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If you believe the hype that the Organic Consumers Association puts out, you believe that organic foods are better for you than the conventionally raised variety. And you likely also believe that animals raised in line with organic principles are also treated more humanely. Oops!

Unclear Fate of Biologics

Have you started your Christmas and/or holiday shopping? If you're like us, you're putting it off to the last minute – because you're too busy with other things. Here at ACSH, we've been busy telling the world about science. Here's where we've appeared recently.

Agricultural literacy is at a low level in the land of plenty. There may be a law that dictates an inverse relationship between abundance and knowledge about the source of the abundance. We do not burden ourselves with factual information about that which we take for granted, namely, food, health, and a comfortable life in a non-threatening world. As long as the fridge is full, the car always starts, and the TV keeps entertaining, why bother to know what makes all that happen?

The media continue to feature nonsensical statements about health, probably because health issues sell, and the editors lack appropriate scientific judgment.

Much of the literature in the softer sciences, and here we need to include studies of public health issues, like nutrition, exercise, or even COVID-19, seem irreproducible. One group's work does not seem to be easily reproduced by another, giving rise to concerns about bias and veracity. As always, there is far more to the story.

Notes From Dr. Miller

Science has its Napster. "Sci-Hub, a Pirate Bay-like site for the science nerd. It's a portal that offers free and searchable access ‘to most publishers, especially well-known ones.'   and may incite a similar type of disruption "... For those who ...choose to pirate a paper instead, ask yourself whether it is worth risking the viability of a system..." 

When folks here at ACSH hear the term cancer phobia, we instinctively assume it means the pervasive fear that exposure to certain chemicals or environmental factors will undoubtedly increase one s risk of cancer. Yet in a recent op-ed for The New York Times, science journalist David Ropeik uses the label in quite a different way: He describes the sense of doom that many patients experience upon receiving a cancer diagnosis, or simply when they hear the word cancer.

As COVID-19 cases drop and immunization rates rise, Americans are proving the media's glass-half-empty predictions about vaccine hesitancy mostly false. It turns out that people don't like getting sick, and they'll take steps to protect themselves when given the tools to do so.

The notes of physicians are now freely available to patients. Is medical innovation fueled by theory or experiments? Another consideration in the Wuhan leak story, what are the limits to eminence over specific expertise? Finally, the nose knows - in this case how the receptors of smell are challenging lock and key.

Oklahoma, which badly botched a number a number of executions by using experimental methods that were scientifically flawed, has decided to use nitrogen asphyxiation instead. A look at the chemistry and physiology of a more-humane method of capital punishment. 

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Anyone want to be smarter? Clearly, there's a need; otherwise, I wouldn't have written an article called "Drowning in Morons" in 2020. Perhaps there's a solution. A company is selling a dietary supplement called Smart Drops, which don't just make you smarter but also increase your libido, treat your arthritis, and improve your athletic performance. Believable? Not so much. And let's not forget a Bigfoot spotting - in an MRI facility.

1. Conspiracy Fantasy Camp

There are plenty of reasons for skepticism about medical studies. Some are poorly designed or performed, and some conclusions are totally implausible. In addition, some interpretations of them are intentionally misleading, and some studies need not have been done at all.

A new paper throws every journalism clickbait notion into one epidemiological claim. Take a look.

The recent reporting on Flint's water crisis by CNN's Christiane Amanpour has a tenuous grasp of the data and the reality. 

Orphan crops, private equity and the closure of Hahnemann Hospital, a for-profit medical school?, and how to understand the contradictions of science.

Recently The Lancet posted a correspondence titled, "Lupin flour anaphylaxis (http://www.thelancet.com/journal/vol365/iss9467/abs/llan.365.9467.revie…)." It was followed the next day with a BBC posting titled, "Lupin flour 'poses allergy risk'" (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4419709.stm). Since then, there has been a deathly media silence.

A 2018 Washington Post article addressed the methods we use to breed food crops. But it suffered from a common shortcoming -- “pseudo-balance” -- or the seeking out of clueless commentators to contradict advocates of superior modern genetic modification techniques.  We hate to break it to the author, but in spite of what they teach you in journalism classes, not every issue benefits from point-counterpoint.

Far too many scientific papers are being retracted from prestigious scientific journals because scientists fabricated or falsified data. Although no one defends scientific fraud, few recognize its long-lasting impacts on governmental policy and society.

A recent meta-analysis concluded, counterintuitively, that e-cigarettes might actually increase smoking instead of reducing it. How could that be? Dr. Stan Young, a ACSH Scientific Advisory Panel member, details how a meta-analysis works, and how it is so often misused.

The announcement that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was chosen to possibly be the next head of HHS raises many questions about his suitability for the job, especially given some of his controversial beliefs. Here are a dozen questions I would ask Mr. Kennedy.

Some activists are claiming that a "cocktail" of harmless chemicals is somehow doing something greater than the individual harmless chemicals can. These people don't just deny chemistry, toxicology and biology. They deny simple arithmetic.