Science Controversies
Viewpoint: Climate change propaganda and disinformation are now the official position of the U.S. government
The Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists recently won a court case against the administration which forced it to ...
Viewpoint—Tech pseudoscience: The limits of AI and machine learning
Machine Learning (ML) is a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI), where a neural network is ‘trained’ to recognise patterns, in order ...
The most developed countries have declining birth rates, endangering their economies—or maybe not
Low fertility rates—the average number of children born to a woman—may not spell economic trouble after all, scientists say. In ...
40% of American adults have confidence in RFK Jr.’s leadership on health, and the numbers are sinking
Americans are losing confidence in the nation’s public health agencies, according to a survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center ...
Viewpoint: ‘The battle to feed humanity is over”: Eco-pessimist Paul Ehrlich leaves a legacy of misinformation about the mortal threat of overpopulation
The butterfly biologist turned rock-star eco-pessimist, Paul Ehrlich has died at the age of 93. That in itself is remarkable ...
Viewpoint: In defense of plastics (and a rebuttal of ideology-infused misinterpretations of risk science)
Close observers will note that journalists in the legacy press have a perplexing habit of engaging in outright activism for ...
Pentagon nears use of untested AI in life-and-death war targeting decisions
The US military might use generative AI systems to rank lists of targets and make recommendations—which would be vetted by ...
Send women to jail for decades for having an abortion? Extremist Republicans get pushback, even from some in their own party
When a trio of Republican state lawmakers introduced a bill last year that would subject women who obtain abortions to ...
Viewpoint: Wheat has become a target of glyphosate critics. Should the herbicide be banned?
We have reached a point where the mere mention of glyphosate reflexively triggers public reactions of fear, regardless of whether ...
RFK, Jr. vaccine rebuke: Judge reverses Trump administration childhood and Covid vaccine policies
In a severe blow to the Trump administration’s health agenda, a federal judge in Massachusetts [on March 16, 2026] blocked the ...
U.S. defunding International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), UN-affiliated group that issued cancer warnings for glyphosate, steak, and getting a haircut
The United States’s withdrawal this year from the World Health Organization (WHO) is having knock-on effects on an influential global ...
Viewpoint—After the vaccine policy wrecking ball: Taking stock one year after RFK, Jr. abandoned science
This past month, my kids’ small-town school has been in crisis mode. Budget shortfalls, emergency meetings, parents scrambling to understand ...
Viewpoint: Check on scare “science”—Claims about the human health dangers of microplastics are collapsing
Since the rise of MAHA in US policy, journalists have been starting to question the findings of activist scientists, and ...
Viewpoint: Why health practitioners need to be disciplined for spreading misinformation—and why that’s so challenging
Unfortunately, in most cases health misinformation has been allowed to stand with very few, if any, professional consequences. Some prominent ...
U.S. government accused of pushing ‘fake news’ about UFOs to cover-up secret dark-project drone and aircraft technology
Donald Trump’s pledge to release official files relating to UFOs has intrigued conspiracy theorists who suspect the US government has ...
RFK, Jr.’s attacks on Big Pharma and Big Ag are finding surprising new allies among Republican voters and leaders: Predatory tort lawyers
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s demonization of food and pharma has put the Trump administration on the wrong side of its ...
Why smart people believe nonsense?
The intuitive explanation is straightforward: people believe fake stories because they lack knowledge or education. The “science literacy model,” which ...
Target targets May to remove synthetic colors from breakfast foods
The Make America Healthy Again movement has made its mark on one of America’s largest retailers. Target announced [on February ...
‘You only need to put a few knicks in the brain’: FDA is bizarrely demanding fake brain surgery to assess Huntington’s disease therapy
Katie Jackson desperately wants a new treatment for Huntington’s disease. Her husband died from the devastating brain disorder. And because ...
‘More conversational and informal’: AI written ‘fake news’ is perceived as more credible than human disinformation promoters
In 2017, ‘fake news’ was chosen as the new word of the year by the Language Council of Norway. But ...
Microplastics as a blueprint for health scares: How the “panic pipeline” of activists and academics partners with tort lawyers to manufacture chemical crises
We’ve seen this fear-to-filing pipeline repeatedly in other contested controversies — most recently involving Tylenol and food additives — where ...
Eerily human-like embryo models are being crafted from stem cells in laboratories, raising ethical concerns
Researchers are racing to engineer highly realistic human embryo models using stem cells in the lab. Some of the newest ...
If you’ve identified as transgender or nonbinary in Kansas, you’ve just lost your ID and driver’s license
The number of bills directly targeting and undermining the existing legal rights of transgender and nonbinary people in the U.S ...
Anti-aging peptide therapies don’t work despite touts by RFK, Jr., Jennifer Anison and Gwenyth Paltrow—and millions of their followers
Droves of wellness enthusiasts, biohackers, social-media influencers, and celebrities are injecting experimental “anti-aging” peptides in the hopes of boosting energy, ...
As measles cases soar in South Carolina, RFK, Jr.’s disciples lobby to gut vaccine mandates
As South Carolina grapples with a measles outbreak that has infected nearly 1,000 people, groups with ties to the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy ...
How to spot fake science news
How to choose your news video describes tips to choose news and separate face from opinion. Our Evaluate news information ...
Viewpoint: Wellness pseudoscience activists are rewriting U.S. health policy
For decades, wellness misinformation lived in a space that was evidence-adjacent and problematic, but containable: the “outspoken minority” spreading lies ...
