Impostor participants are people who fake data in order to take part in health research or are  automated computer ‘bots’ which mimic human behavior and responses. As claims get promoted in journalism about harms related to PFAS in water, weedkillers causing cancer, or food coloring causing diabetes, lawsuits by predatory lawyers have become big business, and it won't be a surprise if such Predatorts or environmental and other activist groups are involved in fake participants to manipulate results in their favor.

A new call to action by ecologists uses a numerical model to note that wildfires in places like California have been made worse by humans. 

That doesn't mean it is human emissions. For decades, California government has banned logging. They let people move to risky fire areas and then not pay for any mitigation or firebreaks. State and local governments refuse to allow dead brush to be cleared because it impacts the environment.

In the early days of Science 2.0, blogging did not get a lot of institutional respect. Public outreach was a waste of time, academics were often told, leave that to science journalists and the PIOs at schools who write press releases.

It seemed archaic. Anyone who knows how much of science is government-funded, about a third of basic research, knows that means it is political. Which means you cannot and should not let someone else write your narrative. It's too easy to manipulate. A decade ago, when a group wrote to Columbia University and asked them to remove Dr. Oz from the faculty because of his claims about supplements and that medicine was a corporate conspiracy, he got allies in corporate journalism to dismiss us as Big Pharma shills.(1)

Due to President Clinton's 1994 DSHEA law (Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994), and diverting science funding to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a large number of people believe acupuncture works and that supplements can be alternatives to medicine.

Acupuncture is the placebo effect but some natural products can work - the problem is that if they work they may do something bad. Kratom is an example of a product banned in countries that grow it; unless it is for export to the United States. They know that it works, and also that it can kill Godzilla.

From Los Angeles to Portland to New York City, political protests have become common. That provides data for what may be happening in brains and how engaged people can avoid becoming a Tyler Robinson or Luigi Mangione or Antifa in Oregon.

The US is not special when it comes to protests, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says there have been over 140 mass demonstrations globally in the past year, with 30 ongoing.

A new paper(1) says  up to 80% of activists experience moderate to severe anxiety or depression. Are they protesting because they are anxious or are they anxious because they spend time in a group of protesters? 

A cross-sectional analysis of emergency Medicaid expenditures from data in the 2022 Medicaid Budget and Expenditure System found that of the 38 states plus Washington, DC, was nominal compared to overall spending.

There are confounders. Not all states allow it and 11 did not report emergency Medicaid spending on illegal immigrants and some, like California, now give health care for free to anyone regardless of their legal status, which means the $9 billion on emergency room care for illegal immigrants in 2024 is 70% due to that one state. Total Medicaid costs for illegal immigrants during 2021-2024 were $16 billion but this paper did not include other public spending.