Beinecke MS 408, commonly called the Voynich manuscript (after Wilfrid Voynich, a book dealer who bought it in Italy), has long been dismissed as gibberish by most, but beginning in 1915, and certainly since the 1960s, it has also been a source of fascination for people who believe it must be a code. Or a recipe book. Or something. It is actually a proto-Romance language, according to a new paper. It just had never been written before because educated people used Latin, says Dr. Gerard Cheshire.

So uneducated people wrote in a language from 2000 years earlier?

Homeopathy, now two centuries old, proceeds from a fascinatingly bizarre premise; that there is a u-shaped curve for dose. Reasonable people know the dose makes the poison; a medicine that can help you at normal levels can be harmful at high levels. 

Homepaths (and the Endocrine Disrupting Chemical community) instead also believe in an upward curve at other end, that chemicals at extremely low levels can also affect people. This u-shaped curve allows all manner of homeopathic "remedies" to be foisted off on people, not to mention allowing anti-science activists to attribute magical statistical harms to chemicals that science can't detect.

Glyphosate, a common weedkiller, doesn't have a mechanism that acts on the biology of humans, at least without falling into a tub full of it and drowning, but trial lawyers know science does not matter to a jury, emotion does. And emotionally an agriculture company can come off stiff compared to a couple who used the product for 35 years and then both got non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

U.S. Right To Know, an industry-funded trade group that was created to harass and intimidate scientists, has teamed up with a few academic allies to promote 129 Freedom of Information Act requests they submitted related to Coca-Cola.  To harass scientists as effectively as possible, they make requests overly broad so they can claim to "reveal" some suitably cosmic number, in this case 87,000 documents.

Can all nuclear energy be weaponized? It could, according to US politicians in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton and Senator John Kerry mortally wounded nuclear energy development, to the cheers of their constituents. It was all based on claims by environmentalists that nuclear energy invariably led to nuclear weapons.

A recent paper in JAMA should have EXPLORATORY in giant red letter across every page, or else journalists will use it to promote fear and doubt about sunscreens. Which is already happening.