Science in the U.S. is under assault by postmodernism, political partisanship, and trial lawyers. Without a change in the direction of our culture, American technological supremacy is facing an existential threat.
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An article in the latest edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that when it comes to risk from the coronavirus, air travel is much safer than you might believe. It is safer than shopping in a supermarket, riding on a train, or going to work in an office. Why? It's all about the air quality in the cabin.
A group of researchers reports an association between low vitamin D levels and COVID-19 infection. Is this a true cause-and-effect relationship? Or are we seeing an excellent example of selection bias? Let's take a look.
Gene drive technology is powerful and slightly frightening. But the coronavirus pandemic reminds us that we want to have multiple weapons in the public health arsenal, should we be confronted with another life-threatening microbe.
The anti-chemical Silent Spring Institute has commissioned a ridiculous study, one that reaches a conclusion akin to pointing out that a circle is round. It's a bunch of nonsense. Here's why.
The globalization of regulation, our friend the fungus, communicating science, and the search for a less sugary sugar.
Operation Warp Speed is the name of the federal effort to quickly bring a COVID-19 vaccine to the public. Like all federal efforts, it carries both a price tag and an organizational chart.
Months ago, the government began Operation Warp Speed to quickly find and distribute a vaccine for COVID-19. As that day approaches, our concern has turned to which groups will be first to be protected. And more recently, a Pew study found that instead of a fight to reach the front of the line, only half of us would get the vaccine at all. Why would that be? Let's take a look.
Europe is "catching up" to the U.S. in terms of new COVID cases. Besides the "farewell party" that Czechia threw for the pandemic, what else went wrong?
Plastic bottles litter most of the world. There have been ongoing efforts to find methods to biodegrade PET, a very common plastic used for bottled water. British scientists have discovered an efficient way to get bacteria to "eat" PET plastic. Here's how it works.
Early on in the pandemic, the call was to flatten the curve, in order to reduce the number of cases and not overwhelm our healthcare systems. Over time, some say that has morphed into an attempt to eliminate or suppress the viral spread. A new study looks at the tradeoff.
Given that more than 200,000 Americans have died (at least in part) due to COVID-19, there seems little to lose and much to gain by green-lighting human challenge trials in which volunteers are vaccinated and then deliberately infected with coronavirus. The U.S. should follow the UK's lead.
Thirty-seven years ago, at the end of September, the world faced another global crisis. Just three weeks earlier, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 inadvertently entered prohibited Soviet airspace and was shot down by a Soviet air-to-air missile, killing all 269 passengers and the crew of a Boeing 747.
Although pain patients in the U.S. continue to struggle mightily to get the prescription opioids they need, at least they -- finally -- have the American Medical Association behind them. But in Canada, patient advocacy groups are also fighting the Canadian Medical Association, something that can be seen in an open letter to the CMA from the Chronic Pain Association of Canada. Here are some of the letter's highlights, especially those involving contributions from ACSH.
On tap this time 'round: Is Science magazine political? ... Do you suffer from Lesesucht? ... If life is a gift, are we sharing it? ... and shaming in the time of COVID-19 distributing vaccines, the 18th Century perspective.
Just as COVID-19 is a global problem, the search for a vaccine is a global effort. Sometimes, to get clarity, especially in the run-up to a presidential election, it is better to get an outsider's view.
Bad behavior has consequences, except when you're a social media platform. But the number of peer-reviewed articles subsequently retracted raises the question of whether medical journals believe that they, too, are "platforms" without responsibility for what they publish and disseminate.
The term "opioid" has become a dirty word. "Synthetic" is also dirty. When putting them together you get something that is dirty but also confusing -- and probably intentionally so. There's no scientific reason to categorize a drug as a "synthetic opioid" or a "synthetic anything," as you will read here. To see how silly it is, let's perform the same exercise with antibiotics and see how that works out.
The media reports of national COVID-19 statistics mask the substantial and continuing variations among regions. The virus doesn't care about geography, but we need to understand geographic differences if it is to be contained.
Perhaps it is my longstanding interest in my professional failures (or how understanding failure makes my work better and my actions more resilient) but I was drawn, much like a moth to the flame, to the recent full Congressional report on the model that Boeing badly bungled. In a week of important news, it was mentioned and then overlooked. That was a mistake. Let's take another look.
It's now more than seven months into the pandemic in the U.S. and doctors and scientists have been trying pretty much everything -- with little to show for their efforts. Perhaps the most effort has gone into finding drugs to prevent the immune system meltdown caused by the virus. Here's another: Can a simple, safe, approved drug called phenylbutyric acid tread the line between under- and over-treatment of the immune system by reducing cell stress?
The RAND Corporation recently released a study of hospital pricing for commercial insurance vs. Medicare, the de facto standard. It's no surprise that commercial insurance pays more than double Medicare. And those payments are not evenly distributed nationally, within states, or even health systems.
Here's another example of the difference between statistical correlation and causation. Maybe it's best to agree on a plausible path of causation before looking for the correlation. That way it avoids fishing expeditions.
There is a lack of good clinical research on the advantages of blue-light filtering lenses.
While things continue to change here at home, the Hubble Space Telescope, a joint project of the European Space Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, continues its work.
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