In 2011 I wrote a book with Dr. Alex Berezow of RealClearScience in which we noted the common cause among the anti-vaccine, anti-energy, and anti-GMO communities. They shared common beliefs about distrust of science and I made a challenge; I said if I drew a radius around a Whole Foods, I could predict with high accuracy how those people with those beliefs voted.

In January, the Chang’e-4 lunar probe landed on dark side of the Moon but it's a tiny relay satellite that is getting all of the buzz today. 

"Bud Light", a lower carbohydrate beer produced by  Anheuser–Busch InBev of Belgium, made waves at the Super Bowl, among beer experts and competitors at least, by assuring their customers they did not use corn syrup.

So corn syrup is bad? Well, no, they didn't say that, they just said they didn't have it, but such "nocebo" tactics - the opposite of placebo, making people feel healthier about a product they don't have - have been tried and true for 50 years.(1) 

I got a butter shaper for Christmas. I asked for one because I make lot of butter in a mason jar and then just throw it in tupperware but my friends sometimes want butter and it feels a little dismissive to just hand them tupperware.

Imagine my disappointment when I read the instructions which stated that it needed to be treated with "Organic Coconut Oil." Butter used to be something almost everyone made and now it was the providence of uninformed hippies, it seems. Or maybe this company was trapped in 2016?

When the HPV vaccine was first introduced, there were a number of reasons people listed for being critical. Some were just corporate cynicism - a company that just lost $5 billion in a Vioxx settlement was working its way under the same vaccine halo as polio and smallpox, they said. Others argued that it didn't work very well. And then there was a more subjective cultural claim that protecting teenage girls against a future cancer by making sex seem safer would lead to promiscuity.

Data from 110 counties in 33 states from 1998 to 2014 has found that brute preservation efforts, the 'nature cannot be touched by humans' kind promoted by aggressive environmental groups, leads to more greenhouse gas emissions.