In 1958, shortly after passaged of a misguided law related to chemicals and food - a problem that haunts trust in science like vaccines even today - America got its first government-created chemophobia craze. In cranberries.The poorly worded Delaney Clause specified that any trace of an artificial chemical that had been linked to cancer - even if it was just epidemiological correlation or in a...
read moreWriting in The Daily Beast, William Bredderman notes that the self-proclaimed whistleblower organization US Right To Know has a seedy undercurrent of malevolence; its relationship to the anti-vaccine movement. Welcome to the party. Get ready for your readers to be told you must have been bought off by Monsanto or Pfizer. While USRTK will claim its own funding has no impact at all on their...
read moreDuring the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, 28 states experienced higher gun deaths, including suicides. New York, Minnesota, and Michigan saw numbers go up more than 100 percent, according to a recent paper. Only Alaska, which often leads the US, had significantly lower rates of gun deaths during that period.read...
read moreRecent survey results by SciDev.Net/CABI reveal that the majority of science journalists (633 respondents from 77 countries) believe that the field is not consolidating the way some other mainstream/legacy journalism specialties are.read...
read moreIn the fall of 2003, Starbucks tested a new latte in two cities and autumn hasn't been the same since. The pumpkin spice craze was born. How did it all happen? We can thank free market economics. The company already had Christmas locked up with cups and flavors, like Peppermint Mocha and Eggnog latte, and wanted to do the same for Halloween. Or Thanksgiving. Whatever period lasts as...
read moreTo most people, food production, home ownership, and energy don't have much in common, but in the hands of 'science is a corporate conspiracy' theorist Dave Goulson, humans are ruining the planet. The common cultural cancer underpinning of our problem, he believes, is capitalism.Rachel Carson believed misuse of DDT was harming birds, Goulson claims our very existence is. And his solemn false...
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