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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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Thanks to social media, advice on how to prevent a cold is everywhere and 51 percent of parents taking the  C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health admit to believing in folklore and homeopathy even though 99 percent of them accept scientific approaches as well. 

Welcome to 2019.

Colds are caused by viruses and spread most frequently from person to person. The most common transmission is mucus from the nose or mouth that gets passed on by direct contact, coughing, sneezing, doorknobs, etc. Therefore the most effective method for preventing colds is encouraging children to wash hands.

It won't work in stopping them all.  Kids will probably experience three to six colds each year. 

Drake’s Organic Spirits is touting it is the "first and only spirits line in the world to receive all five major health certifications." By "health", for four of them they simply mean manufacturing or cultural preferences; kosher, vegan, Non-GMO Project, and USDA Organic. (1) For the health-related one, gluten-free, there is no gluten in rum (sugar/molasses) anyway and since they use the same ingredients for their vodka as their rum, there is no gluten in that either.

And finally, by "spirits line" they mean the mixes that go in their rum and vodka, not the alcohol itself.
Traveling to Mars is a ridiculous idea outside anything but "adventure" yet the U.S. administration under President Obama scrubbed his predecessor's return to the moon and replaced it with a program bearing his name, going to the red planet.

Whether or not that actually happens, science and technology are using that potential to experiment with growing food in space. 
A California lawmaker wants to ban paper receipts - those annoying long things that immediately get lost in a grocery bag - but instead of promoting the legitimate reason to get rid of them, they are useless, he invoked chemical scaremongering.
Bryn Jarald Henderson, D.O. (osteopath), claimed his stem cell treatments at Regenerative Medical Group and Telehealth Medical Group using amniotic fluid from women who have given birth via C-section could cause the lame to walk and cure kidney disease and whatever else. 

That was enough to get slapped down by the Federal Trade Commission and rightly so. Though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been forced to allow all manner of suspect claims in the food and supplement industry due to President Clinton's 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Law exempting supplement hucksters from any real oversight, overtly lying to  is another animal.
House plants can help clean a home's air, but unless you live in a greenhouse a mechanical high-efficiency particulate (HEPA) air filter is the way to go, because it forces pet dander, pollen (even cigarette smoke if you still do that) or pollen through a mesh that traps those.