Top 6
‘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 ...
Extreme heat and evolution: We adapted to handle a vast range of temperatures but current conditions are pushing limits
Heat waves are the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States, not the more photogenic windstorms and floods. Hotter ...
Viewpoint: How COVID has altered the future of US agriculture and the role of biotechnology
The past year has been a doozy. Being locked up for a year and watching half a million Americans die ...
Activists and ‘celebrity figures’ are turning public opinion against crop biotechnology in Mexico
On New Year’s Eve 2020, the Mexican government announced its plan to ban GMO corn and phase out GMO corn ...
How Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and anti-vaxxers misrepresent the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) to scare people about COVID shot ‘dangers’
Convincing a parent that vaccines won't harm their children can be a near-possible task these days. As pediatric infectious disease ...
Viewpoint: Here’s why activist environmentalists’ promotion of a ‘binary organic vs conventional/good vs evil dichotomy’ is bad for sustainable agriculture
Due to successful fear-based marketing campaigns, the demand for organic food in many affluent countries is rising far faster than ...
Organic pesticide copper sulfate—unlike glyphosate—is a carcinogen, kills beneficial insects, decimates soil, pollutes water. It also works. Here are political and science reasons why regulators give it a free pass
Europe is currently in a frenzy trying to drum up enough support to dramatically rollback approvals of targeted synthetic pesticides, ...
Is Prevagen the ‘silver bullet’ supplement to treat Alzheimer’s disease? Distinguishing hope from hype in the battle against cognitive decline
The avalanche of TV ads for Prevagen that coincided with my reaching Medicare age has inspired me to investigate what’s ...
Viewpoint: This 11,000 page European Union report should end the debate over the ‘dangers’ posed by glyphosate weedkiller
Glyphosate is a weed killer widely used by the agricultural industry and also available for consumer use in products like ...
How did Taiwan go from fortress impregnable to Asia’s COVID hotspot?
In September 2020, I arrived in Taiwan on a flight from New York. I had read much about the border ...
Viewpoint: Eric Lander is the first geneticist to direct US science policy. Here’s how he can harness the biotechnology revolution
Eric Lander—geneticist, mathematician, president and founding director of the Broad Institute— took the helm on June 2 as director of the Office of Science and ...
Saving our soil: 4 new microbial technologies that keep soil healthy and us fed
Soil microbes are hard to see and understand, yet we know that they have a significant impact on plant health, ...
Pregnant women’s brains show troubling signs of stress – but feeling strong social support can break those patterns
Even before the pandemic, there was plenty for expectant mothers to worry about. Pregnant women must withstand a barrage of ...
GLP Podcast: ‘Lefty’ anti-GMO groups embrace lab-leak story; Organic nutrition myths; CRISPR treats crippling disease
Anti-GMO groups have hitched their wagons to the COVID lab-leak hypothesis to keep their flagging agenda alive. Organic produce is ...
