These days I am in Paris, for a short vacation - for once, I am following my wife in a work trip; she performs at the grand Halle at la Villette (she is a soprano singer), and I exploit the occasion to have some pleasant time in one of the cities I like the most.
This morning I took the metro to go downtown, and found myself standing up in a wagon full of people. When my eyes wandered to the pavement, I saw that the plastic sheet had circular bumps, presumably reducing the chance of slips. And the pattern immediately reminded me of the Monte Carlo method, as it betrayed the effect of physical sampling of the ground by the passengers' feet:
The trial lawyer outfit Environmental Working Group paid to publish a claim that a for-fee group paid by them 'detected' chemicals that a few fringe epidemiologists correlate to cancer - in animals - and therefore humans are at risk.
Newsweek doesn't have any science journalists
so they dutifully repeated it, but if you want an answer you can trust, rather than corporate media, here are the facts.
1. Any chemical at high enough dose can harm you. That includes H2O. 'The dose makes the poison.'
Epidemiologists correlate eating more fish to better health and while skepticism is warranted - we're talking about what people claim on food surveys and taking it as scientific truth - there is no question its economic impact is real.
Yet food activists then piled out to an environmental strain problem by claiming that farmed salmon is somehow worse. It resonated without any skepticism because many weealthy elites want to go to restaurants and know blue collar workers risked their lives for expensive fish.
In the future, people in need of an organ transplant will have one grown using their own stem cells. That means no immunosuppressive drugs, no risk of failure, no hoping someone compatible dies. Until then, the best solution to get rid of waiting lists is donor animals.
A new study completed the longest-documented case of a genetically engineered pig kidney functioning in a human body; 61 days. It used a GalSafe pig, an animal engineered by Revivicor Inc., and approved in 2020 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a potential source for human therapeutics, as well as a food source for people with alpha-gal syndrome, a meat allergy caused by a tick bite.
When a pandemic is happening in real time, it's only possible to know in hindsight what was a successful mitigation strategy, what was hype to help a presidential candidate, or even what was suppressed for geopolitical interests.
There is no question mitigation was good, but political and corporate media pressure to keep the world locked down and terrified into 2022 was always immunologically suspect. Many lives their lost due to the pandemic, some lost their lives because it was suggested people should not seek medical care due to imagery of COVID bodies stacked in parking lots, but a whole lot of damage won't be known for a decade or more.
White environmentalists in rich European countries still maintain a kind of benevolent colonialism over Africa, telling those countries Europe won't buy their food unless they use no science in its production - while ignoring that organic farming for thousands of years in Africa showed why it is such a failure for anyone not born into a natural 'breadbasket' region.
A new study finds that while antidepressants reduce negative memories in individuals suffering from depression they may also be improving overall memory function.
But don't go all Ozempic and rush to find a boutique physician willing to prescribe them for you, no one knows how antidepressants work, even after 70 years in existence. Though they outperform placebos like supplements in GNC or other alternatives to medicine, alternative medicine is such a scam because the threshold for placebo is high. Antidepressants are far better than supplement alternatives even though they only work 50 percent of the time. That is why patients routinely have to try a few.
In the past, you may have seen various 'we detected X in urine' papers endorsed by suspect names like homeopathy believer Phil Landrigan and endorsed by organic industry apologist Chuck Benbrook.
What do such claims even mean? In science, nothing. We can detect anything in anything now, but groups like Heartland Health Research Alliance Ltd are prized by litigators who sue "at the drop of a rat" and need any detection in humans - bonus points if they can claim pregnant women - of any chemical that can kill a mouse at 10,000 times a real-world dose. Any reason to send a teary press release sent to the New York Times.(1)
In July of 1937, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, on their way around the world, missed a planned stop at Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean.
You may not even have known Noonan was on the flight, it's always been a better narrative to suggest she was solo, but one thing is well-documented. No one knows what happened to them.
Uncredited
The International Agency for Research on Cancer(IARC) was once so heralded in a field so rigorous and methodologically conservative that epidemiologists were last to accept a hereditary aspect of cancer. That's right, they didn't see enough evidence to think family history of cancer mattered, and only agreed when overwhelming data were found. They were so thorough that when they declared smoking caused cancer, Big Tobacco was doomed.