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Posts made in October, 2025

Make Your Own Halloween Slime – In Both Gen X And Hippie-Dippie Baloney Versions

Make Your Own Halloween Slime – In Both Gen X And Hippie-Dippie Baloney Versions

If a politician who used to be a Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer hasn’t banned all food coloring by the time you read this, here is how you can make your own green slime. In both Gen X - chemicals that sound like chemicals - and more natural-sounding versions of chemicals. Basically, people who think Dawn dishwashing liquid is an organic weedkiller. These are excerpted from Halloween...

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Impostor Participants Are Skewing Epidemiological Surveys

Impostor participants are people who fake data in order to take part in health research or are  automated computer ‘bots’ which mimic human behavior and responses. As claims get promoted in journalism about harms related to PFAS in water, weedkillers causing cancer, or food coloring causing diabetes, lawsuits by predatory lawyers have become big business, and it won't be a surprise if...

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Humans Made California Wildfires More Dangerous, Though Not With Emissions

A new call to action by ecologists uses a numerical model to note that wildfires in places like California have been made worse by humans. That doesn't mean it is human emissions. For decades, California government has banned logging. They let people move to risky fire areas and then not pay for any mitigation or firebreaks. State and local governments refuse to allow dead brush to be...

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Altmetric Will Now Include Your Podcast

In the early days of Science 2.0, blogging did not get a lot of institutional respect. Public outreach was a waste of time, academics were often told, leave that to science journalists and the PIOs at schools who write press releases.It seemed archaic. Anyone who knows how much of science is government-funded, about a third of basic research, knows that means it is political. Which means you...

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Coca Leaf: Native Heritage Or Dangerous Drug?

Due to President Clinton's 1994 DSHEA law (Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994), and diverting science funding to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a large number of people believe acupuncture works and that supplements can be alternatives to medicine.Acupuncture is the placebo effect but some natural products can work - the problem is that if they...

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