Capricious California: Coffee Won”t Have A Prop 65 Warning, Which Means Few Products Should
After attracting scorn with bizarre classifications of a weedkiller, bacon, and hot tea, the French statistics group known as the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) decided to puncture claims that activists had manipulated the process by doing a flip-flop on coffee. Though they were widely expected to increase the hazard designation from 1991's already bizarre "possibly carcinogenic", they suddenly reversed course and lowered a classification of a product for the very first time.RIP Murray Gell-Mann, A Great Physicist Who Taught Science Journalists How To Do Better
RIP to Professor Murray Gell-Mann, who passed away last week and was famed (including a Nobel prize) for quark theory.I never met him, but if you spent time at Caltech you probably did. He was not like Einstein, I am told, he was approachable if you were a young scientist, but you had to know what you were talking about.
A few years ago I taught a class there, invited by my friend the best-selling author and science journalist Greg Critser, who was an instructor for science journalism at the school. He had previously agreed to be on an AAAS panel I was moderating in San Francisco and I was returning the favor for him by being a guest speaker for his class at Caltech.
Your Meat Does Not Bleed – But That People Think It Does Is Important For Plant-Based Substitutes
If you have cooked a steak or a hamburger you know that by the time you are ready to serve it, and certainly after you cut or bite into it, there will be liquid that oozes out of it.Anti-meat groups know it isn't blood(1) but they use that imagery to try and sway people to their cause. And groups who make substitutes for meat also use that imagery, because they think that's important to meat eaters. Because marketing groups have long used it, people think it's blood, and even use the term "bloody."
The Voynich Manuscript Has Been Decoded. Again. Except It Hasn’t.
Beinecke MS 408, commonly called the Voynich Manuscript (after Wilfrid Voynich, a book dealer who bought it in Italy), has long dismissed as gibberish by most, but beginning in 1915, and certainly since the 1960s, it has also been a source of fascination for people who believe it must be a code. Or a recipe book. Or something. It is actually a proto-Romance language, according to a new paper. It just had never been written before because educated people used Latin, says Dr. Gerard Cheshire.So uneducated people wrote in a language from 2000 years earlier?
FDA Warns Public Of Homeopathic ‘Remedies’ That May Actually Do Something – Like Kill Your Kids With Natural Rat Poison
Homeopathy, now two centuries old, proceeds from a fascinatingly bizarre premise; that there is a u-shaped curve for dose. Reasonable people know the dose makes the poison; a medicine that can help you at normal levels can be harmful at high levels.Homepaths (and the Endocrine Disrupting Chemical community) instead also believe in an upward curve at other end, that chemicals at extremely low levels can also affect people. This u-shaped curve allows all manner of homeopathic "remedies" to be foisted off on people, not to mention allowing anti-science activists to attribute magical statistical harms to chemicals that science can't detect.