When Miles McEvoy became Deputy Administrator of the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) he set out to do something in the Obama administration that Science 2.0 long had called for, and Consumers Union had been calling for a decade before us; spot field testing of organic food so their customers could be certain that the prohibited substances and excluded methods that marketers advertise in their process were actually not being used.

New molecules similar to carbohydrates have showed the capacity to inhibit the activity of a specific type of glycoside enzymes - and that means inhibiting infectious diseases.

Glycosides are essential enzymes to digest carbohydrates but they are also key players in infections caused by pathogens, in anti-bacterial defense and many other vital cellular processes. Because these small molecules that are able to bond with and inhibit the activity of enzymes in infectious diseases, it opens up the basis for new medicines. 

George Washington may be the only popularly elected ruler in History who, when his supporters offered to crown him King, relinquished his power, instead. Politically speaking, that was a very unnatural thing to do. Historically, federal agencies have not surrendered their power, even after their congressional mandates were accomplished. Instead, they have invented new problems to solve, thereby justifying their continued existence.

Short summary: it's an entertaining but rather far fetched proposal in an arxiv preprint not published anywhere but mentioned in a Scientific American op ed. Implausible for many reasons including its spectrum which is not the shiny spectrum you'd expect from a solar sail but the red of tholins mixed with rock and metal as you'd expect from an asteroid / comet.

The midterm elections are widely expected to usher in this century’s “year of the woman” – an explosion of women entering government.

Massachusetts will likely elect its first black woman to Congress, Arizona is poised to send its first woman to the U.S. Senate, and fully 50 percent of Democratic congressional nominees this year are women.

If you’ve ever thought your poo is just a bunch of dead cells, think again. Most of it is alive, teeming with billions of microbes. Here’s what studies in healthy adults reveal makes up our poo.

Water

Our feces is largely (75%) made up of water, although this differs from person to person.

Alcohol is a drug which needs no introduction given its (multi)age-old impact on humanity.

One crucial question is “what makes some people crave alcohol in excess acutely ie a single sitting and/or chronically over time”? Scientists have long known that the answer involves the neurotransmitter dopamine in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the brain.

Recently Mark Brodie, Professor of Physiology and BioPhysics at the University of Illinois at Chicago published an interesting article in the journal Neuropharmacology. His research focused on the potassium channel KCNK13 which is found inside the membrane of dopaminergic neurons in the VTA.

Tourists are not alarmed by Proposition 65 cancer warnings on nearly every product in every store in California, it quickly becomes a joke to them.

Scientists in California warned that would happen while trial lawyers behind the referendum insisted it would never get that bad, knowing that "leadership" in such a ridiculous area - a body in France "suggesting" a link to cancer - would be a disaster for public trust in science. And therefore good for trial lawyers who want a jury to believe Science Is A Corporate Conspiracy.

If the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), independent scientists, and fisheries experts all know a claim in an article is hopelessly flawed why would the journal Marine Policy dig in their heels, doing irreparable harm to the marine conservation they claim to care about?

When expressing concern about the article, NOAA wrote, "allegations made in the paper, are absent of transparency regarding the data, and assumptions supporting them are irresponsible and call into question the authors' conclusions."

On Sept. 6, 1958, the “natural” food movement and chemophobia as we know it were born. On that day, the Food Additives Amendment of 1958, which modified the U.S. Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, came into force.

Also known as the Delaney Clause, it stated if a synthetic chemical could be shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals, the chemical must be banned. It also suggested if the exact same chemical was natural, it was safe. While this was immediately attacked as a baffling and unscientific approach to carcinogenicity, many lawyers were looking forward to decades of litigation.