Science Controversies
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 ...
‘They are an essential part of a healthy diet’: Debunking MAHA’s rejection of seed oils
For years now, seed oils have been cast as the quiet villain of modern eating. Scroll through social media, and ...
Longevity cure? Don’t waste your money on NAD anti-aging supplements. They don’t work
Recent studies on aging have latched onto a “player” in longevity that had hitherto received little attention: nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, ...
The Casey Means file: For MAHA, ‘her lack of clinical grounding isn’t a bug, it’s a feature’
Here’s what [Casey Mean] said, in rotating order, regardless of the question: root causes. Real food. Informed consent. Have a ...
Viewpoint: America’s reproductive health safety net is fraying as political wars escalate
In late October, Maine Family Planning announced three rural clinics in northern Maine would close by month’s end. These primary ...
Is the longevity treatment boom over-hyped?
At Biograph, a longevity clinic with locations in New York City and San Francisco, an assessment day can last up to ...
RFK, Jr.’s aversion to legislation raises the question: Will his revolution endure?
Over the course of his year in the Cabinet, Kennedy has racked up major wins for his Make America Healthy ...
Teaching AI to have a soul
As the resident philosopher of the tech company Anthropic, [Amanda] Askell spends her days learning Claude’s reasoning patterns and talking to the ...
Is there a way to stop climate disinformation? Spain has a plan
Propagandists flood our feeds with climate denial, conspiracy theories, and outrage to divide the public, inflame geopolitical tensions and destroy trust in ...
