The days when Whole Foods could rely on elite prestige - customer were buying self-identification with higher prices on food - are gone now that organic marketing has actually convinced customers that it's food is not just a process or an ethical way of life but, as economist Chuck Benbrook often tried to claim, actually more nutritious than regular food.

If the food itself is better just by paying for a sticker, then it becomes a price issue; and Whole Foods share prices continue to languish.

They may get worse. An analyst for the stock commissioned a survey and customers said they did not notice any price changes, even after Whole Foods lowered prices. 

US Right To Know, an anti-GMO front group funded by organic food corporations, has made no secret of its willingness to smear and bully and libel scientists and journalists and anyone else who stands up to their campaigns of fear and doubt about the competitors of their clients.

They are Deniers For Hire in the purest sense. A short while ago one of their advisors, Lisa Graves, who runs the political attack site SourceWatch, libeled me by calling me a "felon" but US Right To Know could just dismiss that as not being someone directly working for them. Now they have gone over the top under their own banner.

Do you believe your car grill says something meaningful about you? That a messy office means you are more likely to be racist? That some people have precognitive abilities?

Those are all peer-reviewed psychology papers and, because psychologists claim it is science, they have fed the growing distrust of science by the public. It isn't global warming or GMOs that polarize people the most, it's the 'social sciences'. Like political science or military science, those are not science at all, it is just a proper name, and when the science is just statistics placed into charts by academics who surveyed college undergraduates that either got paid or received extra credit (meaning they are psychology undergraduate students), the public gets weary.

To anti-science hippies, 'drink this pesticide if it is so safe' is the kind of mic-dropping burn that resonates with the sub-literate primates who don't understand the basics of toxicology and buy supplements and deny vaccines.

Drinking any pesticide, organic or synthetic, is an IQ test, not a science experiment. Unless you are writing at whatever GM Watch is.

Four new elements that have been added to the periodic table, completing its seventh row, according to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).

Now comes the fun part - picking names for them. Hopefully, they will look beyond naming them after Johnny Depp or a Keith Richards. In the meantime, they are being called ununtrium, (Uut or element 113), ununpentium (Uup, element 115), ununseptium (Uus, element 117), and ununoctium (Uuo, element 118).

It's not even trivial to identify them as elements. 

E-cigarettes, increasingly popular nicotine delivery systems, have been touted as a safe alternative to conventional cigarettes and a smoking cessation tool, but now that they have become popular (more teens are using them than cigarettes, writes the American Council on Science and Health), they have become a polarizing subject, with studies in favor of — or against — the products.

There once was a time when the use of thin models was deemed as promoting an unrealistic body image for women - odd at a time when obesity was rising and there were fewer and fewer thin women to blame.

Now "plus-size" models are taking some heat for promoting poor health choices and obesity. A paper in the Journal of Public Policy&Marketing says advertising campaigns that lean towards using ‘plus-size’ models are having a “detrimental” effect on the public’s lifestyle and eating behavior because they claim being fat is ‘real’ and ‘normal’ . 

The organic food process has been a miracle of clever marketing that will be taught in business schools for generations to come: They managed to convince the public to pay more for food using reasoning that mostly involved self-identification as being more ethical people and better parents if they did so.

Nothing special about that, except this is food; an organic tomato is no different than any other tomato. Both are grown using pesticides and fertilizers, both have been genetically modified for thousands of years.

Sugar is sugar, to scientists. But Big Sugar, which promoted the notion that its bleached white product was somehow superior to corn syrup, suddenly found itself fighting a second front, against nutritionists, food bloggers and outright crackpots like Joe Mercola and the lunatic that runs that Natural News site.