A recent paper found an increased risk for malignant melanoma in men who took sildenafil (Viagra) for erectile dysfunction.

Unlike some observational studies, this is not being exaggerated by attention-whoring researchers. They are cautious about what it means and doesn't mean. The media is making hay, of course, and they may be making it for good reason.

The prospective cohort study was based on participants in the Health Professionals’ Follow-up Study who were questioned regarding sildenafil use for erectile dysfunction in the year 2000. A total of 25,848 men were used after excluding those who reported cancers at baseline.

Kansas Republican Mike Pompeo, a Congressman from Wichita, is behind a bill to create a national standard for mandatory for review of GMO foods by the FDA, called the"Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act."

What? Have Republicans gone over to the anti-science dark side too? No, Pompeo sides with science and recognizes GMOs are safe. He says this is more to cut off state ballot initiatives popping up across the country, which are invariably hijacked by homeopaths, alternative medicine gurus and the $29 billion organic industry to claim a facade of 'food awareness' but really are just warning labels for competitive products.

Harvard Divinity School Professor Karen L. King believes that an ancient Coptic fragment, the first-known explicit reference to a married Jesus Christ, is authentic, and supports the argument with an article in Harvard Theological Review.

The fragment, announced at the International Coptic Congress in Rome in 2012, contains a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples in which Jesus speaks of “my wife” and so it was informally given the title The Gospel of Jesus's Wife.

Here is the translation:

When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth - Revelation 6:12-14

We've only had a few doomsday events come and go in 2014 but a new one arrives April 15th. No, it isn't the IRS, though that is doomsday for American wallets. 

Want to find the flaws in a study? Ask a competitor, just like you would ask a competitor about the flaws in an iPhone or any other product.

And if you really want to see griping about the flaws in a study, ask someone who happens to believe just the opposite. 

When a paper comes out that uses the exact same terminology as studies that advocates happen to like, conservative scientific verbage like using the word "possible" is touted as a weakness and they will insist there is no "clear" correlation. When culturally contradictory papers are published, we are told cross-sectional studies can't tell us anything at all about causality, exactly the opposite of what we read about papers confirming a position.