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Is Smirnoff Breaking The Law With Its Non-GMO Alcohol Label?

Posted by on Oct 12, 2018 in Public Health | Comments Off on Is Smirnoff Breaking The Law With Its Non-GMO Alcohol Label?

Smirnoff, a vodka brand, has tried to place itself under a health halo by claiming it is not only gluten-free but non-GMO as well.

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So King Arthur Has Returned – And She’s An 8-Year-Old Girl

Posted by on Oct 5, 2018 in Random Thoughts | Comments Off on So King Arthur Has Returned – And She’s An 8-Year-Old Girl

In Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur", French and English tales were reworked into the definitive mythology of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. But he may have gotten one thing wrong.

Instead of a lady in the lake providing (and eventually taking back) the fabled sword Excalibur, symbol of pre-Norman rule, until the return of the King, the lady in the lake may have been meant to be the next great monarch. If so, she's arrived and her name is Saga Vanecek.

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JAMA Retracts 6 More Brian Wansink Articles

Posted by on Sep 19, 2018 in Science History | Comments Off on JAMA Retracts 6 More Brian Wansink Articles

The number of articles retracted related to nutrition now numbers unlucky 13 - and that bad lack shares one name in common: Brian Wansink, Ph.D.

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BPA Causes Diabetes? Fred Vom Saal Is Proof Aging Researchers Sometimes Lose Their Minds

Posted by on Sep 14, 2018 in Chemistry | Comments Off on BPA Causes Diabetes? Fred Vom Saal Is Proof Aging Researchers Sometimes Lose Their Minds

Dr. Jane Goodall is in a panic about GMOs and all of modern agriculture. What isn't plagiarized in her screeds about food is a mishmash of conjecture, anti-science mysticism, and lack of a clue about biology. She is not alone in losing her mind a bit with age. Dr. Linus Pauling became obsessed with Vitamin C as he aged, his claim that high doses would cure a cold is still promoted by supplement salespeople today. Dr.

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Ray Tracing Is Back Again. Is It Real This Time? Nvidia Thinks So

Posted by on Aug 22, 2018 in Technology | Comments Off on Ray Tracing Is Back Again. Is It Real This Time? Nvidia Thinks So

Ray tracing has been a hot topic since...well, at least 350 B.C. in the western world, when Aristotle described his camera obscura and wrote that the eye is 'a darkened chamber awaiting light.' Da Vinci was fascinated by it, as was Descartes. And of course Einstein wanted to understand light quanta.

In the 1990s, software and hardware companies began to tout it, but like Atari Jaguar's claim it was a 64-bit machine because it had two 32-bit processors, it was a lot of marketing.

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Epidemiologists Link DDT From The 1970s To Modern Autism Diagnoses

Posted by on Aug 16, 2018 in Neuroscience | Comments Off on Epidemiologists Link DDT From The 1970s To Modern Autism Diagnoses

DDT was banned by a politician in the US in 1972 and was banned a few years later in Finland, so how can it be causing autism now?

The answer is statistics. The same curve that can show autism is linked to organic food can link autism to anything and if you are at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health you are very much against corporations and in need of a way to get in the New York Times, so a recent paper links DDE, a metabolite of DDT, in the blood of pregnant women to autism.

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Appeals Court Wants EPA To Ban Chlorpyrifos, Without Seeing Any Data

Posted by on Aug 9, 2018 in Chemistry | Comments Off on Appeals Court Wants EPA To Ban Chlorpyrifos, Without Seeing Any Data

Environmental trial lawyers are thrilled that the politically friendly 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California

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The James Webb Space Telescope Continues To Bleed, Other NASA Experiments Will Continue To Hemorrhage

Posted by on Jun 27, 2018 in Aerospace | Comments Off on The James Webb Space Telescope Continues To Bleed, Other NASA Experiments Will Continue To Hemorrhage

Science 2.0 began 11 years ago, the year that the James Webb Space Telescope was supposed to be completed, but there was no real cause for alarm about the delays until 2010, when it was three years late and $1.5 billion over budget. Not many in science communication really cared, though that is easy to dismiss as modern journalists being cheerleaders rather than critical thinkers. Instead, the science community has continued to gush how great it will be as JWST missed milestone after milestone after milestone. 

Even last month, people were still continuing to write sentences like "JWST will be able to..." about 2020. 

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The James Webb Space Telescope Continues To Bleed, Other NASA Experiments Will Continue To Hemorrhage

Posted by on Jun 27, 2018 in Aerospace | Comments Off on The James Webb Space Telescope Continues To Bleed, Other NASA Experiments Will Continue To Hemorrhage

Science 2.0 began 11 years ago, the year that the James Webb Space Telescope was supposed to be completed, but there was no real cause for alarm about the delays until 2010, when it was three years late and $1.5 billion over budget. Not many in science communication really cared, though that is easy to dismiss as modern journalists being cheerleaders rather than critical thinkers. Instead, the science community has continued to gush how great it will be as JWST missed milestone after milestone after milestone. 

Even last month, people were still continuing to write sentences like "JWST will be able to..." about 2020. 

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Anti-Science Mommy Bloggers Declare War On Mark Lynas – Again

Posted by on Jun 26, 2018 in Random Thoughts | Comments Off on Anti-Science Mommy Bloggers Declare War On Mark Lynas – Again

It can't have been easy for former environmental activist Mark Lynas to change sides. His friends were on the anti-science side, he was a dutiful reader of The Guardian, where activists and environmental trade groups reign supreme, and he was adored there.

But he had an ethical dilemma. How could he talk about the science consensus on climate change, despite generous potential funding by corporations to say otherwise (no, really, anti-science people think that happens), while continuing to deny the science consensus in agriculture. Exxon's revenue was 20X that of Monsanto and yet even with far fewer scientists in climate studies they were not "bought off" as his side claimed about farming.

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