The billions of dollars that the food industry won't have to spend on pointless GMO labels isn't simply money saved for consumers- we are actually lucky they aren't spending billions on top of the billions they will already have to spend on pointless labels that could be required by the Obama administration under its health care reform provisions. Because it will all be passed through to us so someone, somewhere can get something for free.

The farewell letter written by departing Secretary of Energy Steven Chu will be remembered as one of the most thorough, detailed and outspoken ever crafted by a departing Cabinet member.

It's his actual tenure running America's energy policy we wish we could forget. In his parting 3,781- word term paper he takes credit for the Bush administration's ARPA-E (that's the energy version of DARPA) yet doesn't mention the things he actually should take credit for, like steering American energy research into an expensive morass of feel-good fallacies and solar activism while refusing to stand up to his boss on anti-science policies designed to make energy across the board more expensive for poor people.

When Congress passed the newest farm bill extension at the beginning of this month, they cut $22 million being paid under the National Organic Certification Cost-Share Program, along with several other subsidies to organic farmers. 

That means you and I and everyone else no longer have to pay so organic farmers can put that sticker on organic food.  After all, if traditional food was going to have to suck it up and put GMO warning labels on food, and the $29 billion organic industry thought that was a great idea, it doesn't seem right taxpayers should have to bankroll stickers for anyone else.

Making a coffee beer has always been tough but not for obvious reasons - it isn't like people don't enjoy foam, cappuccino has been around forever. Lipids in coffee just don't seem to make a lot of sense, though.

But without coffee and beer, science would grind to a halt - a $140 billion a year industry would be paralyzed - so it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to put them together.

Loowit Brewing and Torque Coffee Roasters in Vancouver have been working on just such a coffee stout that they introduced at the "Drink This!" artisan beverage festival. Torque co-owner Ryan Palmer also created a coffee pale ale beer with Mt. Tabor Brewing's owner Eric Surface. A stout is a natural fit to get going on coffee-beer hybrid.

If you are part of the $29 billion organic food masses, you can breathe a sigh of relief about the latest Salmonella recall - this one is not in your stores. I'm so relieved I am putting up a link about it.

Stallings Head Cheese Co., Inc., of Houston is recalling 4,700 pounds of hog head cheese that may be contaminated with Salmonella, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced today.

Hog head cheese? You betcha. Hog head cheese is a gelatinous mixture of meat from a hog's head. It's popular in Cajun cuisine. Hey, don't make fun.  People in California eat salad and I don't understand that either.

Psychiatrist Dr. Eric Hollander says the hygiene hypothesis -  the idea that by eliminating some harmful organisms we are weakening our immune systems - may be a reason to study the use of ingesting the eggs of parasitic worms to treat autism.

He gets to jump on a few hot button cultural topics that way, autism and a medical idea that has caught on with the usual anti-science hippies and the more normal crowd who got sold the idea that anti-bacterial soaps were necessary if they care about kids.

The kicker is that the psychiatrist got the idea when he noticed one of his patients’ behavior improve while self-medicating with Trichuris suis ova (TSO), the eggs of a whipworm. That passes for a journal paper in the social sciences.

Diagnosed rates of autism around the world have increased a lot over the last decade and a half but there is ongoing debate about whether there are actually more cases or if it is instead a cultural phenomenon, namely that we're getting better at detecting the disorder and more willing to label kids as having it. Some also contend that the increase in autism is due to whatever they happen not to like; vaccines, GMOs, etc.

How can you know? To prove that diagnoses have gotten better, rather than there being a true increase in autism, you'd have to know what would have happened to today's kids 20 years ago. Would they have been diagnosed with autism?  Or ADD? Nothing? 

The Smithsonian  wants some help in making their citizen science efforts a little more relevant to the public. 

So if you are not a zoologist and can take their eMammal Survey it will help them get some 'baseline' values of what people know about critters.

James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, wrote in a paper "We now have no general of influence, much less power ... leading our country's War on Cancer."

On the $100 million U.S. project to determine the DNA changes that drive nine forms of cancer: It is "not likely to produce the truly breakthrough drugs that we now so desperately need," he said. And on the idea that antioxidants such as those in colorful berries fight cancer: "The time has come to seriously ask whether antioxidant use much more likely causes than prevents cancer."

What does he mean?