While 2020 looked to be another year when corporate media journalists would provide the same old Product X "linked to" Disease Y "a new study finds" articles as they have for the entire century, the latest coronavirus, COV-19, has saved us from all that.

While in the past people were willing to pretend concern about what diseases the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences was willing to correlate to useful products on a spreadsheet, those days are gone. Chemophobia is a luxury for the idle rich, much like organic food or the anti-vaccine movement.

When people do have something to be concerned over, data dredging goes by the wayside. Reality sets in. Science is back to being a force for good.

March is the time of year when even people who aren't college basketball fans get involved - because of March Madness pools, online or in the office. 

Most, even experts will fail, because they do one thing wrong - they start in the beginning, which this year is March 17th, with dozens and dozens of teams, and work their way toward the NCAA Final. Yet that is the wrong way to go, according to a new study. Most people will be lured by the prospect of an upset along the way and are out of it by the Final Four.

A new sickness, COVID-19 known as Coronavirus 2019, has become one of the most worrying problems on the planet these days. Certainly, it could be a serious thing in many aspects, especially for the people who become infected and, consequently, for the health systems of many countries if this number were to extend to large portions of the population. Nonetheless, there are also positive aspects. As said by the proverb, every cloud has a silver lining.  

A new long article which appeared on the arXiv preprint repository last week is sending ripples around the world of particle physics phenomenology, as its main result -if proven correct- will completely wipe off the table the one and only long-standing inconsistency of the Standard Model of particle physics, the one existing between theoretical and experimental estimates of the so-called anomalous magnetic moment of the muon.

The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center (JRC) in Canton, Massachusetts, has 45 people who've been exposed to electrical shocks through electrodes attached to their skin, under the guise of conditioning individuals to stop engaging in self-injurious or aggressive behavior. They have names such as Whistle Stop, SIBIS, GED, GED-3A 2, and GED-4 2. Some 35 years ago, they were approved as medical devices.

The Organic Trade Association has canceled The Organic Center's Annual Benefit Dinner due to venue concerns about coronavirus in Anaheim during the Natural Products Expo West, where the dinner was going to be held. Naturally.

Many adults have some degree of osteoarthritis, up to 15 percent of those over age 60, but less well known is that degenerative joint disease (DJD), where the protective cartilage that cushions the end of the bones wears down over time, affects a high proportion of pet cats of all age groups, but particularly those 10 years of age and over.

A new study provides a Feline Musculoskeletal Pain Screening Checklist  to help veterinarians and owners to identify cats experiencing DJD-associated pain.

Packages and labels can be a bit of a mess in the 21st century. What is GMO plastic? Who knows? Yet a company named World Centric is selling ZeroWare 2.0 Reusable Dishware - "alternative" tableware they note is not only free of melamine, which they claim is killing people, but is also made from "Non-GMO plastic."

Naturally, I asked their PR rep what Non-GMO plastic was and got no response. Every one of these shady companies claims they are about science and health, but they are about money and will ghost anyone who asks an obvious question, like how they can be an alternative to GMO plastic when plastic has no organism to genetically modify.

This is the news that they are not really sharing on mainstream TV: China is containing this outbreak. The screenshot shows figures for one of the other provinces, Henan province, right next to the worst affected province Hubei. Meanwhile China as a whole reported only 329 new cases on thursday, the lowest number for over a month. This would not happen for a pandemic, so it is not a pandemic yet.

The WHO say that if we act promptly it will never be a pandemic. The course of this disease is under our control.

skip to: Why this is not a pandemic

On most comedy television shows with episodes dealing with kids and sports, there is likely to be a joke about snack culture; it has to be organic, free-range juice boxes, etc.

The jokes are there because for the script writers, snack culture wasn't a thing for most of them when they were children, nor was it for most parents. The audience will laugh but the screenwriters and the audience are the ones who made snack culture during and after sports the cultural norm. Gatorade was only invented at the University of Florida (home of the Gators football team) when they were adults and didn't become popular until the 1970s, so we can't blame Baby Boomers for this one.