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Young People Have Become Jaded To Emotional Appeals On Screens - And That Is Good

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The Feel Good Fallacy Of Sugary Drink Taxes On Reducing Obesity

Social authoritarians like to make people more reliant on government and then control what people...

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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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In the 19th century, charlatans traveled around selling magic potions, tonics, and salves but to stop them no one decided to ban actual medical research.

The issue facing "AI", which is short for Artificial Intelligence, is that the only people who will feel bound by top-down control were never going to be a problem in the first place. Large Language Models, termed Generative AI, can be a huge positive in health care, but because it is misunderstood and there is a lot of exploitative media coverage there are ongoing efforts to kill it before it really gets going.
A new paper in Canadian Medical Association Journal has linked irregular heartbeats in 322 Chinese cities to small-micron particulate matter, invisible pollution that needs an electron microscope to visualize. Given its minute size, PM2.5 is one-fourth the size of real pollution, PM10, there is four times as much of it, so the paper could have used PM10 and achieved the same statistical significance. It just would have been less dramatic
Prior to natural gas hydraulic fracturing making played out gas wells viable again, America was in a real climate emissions pickle. In 1994, Democrats finally won their war of extinction on nuclear energy, they cheered as President Bill Clinton and Senator John Kerry(1) created regulations that act as bans and eventually forced through a series of anti-nuclear activists at the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Many women eat healthier during pregnancy, but that may mean whatever version of 'healthy' is trending in any given year. Sugar-free, low-fat, gluten-free, paleo, organic, it all has proponents, it all has suspect epidemiology papers claiming it should be a reason to buy some New York Times bestselling diet book built around it.
In 2016, The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act amended the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and created a mandatory requirement for EPA to evaluate existing chemicals using transparent methodology and risk-based assessment. Not simplistic epidemiology.

This was actually a good thing. We want to make sure people are still safe as new data arrive and since they were using science and not statistical correlation, we could have confidence in the results.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a United Nations epidemiology group headquartered in France, could be in ethical hot water again over the claim by a Ramazzini Institute leader that seems to know in advance that IARC will consider aspartame a carcinogen - a designation which leads to automatic warning labels or even bans in places like California, which under Proposition 65 turned over its science to IARC last century.