On February 15th, the litigation outfit known as Environmental Working Group, most famous for using public USDA data (although excluding pesticides from the organic food companies which fund them) to compile a 'Dirty Dozen list' of foods which contain pesticide residues (100 percent of them) but that is nonetheless reliably rewritten by allied journalists in progressive newspapers, paid to...
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In some homes, it is believed that static electricity can lead to inferior grinding, and that has coffee connoisseurs searching for answers.Will water help, or is it just making a mess because while a little may help, people will use too much? Coffee is prone to fads the way athletics - nasal strips, cryo-therapy, those weird blue-light filter glasses - and certainly nutrition is. A study...
read moreThe dose makes the poison, except in academic epidemiology, where H-Index and citations necessitate writing papers claiming any dose is toxic.This is why EXPLORATORY claims aren't actually science itself. When your only method is to ask people what products they use, if they feel sad, angry, or have a disease, and then correlating the product you wanted to target to the malady, it is easy to...
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Halloween is the time of year when you are most likely to find out your significant other is a vampire - or vampire hunter. Sure, vampires can't be real and never have been, there can't really be hunters for those any more than there are ghost hunters, but History Channel is stuffed with people hunting ghosts, so let's light a science candle rather than curse your supernatural darkness and tell...
read moreHalloween is just a few days away so prior to worrying about razor blades in candy or kids getting run down in the streets you may want to think about pumpkins.They are full of toxic chemicals. Even organic pumpkins.Andy Brunning, of the Compound Interest site, made this graphic for Chemical & Engineering News, but they have nothing to do with this article about the dangers of...
read moreIf you have been in science media for any period of time, you have seen a predictable pattern; epidemiologists look through columns and rows of foods people claim they eat and diseases or lack thereof and if they get enough to declare "statistical significance" they write a paper noting down at the bottom that they can't show a causal relationship but then send press releases to New York Times...
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