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Caveat Emptor. Consumers and journalists beware Anti-biotechnology activists engaged in a week of "direct action" at Starbucks Coffee shops this week aim to target you over the next few days with false and misleading information about food safety, nutrition and the environment. The same people who brought you a long list of other false health and environmental scares including the infamous Alar in apples scare, the Dow-Corning breast implant campaign and dozens of other debunked fears are at it again.

The scientific publishing industry is thoroughly dishonest and corrupt, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the journal Science are now also a part of the problem. Here's a disturbing case in point.

An unneeded solution is looking for a non-existent problem. It's one more illustration of the reality that all of U.S. public health policy on the so-called "prescription opioid crisis" is outright fraudulent.

Many public health officials have called for mandatory vaccines to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. The motivation for this policy is understandable, but forcing parents to immunize their kids emboldens the anti-vaccine movement. By incentivizing people to vaccinate and holding them legally accountable when they don't, we can preserve individual autonomy, maintain herd immunity and undermine the anti-vaccine movement.

When it comes to the Zika virus, a quaint anomaly for decades, those who live in rural areas have much different ideas than urban dwellers on how to prevent the mosquito-transmitted infection from becoming a major health problem in the United States.

Pesticides can be very dangerous; they're also vital tools farmers use to produce our food. Here's a guide to help you navigate the media maze of sloppy reporting on pesticide safety.

Who's smarter, an 85-year-old billionaire in terrific health or a "sue and settle" activist group that undermines science?

Caveat Emptor. Consumers and Journalists beware-Biodevastation activists aim to target you over the next few days with false and misleading information about food safety, nutrition and the environment. The same people who brought you a long list of other false health and environmental scares-including the infamous Alar in apples scare, the Dow-Corning breast implant campaign-and dozens of other debunked fears are at it again. This time the scaremongers are targeting such safe foods as milk and other dairy products in your local supermarket and at food retail outlets such as Starbucks.

1. A website called the National Observer is an "online only" publication whose editor has been accused of political boosterism and using her publication to attack opponents of her family.

When you have a baby on the way, everybody has "helpful" advice that isn't all that helpful. Most of it, in fact, is downright useless, and some of it is potentially very harmful. We'll start with the latter and revisit the useless in part two of this series.

The pediatric group recently issued a policy statement riddled with chemophobic nonsense. Why are officials there whining so much? Here's why.

While BPA hysteria has been going on for many years, for just as long we've been writing that the chemical is safe. As it turns out, we've been right all along (while, as usual, the Joe Mercolas and NRDCs of the world were not).

We did not evolve in a world of plentiful food; instead nature was out to kill us. Today, food is a commodity and when something becomes a commodity, it takes a while for culture to catch up. Science has outpaced our cultural maturity, and it has led to a certain amount of doublethink about food.

Sometimes it's good to recognize your limitations.
For example, I could describe how DNA works, or how to make crystal meth, poison your neighbor or blow stuff up. I won't, but I could. And I'd know what I was talking about.
Perhaps I could also write something about teapots from the Ming Dynasty if I read about it on Wikipedia, but in reality I wouldn't know one if it fell off the Chrysler Building onto my head.

Science should always be open to new approaches and ideas. Perhaps this seems self-evident, but although this may sound good in theory, many scientists view new approaches challenging their long-held beliefs with skepticism or downright hostility. Rather than rationally examining ideas that cause discomfort, ideas are off-handedly dismissed, and the people advancing them are attacked. This is the scientific version of “cancel culture.”

With so much disinformation on the Internet, debunking junk science and bogus health claims could be a full-time job. Indeed, "debunkery" is one of the main reasons why ACSH exists. Narrowing down a full year's worth of nonsense into the 10 worst bogus health stories is quite a challenge. But we never shy down from a challenge. Here are the stinkiest stories from the past 12 months.

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.

Today, there is simply too much known in far too many diverse fields for any person to hold it all in their brain. This means that, no matter how smart one might be, there are times when we have to push the “I believe” button and simply accept the statements of others. The problem is that these others are too often wrong, the topic is too often very important, and the statements made are too wildly disparate. We feel we must choose, yet we don’t know how.

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

The "One Chip Challenge" – a ridiculous exercise in pain endurance – where people are dared to eat Paqui brand chips "flavored" with increasingly hot peppers may have been the cause of death of a 14-year-old boy who ate a single chip. But Paqui tries to portray their product as "healthy," for example, GMO-and-preservative free. What a bunch of BS.

Perhaps the worst laboratory accident in recent memory occurred in 1996, when Karen Wetterhahn, a chemistry professor at Dartmouth, spilled a couple of drops of dimethylmercury on her glove. Thinking nothing of it, she simply changed gloves. Ten months later she died from mercury poisoning.

AI. Blah blah blah. You can’t turn on the news without hearing about it constantly. So I decided to see if it knew chemistry. With a few exceptions, it did very well. Even when I tried to trick it.

A retired psychologist attacked an article of mine about deranged Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo's views of public health policies toward the COVID-19 pandemic. His assertions ranged from the preposterous to the merely inaccurate.

In Walpole, Massachusetts the circus is always in town. This is because Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. opened his national presidential campaign headquarters there in 2023. RFK, Jr. may blame some of his erratic behavior, mostly regarding science and medicine, on his brain-eating worm, but I don't buy it. He was saying crazy s### well before Wormgate. Here's some of it.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is right about one thing: the public should hold it accountable for how its programs work. The EPA said as much last month in a press release announcing its participation in ExpectMore.gov, which "provides the public with candid, easy to understand assessments of federal programs," including approximately forty-three from EPA.
So why did this huge, wasteful federal agency stonewall a small, information-seeking consumer advocacy organization and flout the law in the process?