Like the CDC manufacturing a prediabetes epidemic and pregnant women getting a scarlet letter if they have a glass of wine while pregnant, flossing seems to be a distinctly American phenomenon. Are we right? The British are famous for bad teeth, for example, and fiscal conservatives will say that's because dental care is not free under their socialized medicine. They must not floss, right?

Well, they don't, but it may not matter. Most people in Europe who have great teeth don't floss. They think it is humorous that we pull string through our teeth the same way European women wonder why their babies don't have more birth defects if a glass of wine causes fetal alcohol syndrome.

The biggest shopping day of the year is not Amazon Prime Day, nor is it Black Friday, it is instead on November 11th - Singles Day.

China has so many unmarried people they turned it into a shopping celebration.



In Sweet Lemons Rationalization, if you are unable to find someone worth marrying, you can declare you don't want to get married anyway.  If I say I don't want to date Heidi Klum, it is empowering and therefore not an insult that she does not date me.

That is the case with a growing number of Americans.

Since most of the building blocks of our own body are protons, the above title might disturb sensitive readers. On the other hand, describing a proton as a bag of garbage has several merits, as it is a fruitful analogy that may be carried forward when we wish to examine experiments that studied the structure of matter. I will explain what I mean in a moment below.

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 you how to get rid of your partner's garlic breath after they return from a night of slaying.

Some controversial claims by epidemiologists with links to anti-meat groups (Frank Hu, Walter Willett, et al.) suggest that a normal human diet containing meat causes inflammation, which they then link to increased risk of heart disease.

A risk factor for a risk factor for a disease isn't very compelling but journalists often confuse hazard, including when epidemiologists use 10,000 doses, and risk, which is actual clinical relevance to people.

Halloween 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 pumpkin chemicals. Theirs is informational, the snark is all mine.

Hurricane Katrina was not dangerous until it hit land in Louisiana. But it intensified and since activists had successfully lobbied the Clinton administration to prevent the Army Corps of Engineers from making repairs, devastation occurred.

Injuries and lives lost may have been reduced if there was a better way to predict when a commonplace tropical depression or tropical storm will intensify. 

A new paper says there’s more than one mechanism that causes rapid intensification. 

The benefits of fluoridated water are well-established but when nature rather than science is in charge it can be harmful. The dose makes the poison and over 200 million people worldwide are estimated to be exposed to high fluoride levels in their drinking water.

A new study finds that long-term consumption of water with fluoride levels far above, 1000 percent more, established drinking water standards may be linked to cognitive impairments in children.

In pursuit of the ambitious goal of reaching net-zero emissions, nations worldwide must expand their use of clean energy sources. In the case of solar energy, this change may already be upon us.

A recent