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The beautiful thing about science is that it is constantly changing, as new facts bump up against old ideas, theories, and received wisdom. So it should come as no surprise to learn that two reports of recent vintage now have to be revised.

Groups like the EPA have used "secret science" to legislate without being accountable to the public the way Congress and the President are. It's time for that to end.

Anti-pesticide activist Carey Gillam recently moderated a panel discussion about the weed killer glyphosate. I attended and took notes. Here's what I saw.

Recently, Newsday's David Olson wrote about opioids in an honest way not often seen in mainstream media. He emphasized the harm caused by the “overcorrection of the pendulum” – the shortage of medically legitimate opioids caused by ill-advised restrictions on prescribing. He gives personal accounts of practitioners, pharmacists, and patients struggling to navigate the unforgiving terrain of new laws and policies. Thumbs up to Mr. Olson for this important article.

For political websites, no conspiracy theory is too outrageous - including claims that I might be a shill for a corporation.

A paper says up to 8,000 new antibiotic combinations could be ready for testing, but there is a big catch: It's called reality.

New York, NY -- June 2005. Journalists can improve their coverage of public health topics by more critically considering health claims made by activist groups. These claims are frequently not based on sound science.

Social media censorship has exploded since the beginning of the pandemic, in large part thanks to the proliferation of so-called "fact-checkers." While efforts to limit the spread of false information online seem sensible, experts are starting to point out the downsides of tech companies moderating scientific disputes.

In this month's round-up, you'll find that we've been writing about and discussing a range of topics, from the ever-present dangers and complexities of the coronavirus to the need for accurate scientific journalism. And not only are we laser-focused on the deadly force of the tiny microbe, we've also got our eye on that big, wandering moose. What do we mean by that? Read on.

In our modern industrialized food society, it's easy to lose awareness of how food is made. In the 19th century, when food was just becoming industrialized, it was fascinating to city dwellers. Factories gave tours, but it was certainly not without shock to the public who witnessed the process.

The Pew Research Center released a survey of 12,648 Americans on their current views on COVID-19. The headline was the increasing interest in vaccinations, up now to 60% of those surveyed, since Pfizer and Moderna's announcements. But the headline left a lot of great information "below the fold," if mentioned at all. This special edition of Every Picture Tells A Story shares a few of the salient findings.

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.

Recently, I posted a piece on the discovery of the potential for a serious allergenic response from a foodstuff that was being promoted as a non-genetically-modified (non-GM) alternative to GM soybeans. There was almost total media silence on this matter even though the research itself was published in a leading peer-reviewed medical journal. ACSH Nutrition Director Dr.

1. If you don't have HBO, and if you have HBO but you don't watch John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight", and if you do ordinarily watch but missed the August 13th episode...well, you didn't miss much.

Ah, it's spring again when our fancies are said to turn to romance. And with Earth Day upon us (April 22nd), the Greens' romantic fantasies turn to the environment, as they promote nineteenth-century Romantic ideologies to deal with twenty-first-century problems. Increasingly, the food sections of many newspapers have become year-round bastions of these romantic ideologies, touting the virtues of local produce, heritage varieties, and of course organic agriculture.

I won't pretend to be objective about ABC News anchor John Stossel. I worked for him from 1995-2001, as an associate producer on one-hour specials very much like the one airing tonight (10pm Eastern), called Lies, Myths, and Downright Stupidity.

It s always refreshing to see a journalist stand up for sound science, especially since it so rarely happens. That s why we d like to make note of Trevor Butterworth s latest op-ed in Forbes. In it, Butterworth intelligently critiques New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff s hollow, politically driven campaign against chemicals.

Skepticism is hard. As a recent best-selling book noted, doubletalk is a pervasive part of an attention-driven, media-dominated economy. But we can't just choose to doubt everything all the time, or we'd never be able to get out of bed in the morning for fear of the floorboards inexplicably collapsing. So we each come up with our little rubrics for deciding what to discount.

The stoic farmer farmer of today is much like the stoic scientist: neither likes the idea of self-promotion. But because neither group likes that task, the discourse about their work is instead framed by well-funded detractors.

Some people are deeply moved by the idea that there is a more holistic way of viewing human health, that there is a warm, friendly alternative to cold, institutionalized medicine as I learned while conducting interviews for a new "e-monograph" about unconventional medical practices.

"Flip Little Article"?
Dear Dr. [sic] Raso,

The International Agency for Research on Cancer says it doesn't know if coffee causes cancer, which is a switch from 1991 when the agency, an arm of the World Health Organization, said it did. That's bad news for those who want to trust IARC's recommendations, because its reasons to reverse course on coffee are no more valid than its reason to have declared it possibly carcinogenic to humans in the first place.

Adulterated honey, meaning it has been diluted with other substances, has been an issue for as far back as honey has been sold.(1) One of the reasons we know so much about the composition of the sweetener is due to efforts from the 1960s on to fight fraud. Today, it is most likely to be mixed with high fructose corn syrup because, as you probably know, that is about the same in fructose.

A long-time critic of 2016 CDC guidelines for prescription of opioids calls for replacement of the CDC writers' team now revising the guidelines. Draft recommendations reviewed July 16th, 2021, double down on errors of science and misdirections which characterized the original. The present team has fundamental professional conflicts of interest and lacks first-hand expert knowledge of pain management practice.

1. Nature magazine covered our ranking of the good and bad science journalism sites last week, highlighting our concern that "Not only is it susceptible to the same sorts of biases that afflict regular journalism, but it is uniquely vulnerable to outrageous sensationalism”.