Science Controversies
With Trump’s support, RFK, Jr.’s CDC to use unverified data to claim that the Covid shots are linked to 25 child deaths
Trump health officials plan to link coronavirus vaccines to the deaths of 25 children as they consider limiting which Americans ...
Viewpoint: How association studies and ‘links’ distort our understanding of the relative risks of different foods
There is a growing debate about ultra-processed foods (UPFs) —products designed for shelf life and taste, typically high in added ...
DNA screening start-up claims it can screen embryos for the likelihood of age-related diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s
Prospective parents using IVF will soon be able to rank embryos using genetic and other information in the hopes of extending ...
US children receive 92 vaccine doses? RFK, Jr.’s vaccine math doesn’t add up
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a Senate hearing ... that children receive up to ...
It’s often said that humans and chimps share 99% of their DNA. That means a lot less than almost everybody believes it means
Early research suggested that human and chimp genomes are more than 98% identical. "What it means is that for each ...
What legal rights should non-conscious AI’s have?
In Silicon Valley, there’s a small but growing field called model welfare, which is working to figure out whether AI models ...
The contagion of Florida’s vaccine policy: What states will be next to end school vaccine mandates?
As health department directors in Dallas, Texas, and Columbus, Ohio, we have seen firsthand in our communities that viruses do ...
RFK, Jr.’s report to suggest Tylenol use during pregnancy has links to autism. What does the science say?
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has in recent months teased a September announcement in which he would identify the ...
Viewpoint: Private companies may soon be able to de-extinct our human ancestors. It’s time to debate ethics and regulations
The recent trend for resurrecting extinct animals has made headlines globally and sparked controversy over the validity of the claims ...
GLP podcast: ‘Fight fire with fire.’ How one science advocate converts vaccine skeptics
Many scientists treat the anti-vaccine movement as a collection of lepers—a group of malcontents to be ignored and ostracized in ...
When farmers deny science: The hypocrisy hurting agriculture’s credibility
There is vast scientific consensus that our planet is experiencing a long-term climate change, and denying this trend — as ...
A single high dose of LSD can ease anxiety and depression for months
A rigorous new study finds that a single dose of LSD can ease anxiety and depression for months. The study ...
Trust issues: What happens when therapists use ChatGPT?
Declan would never have found out his therapist was using ChatGPT had it not been for a technical mishap. The ...
Confronting the elephant in the human biodiversity room — the explosive issue of IQ
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine two widely separated human groups living for thousands of years in different cultural and ecological ...
Florida Surgeon General Ladapo calls vaccine mandates “slavery,” as Florida poised to become first state to end childhood vaccine mandates
Florida’s surgeon general ... announced plans to end all state vaccine mandates, including for children to attend schools, which would ...
Historians view Trump’s assault on science as page pulled from the autocrats’ playbook to secure more power
The war on science began four centuries ago when the Roman Catholic Church outlawed books that reimagined the heavens. Subsequent ...
‘Go wild’: Don’t expect a disengaged and science-ignorant president to contain RFK’ Jr.’s assault on science
Trump pledged that he’d empower Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “go wild" on health care. The president has kept his ...
‘Ruining the magic of breeding’? Cloning’s okay but gene-edited horses threaten to upend the pedigreed world of Polo
While Argentina, regarded as the global capital of polo, has long welcomed reproductive technologies – including cloning – to breed ...
25 years ago, India approved GMO rice and was poised to be the developing world’s crop bioengineering innovator. What went awry?
In the early 2000s, India’s fields promised to become laboratories of the future. When genetically modified (GM) cotton was approved ...
Is sunscreen bad for your health? MAHA and social media disinformation threatens a resurgence in skin cancer
Sunscreen protects the skin by either absorbing or reflecting ultraviolet rays that can cause sunburn, premature aging and skin cancer ...
Viewpoint: It’s time to move beyond the ‘sex assigned at birth’ mania
As you may have noticed, “sex” is out, and “sex assigned at birth” is in. Instead of asking for a ...
Viewpoint: Profiling Dr. David Geier, the anti-vax quack who is guiding RFK, Jr.’s vaccine policy
By Jessica SteierGraphics by Sara Chodosh and Taylor Maggiacomo Dr. Steier is a public health scientist who specializes in science ...
‘He’s weaponizing public health’: RFK, Jr.’s hand picked CDC in disarray as three members resign and Trump fires the director
The White House on Wednesday fired Susan Monarez as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after she ...
GLP podcast: Making babies in the lab? The messy ethics of embryo selection
If you could select the traits your children would have before they were born, would you do it? Once a ...
Mixed results: Lung from a genetically modified pig transplanted into a human
[I]n the first procedure of its kind, Chinese scientists on Monday reported transplanting a lung from a pig into a brain-dead ...
Landmark GMO: Pakistan develops cotton variety that resists pests and withstands 120F degree heat
In a landmark development for Pakistan’s agriculture sector, the Centre for Excellence in Molecular Biology (CEMB) at Punjab University, in ...
Some judges are adapting AI for use in court cases though hallucination problems have not been solved
The propensity for AI systems to make mistakes and for humans to miss those mistakes has been on full display ...
