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.

Survey results that will be presented during Heart Failure 2019 in Athens a few weeks from now are a good opportunity to discuss facts and myths about heart disease. Including some held by cardiologists.

20 percent of believe believe, for example, that heart disease patients should avoid exercise while just over 50 percent know that exercise can be a treatment for their disease. Meanwhile, doctors are unsure about the conflict between cancer treatment and heart disease. Does cancer promote heart disease? There are common pathways in tumor growth and heart failure and some cancer therapies are toxic to the heart so it could be that, or the other way around.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was once a serious, revered organization with the somber task of tackling what environmental factors caused what cancers so that we could eliminate them.(1)

And they did. Their decisions for the first 20 years were rock solid - there is no debate now that cigarettes, smog, and alcohol will kill you, especially if you routinely have high doses.  When California chose to abdicated its science policymaking to a French group, there were concerns that its power might be abused but they were dismissed because there was no indication IARC was heading in that direction.