The most popular organic fertilizer is feces while the most popular pesticide is copper sulfate. Both of those don't sound great to ingest but a new study says that extra dung leads to more bacteria - and that may be a good thing, if you believe a lot more bacteria is beneficial to gut health.

Yogurt marketing and supplement claims aside, there is no evidence that your body is impacted by probiotics unless you suffered a legitimate medical issue (as in you need an actual fecal transplant), yet like gluten-free diets probiotic foods have become a trend among people with extra money to spend. The same people who buy organic food.

Bisphenol S (BPS) and bisphenol F (BPF) are chemicals used in the lining of aluminum-canned food and drinks (to prevent spoilage). They were rolled out as a replacement for bisphenol A (BPA), a compound targeted by activists under claims it might statistically be an "endocrine-disrupting chemical." Exhaustive studies later found overwhelming scientific evidence that was not so.

A new paper has statistically linked depression and anxiety during pregnancy (and link preterm births due to those) to the radius of natural gas hydraulic fracturing wells in Pennsylvania.

Should you be worried? The short answer is "no", this is not a very good paper.

Just like "only in mice" has become a common complaint of biologists, chemists, and toxicologists about provocative claims designed to get media attention, "it's just correlation" is invoked nearly as often by the science community.

With air pollution a distant memory outside some pockets in the United States (or during wildfires), the U.S. EPA oddly embraced one paper, which they had not seen any data for(1), claiming that particles so small they could only be detected with an electron microscope, 2.5 microns in size, were killing people.

Data didn't show it, but it doesn't matter and that is the great thing about modern epidemiology. In this decade, epidemiologists only need to show a statistical correlation and then they get media coverage and hand it off to scientists and tell them to prove it. It's sort of like theoretical physicists claiming they can show time travel or a multiverse and the incompetent noobs in experimental physics need to drop everything and prove them right. 

If I have a choice between an emissions-belching factory near my home or clean, high-paying jobs from a diverse group of educated people 13,000 feet above where citizens live, I am siding with science.

This is why while I was a successful environmental fundraiser, many of their positions made no sense to me, even when I was young and naïve. Many of the positions I was supposed to believe in weren't about the environment, they were about manufacturing hype to raise money. Hawaiʻi's Thirty Meter Telescope is another example where it is not about the environment - 13 observatories and telescopes have been there for over 40 years - and it is also not about the next tactic after the environmental argument failed - religion.