As reporter Keith Kloor noted in his recent Nature story on the targeting of biotech professors and science advocates,U.S. Right to Know has issued yet a new Freedom of Information Act demand to Washington State University for the email records of Associate Professor of Nutrition Michelle McGuire. The FOIA has resulted in 12,000 documents (not pages) needing to now be reviewed by university lawyers and McGuire.

Will the planet starve if bees disappear? Aren’t bees responsible for a significant chunk of the world’s food supply and nutrition, from one third to as much as 90 percent, depending on what advocacy group is making the claim? You hear such assertions invoked by advocacy groups, reported as truth by journalists and cited by politicians as accepted wisdom whenever the subject of pollinators comes up.

Gilles-Éric Séralini is a French scientist who has been a professor of molecular biology at the University of Caen since 1991.

Blue Bell Creameries has been battling a Listeria monocytogenes outbreak for the past five years. The potentially killer bacteria was found in ice cream served at a Kansas hospital and sold by retailers. Reports most recently are blaming plants in Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas.

As the founder of Fitness Reloaded, a health and fitness company the most common questions I’ve received through the years is about food. Should we eat this or that? Vegetarian or Paleo? GMOs safe or not? And what about superfoods?

I always dodged the eating questions and preferred to talk about fitness instead. The reason was that I felt that since the “experts”, doctors, dieticians, etc, couldn’t agree on what we should really be eating, then how would I expect that I would give a good answer?

Can scientists learn from listening to public reaction to the products they develop? And should they?

As a philosopher by training (and as a science journalist by profession) I am delving into ethical questions surrounding genetic modification. My reflections were triggered by an article by my friend Alle Bruggink, a professor in industrial chemistry at the University of Nijmegen in The Netherlands. He explored why the public remains suspicious about biotechnology – a surprise to many biotechnological researchers.