced the estimate to 200,000. He was promptly denounced by leaders of AIDS organizations and gay-rights groups, who accused him of lying to minimize the crisis.

Do you think too much pizza will make you fat, or the chemicals in the box? If you think it's the box, you probably read AlterNet instead of us. And we had more outreach last week

As you well know, at ACSH, our job is to talk about and reveal junk science. This is usually not especially difficult, since the same set of

We must be doing something right. We have received so much media attention in the past several days, that it's hard to keep track. Here's where we've appeared.

WScreen Shot 2014-01-23 at 1.20.11 PMhile we don t always agree with the FDA s actions, yesterday the agency resoundingly rejected two citizens petitions that asked the FDA to ban the use of aspartame as a food additive. Kudos to the FDA!

Bees die. A lot. They die in the winter, they die in the summer. Sometimes they die in one area, which is what happened in 2006. Why? Well, it could be stress. Or that beekeeping has become a fad, where amateurs are bungling their backyard hive. So there's mounting evidence that the so-called "Beepocalypse" is not to be Bee-lieved.

Junkscience.com has informed the New England Journal of Medicine that it may have been the victim of scientific misconduct regarding a paper recently published on air pollution and mortality. The contention was that material information was omitted from the work.

1. The medical testing company Theranos didn't need any more bad news - so it is odd that they went out of their way to find some. Starting on July 21st, we had been trying to put our scientist Dr. Julianna LeMieux in touch with someone - anyone - from the science part of the company, especially after “one of the top 10 medical and technological innovations in 2013” fell from grace so far in so short a time.

With no topic beyond reach of his scorn, Donald Trump takes a shot at the NFL, calling the game "too soft" for its attempts to protect players with rule changes. Meanwhile, a big thumbs up to another mogul, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for publicizing the vaccination of his infant daughter; and a sad, early goodbye to legendary rocker David Bowie, a one-time heavy smoker, who died at the age of 69.

Very few have heard about this. It's over 100 years old and explains why bread smells so good and turns brown. But baking also produces a few chemicals of concern – or are they? Here you get a chemistry lesson! Whether you want one or not.

Hear about the German guy who got arrested for getting selling forged vaccine cards to anti-vaxxers? That should be funny enough, right? Nope. ACSH goes the extra kilometer, as usual.

I pitched a column to the journal Science titled, "How I Became a Junk Science Debunker." It was initially accepted and went through two months (and nine rounds) of editing. At the last moment, however, the column was spiked by senior editor Tim Appenzeller (pictured). Why? Because I'm a corporate shill, of course.

To people in science, organic coffee always seemed a little silly, because you don't eat coffee beans any more than you eat the shell of a pineapple, and by the time you do get to the consumable part, whether or not the toxic pesticide on the plant was an organic one or a synthetic one has ceased to be relevant.

What's worse? Getting health advice from an alternative medicine website advertising in a golf magazine or Dr. Oz? At ACSH these questions are par for the course.

1. There's no question some parts of American culture, including academic and private sector science, have been hijacked by 'virtue signaling' - subject to condemnation or praise by groups to show how virtuous and superior they are to those they self-identify with.