Featured in Weekly Newsletter
Should fossil fuel companies be shielded from lawsuits over climate change damage? The Supreme Court takes up the question
Climate change is causing billions of dollars’ worth of damage every year from floods, fires, droughts and other consequences of ...
Viewpoint: Wellness movement activists reposition nicotine from a killer addictive drug into a cure-all for brain ills
An ironic development emerging alongside the “Make America Healthy Again” movement is the portrayal of nicotine as a wellness and ...
The kooky logic behind the raft of spurious cancer claims from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health
It would shock you to know that Costco, according to a new Harvard School of Public Health methodology, caused 120,687 ...
Viewpoint: Food cults: Online ‘nutrition communities’ can pose unique dangers
Nutrition advice used to tell us what to eat. Social media increasingly tells us who we are based on what ...
Viewpoint: Even lousy scientific articles can shield authors when they hype dubious health claims and products
Peer review in reputable journals gives scientific claims an authority that commercial speech rarely enjoys. But what happens when scientists ...
Viewpoint: Chipotle-inspired lesson: 10,000 sick customers suggest that processed foods can be safer than fresh ones
The Environmental Working Group recently compared ultra-processed foods across major fast-food chains and found one conspicuous exception: Chipotle. That makes ...
Viewpoint: Why do online health lies outlive the evidence that debunks them? Read “Everyone Else Is Lying to You”
Medical misinformation has a peculiar advantage: it can outlive the evidence that disproves it, especially when yesterday’s contrarians become today’s ...
Investigative group ProPublica finds links between ectopic pregnancy deaths and abortion bans
This story was originally published by ProPublica. The number of women who died after an ectopic pregnancy has spiked in recent ...
19%: Plunging support for Trump-RFK, Jr. measles vaccine safety oversight
Two new polls reveal cracks in both US and global trust in medicine, with one showing erosion in Americans’ belief ...
Viewpoint: Dubious environmental fears: Why the AI buildout is critical to America’s ecological future
Opposition to artificial intelligence has intensified over the past year. A majority of Americans worry that AI will kill jobs, ...
Viewpoint: Childhood deaths in dispute: Why the CDC vs Pennsylvania conflict over measles vaccines matters
If you’ve been following the dispute between Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy ...
Viewpoint: Bad science—Five bogus Trump administration claims about vaccines and autism
[On August 10, 2026], the president signed an unprecedented executive order declaring the administration’s intention to massively overhaul the vaccine ...
“Hit the brakes”: Anthropic warns the race to superintelligence could spawn internet-seizing AI swarms—and empower authoritarians. Here’s how to stop it.
I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of ...
It’s not 2020, but COVID is still a health threat
A mom in my local parent group posted last week asking whether anyone else had recently had COVID. She’d just ...
Leucovorin for autism: Prescriptions surged 700% after Trump endorsed “a random drug that probably doesn’t work”
Following a White House press conference suggesting leucovorin as a treatment for autism in September 2025, and despite a lack ...
Con game: What happens when people are overly concerned they may be suckered
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine. Which would make you feel worse — losing $100 to a pickpocket ...
From smart packaging to bio-based coatings, scientists find new ways to reduce food contamination
In today’s world, food hunger and insecurity are not due to lack of food. Right now, the world produces enough ...
Viewpoint: Realpolitik environmentalism is on the horizon
When was the last time you heard someone call themselves an “environmentalist”? A decade ago, self-professed environmentalists would proudly claim ...
Viewpoint: How NBC became climate activists’ PR partner and litigation ally—and why it is a symptom of a deeper ideological tilt in the news media
Suncor v. Boulder County, which the Supreme Court will hear this term, asks whether a Colorado county can sue two ...
Innovation vs. regulation? AI is revolutionizing biotechnology—but raising unintended risks and ethical concerns
The recent announcement of novel, viable viruses created by artificial intelligence (AI) was celebrated as a major advance in the ...
The $100 genome: What breaking this accessibility barrier means for the future of genetic testing
In May 2022, Californian biotech Ultima Genomics announced that its UG 100 platform was capable of sequencing an entire human ...
Viewpoint: Follow the money: How Bloomberg Philanthropies and the NGO Lighthouse Reports manufactured a Big Food safety scandal
What happens when you want to run a campaign, but you have very limited data and evidence? One strategy more ...
Viewpoint: Kennedy moves to close Big Food’s GRAS loophole—but will politically-protected Prevagen and Big Supplement slip through another?
With great fanfare, Secretary Kennedy announced the closing of the GRAS (“Generally Recognized As Safe”) loophole. But separating the rhetoric ...
Viewpoint: Will Trump’s politicization of science undermine U.S. Nobel-level research?
This story was originally published by ProPublica. For decades, physicists wrestled with a fundamental mystery of the universe. They wanted ...
AI data-center controversy: The ocean may solve the political and resource challenges—or simply relocate the environmental costs
The artificial intelligence boom is driving unprecedented demand for data centers, raising concerns about their growing energy consumption, water use ...
The politics driving Trump’s medically baseless order to break up combination childhood vaccines
President Donald Trump has ordered a reduction in childhood vaccines — publicly faulting the shots for an increase in autism ...
FDA-approved mRNA flu vaccine signals future for RNA therapeutics
Vaccines have been reliably and affordably protecting people from diseases worldwide for centuries. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, however, vaccine development was ...
