Science Literacy Project Daily Digest
The GMO-seed sovereignty debate comes to Nigeria
Across Nigerian farms, market stalls and WhatsApp groups, one word is triggering fear, hope and fury in equal measure: Genetically ...
Did COVID vaccines kill 2,500 service members? RFK Jr. hires an investigator who compares vaccine promoters to Nazi doctors
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has hired Lt. Col. Theresa Long, an Army doctor with no vaccine or virology ...
Facing ridicule, Hegseth rescinds Pentagon’s new testosterone mandates
The Pentagon abruptly yanked its new testosterone-screening rules just a day after posting them, as ABC News' Luis Martinez reports. Defense ...
Chemophobia trap: How the ‘appeal to nature’ fallacy makes ‘clean’ and organic products seem safer—even when they’re not
Fear of “chemicals” is spreading well beyond the wellness aisle — and now it’s driving political messaging as much as ...
Flattening culture and cognition: Is AI eroding our singularity?
AI chatbots aren't just imitating human creativity — they may be flattening it, according to a growing body of research ...
Viewpoint: Cocky but wrong—feeling superior feeds medical and health conspiracy theories
Feeling smarter than everyone else might be exactly what makes people fall for medical misinformation, as Glendale Star columnist Mia ...
Social media still eclipses AI as the driving force of medical misinformation
Physicians say medical misinformation is getting worse — but they’re not blaming AI chatbots for it. That’s the takeaway from ...
Public is skeptical about claims of vaccine danger, but a poll shows troubling doubts
Vaccine myths are not new. They have circulated for decades, surviving retracted studies and countless public health campaigns. Now, a ...
The promise and peril of gene editing
Gene-editing therapies are delivering real breakthroughs — and real tragedies. As bioethicists Emily Packard Dawson and Lainie Friedman Ross write ...
Viewpoint: How to challenge the lucrative health fear-mongering business
Statins are among medicine's cheapest, best-studied and most effective drugs, yet they've become a prime target of online health fear-mongering, ...
Perimenopause crisis: What works, what doesn’t—and how the hype machine turns anxiety into a $200-a-month payday
Lisa Schrenk, a federal IT specialist, was contemplating suicide before fellow hikers on Virginia's Old Rag Mountain casually mentioned hormone ...
Still believe vaccines cause autism? Here’s the overwhelming evidence that you are being misled
Vaccines don't cause autism — and the evidence proving it has existed for decades, as STAT's Matthew Herper lays out ...
Viewpoint: Trump’s obsession with eugenics-themed language is fueling a surge in racism
The pseudoscience of eugenics, the discredited idea that selective breeding can improve humanity, is resurging in American political rhetoric, as Nautilus's ...
‘Stateless babies’: Mexico’s unregulated surrogacy industry fuels a global ethical debate
Mexico has become the go-to destination for intended parents shut out by surrogacy bans elsewhere, but a patchwork of state ...
How climate change could impact food safety
Climate change isn't just fueling stronger storms and longer droughts — it's also making the food on your plate riskier, ...
Do-it-yourself, anti-aging wonder drug deception: No evidence yet metformin works
Biohackers have long touted metformin, a cheap diabetes drug, as a secret weapon against aging. But a new review finds ...
Viewpoint: If Trump has his way, nitrogen oxide-polluting AI data centers will be exempt from air pollution rules
The Trump administration is moving to end public notification of air pollution from AI data centers, as Guardian reporter Tom ...
Death of a Chinese girl in a gene-editing trial raises concerns about China’s rush to become a biomedical superpower
Six-year-old "Mei" had Snijders Blok-Campeau syndrome, a disorder diagnosed in just 237 people worldwide, marked by developmental delays and simple ...
Deadly ‘faith healing’ exemption: Idaho remains the only state shielding parents from prosecution for replacing medical care with prayer or spirits—even if their child dies
This story was originally published by ProPublica. In Idaho, parents who say their faith prohibits lifesaving medical care for their children ...
Viewpoint: With Trump’s declining mental health and an incapacitated Mitch McConnell unlikely to return to the Senate, America’s gerontocracy needs a Public Physician
Senator Mitch McConnell, 84, hasn't spoken publicly since an ambulance took him from his Washington home on June 14th, 2026 ...
Viewpoint: RFK Jr. and other vaccine denialists blame vaccines for a surge in severe autism. The surge is a myth—and here’s why
Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. keep pointing to what they call an explosion of severe autism cases as ...
Can cloud seeding ease the deepening drought across the American West?
A 26-foot tower resembling a football goalpost in Moab, Utah, pulses electrical charges into clouds — and its maker says ...
Politicizing science: Trump’s pick to head the FDA—Heidi Overton— promotes an ‘alternative system’ of ‘conservative-based science’
President Trump's nominee to run the Food and Drug Administration once called for conservatives to build their own scientific journals ...
Five alarming ways ‘autonomous AI’ can go rogue
In July 2026, Hugging Face discovered a cyberattack unlike any it had seen before — only to learn the culprit ...
African science innovation is growing exponentially, but it’s almost entirely absent from Wikipedia. Why that’s a problem.
Africa's scientific output is surging, but you'd barely know it from Wikipedia: the continent accounts for roughly 10 percent of ...
‘Right-to-try’: Montana’s new law allows licensed center for therapies not yet approved by FDA
Montana has become the first state to license clinics that can sell access to experimental treatments still working through the ...
Rising costs of fertilizer, fuel, and machinery: Tariffs and stalled Iran war weigh heavily on American farmers
American farmers are staring down what one Iowa grower calls "another farm crisis," as President Trump's tariffs and his war ...
