Top 6
Podcast: Are we on the edge of an ‘insect apocalypse?’ GLP Founder Jon Entine debunks this pervasive myth
Could we be on the edge of an insect apocalypse — one that results in 'ecological collapse that would break ...
Viewpoint: Can parents select for healthier children? A new tool for predicting polygenic traits kicks off a fierce debate
Motherhood is rewarding, but pregnancy is risky. Pregnant women usually steer clear of environmental risks that can harm the child ...
Viewpoint: ‘Predatorts’ — How activist nonprofits create fear and seed science doubt, generate lawsuits, and distort public policy
Imagine you are a US tort lawyer wanting to extract as much honey from the pot as possible. What do ...
Did COVID-19 originate in a laboratory? Many scientists still harbor questions
Nikolai Petrovsky was scrolling through social media after a day on the ski slopes when reports describing a mysterious cluster of ...
Viewpoint: IARC — International Agency for Research on Cancer — tries to regroup after blunders on glyphosate and chemical evaluations undermine its former independent reputation
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in France was once one of the most respected epidemiology groups in ...
GLP Podcast: Biotech’s ‘dark side’; Pro-science consumers spread ‘misinformation’; Mandatory HPV shots?
Biotechnology has launched a revolution in food and medicine, but it can also be badly misused by governments and individual ...
10 key facts about Golden Rice, a GMO that can save the lives and sight of millions of children
"This rice could save a million kids a year," read a famous Time magazine cover from July 2000. The report ...
How snake venom and a smoking cessation drug inspired a nasal spray that blocks COVID
A simple nasal spray that stops SARS-CoV-2 in its tracks? That could block the coronavirus in the nose, before it ...
Humans are poor climbers and clumsy jumpers, but boy can we throw. Here’s how and why that happened
With the Tokyo Olympics on the horizon, Kara Winger is training hard. “I want to make the top eight in ...
10% — not 75% — of crop yield is pollinator-dependent: Our World in Data charts raise doubts about claims that global food supply is imminently endangered by ‘disappearing’ insects
It’s unfortunate that the wildlife we care least about provides us with the most functional value. We favor the bears ...
Taboo: Why has Africa emerged as the global coronavirus ‘Cold Spot’ — and why are we afraid to talk about it?
The first COVID-19 case in Africa was confirmed on February 14th, 2020, in Egypt. The first in sub-Saharan Africa appeared ...
Wineries in California have been under siege for decades. There’s finally hope that grapevines can be saved from bacterial disease
In 1961, Adam Tolmach planted a five-acre vineyard on land he had inherited from his grandfather in the wine-growing region ...
‘Minimizing the probability of adverse outcomes’ is driving the ever-changing, sometimes conflicting recommendations on mask wearing
There is increasing confusion, and even consternation, over what seem to be disparate policies, recommendations, and mandates emerging in response ...
‘War on glyphosate’ and the unintended negative environmental consequences of the demonization of a safe and effective herbicide and its removal from the garden market
Across social media they celebrated. The electronic victory laps commemorated Bayer’s decision to remove the herbicide Roundup from the residential ...
Why the COVID-19 coronavirus continues to surprise us
As people in the US grapple with a return to masking to stay ahead of the delta and lambda variants ...
Crop Chemophobia II: When activist journalists twist science in support of ideology
Attacking pesticides is sexy. Many activists, lawyers and journalists have made careers out of propagating a simple, compelling narrative about ...
Viewpoint: Creationism overruns archaeology? Promotion of indigenous origin stories challenges scientific consensus
In April, one of us—Elizabeth Weiss—gave a talk, titled Has Creationism Crept Back into Archaeology?, at the 86th Annual Meeting of ...
Crop chemophobia I: Pesticides are vital to organic and conventional agriculture — but they can be misused. Here’s how to distinguish between legitimate concerns and anti-science propaganda
It seems not a month goes by without an “investigative reporter” somewhere on the internet warning about the dangers of ...
Skin cancer and screening: The good and the bad of ‘overdiagnosis’
About a decade ago, when he was a first-year dermatology resident, Adewole Adamson learned that “exploding” rates of melanoma were ...
Hulu’s Rosemary’s Baby redux ‘False Positive’ bungles the science and stretches credulity
I looked forward to Hulu’s original horror film False Positive, pitched as a modern-day Rosemary’s Baby. It premiered at the Tribeca ...
Gene-edited crops made in Latin America, for Latin American needs
In recent years, precision biotechnologies have appeared on the Latin American horizon, introducing new ways to modify genomes affordably easily ...
Viewpoint: It’s time for a reassessment of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)’s role in sabotaging glyphosate, one of the world’s most popular — and safest — herbicides
As we’re in the midst of a reevaluation of whether the Virology Laboratory in Wuhan, China was the true source ...
How endangered great apes provide a crucial window into human evolution — and why we should help preserve these species
When I was a kid, every trip to the zoo featured a visit to the orangutan habitat. I was fascinated ...
Viewpoint: Stanford is a world-class science institution … except when it comes to critical thinking about the ‘sustainability myth’ of organic agriculture
Stanford, which consistently ranks among the top U.S. colleges and universities, is one of the great research institutions in the ...
Viewpoint: How the anti-GMO movement devolved from dangerous to irksome to irrelevant
Introduced in the 1990s, crops genetically engineered (GE) to withstand exposure to the weed killer glyphosate (Roundup) were a game-changer ...
You don’t have to be a COVID vaccine rejectionist to want to fully understand the nonspecific effects (NSE) of vaccines
The world’s attention is presently focused on the mRNA vaccines, which may turn out to be the most revolutionary vaccines ...
Epstein-Barr virus link? Tantalizing clues suggest EBV potentially triggers COVID long-haul symptoms
COVID-19 has already broken all the rules. Since when does a virus make people lose their sense of taste and ...