Robyn O’Brien—who styles herself as a foodie version of Erin Brokovich - considers economist Chuck Benbrook - who styled himself a Research Professor while an adjunct at Washington State  University - a "mentor" and an "inspiration."

Three winners and six finalists of the 2015 Blavatnik Regional Awards for Young Scientists have been announced. The awards were created in 2007 and honor postdoctoral scientists from institutions across New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. 

Winners are awarded $30,000 each and finalists are awarded $10,000 each in unrestricted funds. 

Nature Biotechnology, which by the name obviously supports agricultural science, has come late to the party defending scientists against the icy chill of bullying tactics by the US Right To Know organization, which is itself funded by organic food corporations and has a director that is the well-known political operative and former Clinton lawyer, Lisa Graves, behind the PR group that runs the SourceWatch advocacy site.

But it's never too late to take the correct stance.

If you prefer an organic toxic pesticide over a synthetic one, or prefer food created with older genetic modification rather than the modern kind, then you are willing to pay more for those values.

And it was only a matter of time before companies followed the money. 

To health experts, sugary drinks and type 2 diabetes are linked because sugar promotes weight gain, and body fat contributes to insulin resistance, which can lead to diabetes. A study a short while ago removed weight as a factor, and claimed that every daily serving of sugar-sweetened beverages increases any person's risk of type 2 diabetes by 13 percent over 10 years.

Vani Hari, "The Food Babe", has apparently made pretty good money selling pseudoscience to her audience. Obviously, almost anything she has said has been debunked by qualified doctors and scientists, but what was little realized is how much money she makes selling the ingredients she claims are dangerous.

No one's life is in peril, of course, because like her claims on microwaves and air travel, she is goofy, it just seems odd she only worries about a "2B carcinogen" (which applies to lots and lots of stuff,  the International Agency for Research on Cancer [IARC] has done 900 monographs on products and only found 1 that they didn't think is a carcinogen - that's why the UN shouldn't do science) when she isn't selling something that is a 2B carcinogen.

Dr. Oz may have thought he won the culture war by making "Dr." really tiny in his logo and hiring an anti-science fact checker for his program, but serious doctors are not buying it.

In Reuters, a consortium worries about the 6,000,000 people per day being told that homeopathy, Miracle Herbs and whatever else will be popular among the anti-science crowd this week will be taken seriously. 

The coffee berry borer, Hypothenemus hampei, is a pesky beetle. It is thought to destroy $500M of coffee crop annually, affecting some 20M small farms worldwide. The borer spends most of its life cycle buried inside of the coffee berry, feeding on the sacred bean held within.

Environmentalism, once the domain of science-based progressives like Dr. Norm Borlaug, has been hijacked by...conservatives.

You read that right. Outside America, 'conservative' usually meant 'attached to the old way', rather than not wanting to hand money over to the government to redistribute for votes. To those classic conservatives, the past is supreme. Sports were better, society was better, it is basically cultural nostalgia and fear of the modern.

That kind of fear of the modern still exists but rather than being old rich white people on the right, it is old rich white people on the left, who pay a lot of political science majors to raise money at environmental groups so they can send us back to the 19th century.