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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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Valeant Pharmaceuticals is in the British Columbia Supreme Court hoping to avoid lawsuit class-action status for ignoring their own scientists and claiming the popular "cold and flu remedy" Cold-fX actually works for cold and flu.

ThinkProgress has found a way to use the tragedy of the Zika outbreak to advance their political agenda. America is one of two developed countries that allow abortion on demand at any stage for any reason (Canada is the other one) and the lack of a national policy has led to varying restrictions on that within the states.

A new study finds that a vegetarian diet likely led to a mutation that may make people more likely to get heart disease and colon cancer.

Using reference data from the 1000 Genomes Project, the team discovered that a mutation called rs66698963 in the FADS2 gene used for making long chain polyunsaturated fats like arachidonic acid is linked to inflammatory diseases like heart disease and colon cancer -- but only if they didn't follow a balanced diet to offset the risk.

That is better scientific methodology than every single International Agency for Research on Cancer monograph produced since 2009, will IARC call a vegetarian diet a carcinogen?(1)
Organic Consumers Association, which funds Denier For Hire cabals like the anti-science group U.S. Right To Know, has baffled the science community once again by just making stuff up. When groups made claims that a larvicide named pyriproxyfen was part of a Monsanto conspiracy to promote Zika to give Monsanto a problem to solve(1), they were dismissed by even Washington Post reporters, so OCA has simply swapped out a new name and is trying again.(2) This time they chose atrazine, a pesticide made by the chemical company Syngenta that is commonly used on corn fields and golf courses.
A decade ago, the media perception was that the only "advocacy" research (science-y sounding stuff out to achieve a cultural goal) was small groups getting a little bit of money to deny things like global warming. In reality, the public knew better, and that scientization of politics had been going on ever since government started to take over science funding.
A running meme throughout most of my life - and I came of age in the late 1960s and '70s, when pot was all the rage - is that people get stoned, then they get hungry. Any number of media portrayals showed it, and still do now. No surprise, marijuana is the most commonly used non-legal drug in America, so references to it resonate with a lot of people. And the munchies after smoking it do as well.

Inference: You should probably get fat if you continue to smoke marijuana into old age.