feartrain

Mark Bittman’s moderation on GMOs may be too late to rescue foodies links to fear tactics

Keith Kloor | Discover | 
For GMO opponents, it’s been a good news/bad news week. The good news: Vermont became the first state to mandate the labeling ...

DNA alphabet expanded, opens up new possibilities for synthetic drugs

Carl Engelking | Discover | 
Way back in Biology 101, we learned that DNA is encoded through the nucleotide pairings of adenine to thymine and ...

Indian farmer suicides: Compelling media narrative with no basis

Keith Kloor | Discover | 
In his Collide-a-Scape column, Keith Kloor quotes from The Economist’s Demography and Development blog, several months ago: Facts can be stubborn – and ...

Reuters, other science reporters often promote ‘false balance’ on GMO safety studies

Keith Kloor | Discover | 
GMO coverage in the media today is where climate change reporting was from the late 1980s until the early 2000s, ...

Mitochondria may be impaired in vets with Gulf War Sydrome

Gemma Tarlach | Discover | 
Doctors have struggled for decades to find a cause for a host of debilitating health problems experienced by veterans of ...

Fear and deception in anti-GMO efforts

Keith Kloor | Discover | 
The anti-GMO troops in the United States received some unwelcome news this week from Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the U.S ...

Despite ethical issues, screen kids for low IQ because some treatment may be possible

Julian Savulescu | Discover | 
There could be a way of predicting – and preventing – which children will go on to have low intelligence, ...

Algae suicide helps its relative and harms its rivals

Elizabeth Preston | Discover | 
You might say the benefit of staying alive is an actual no-brainer: even brainless lifeforms do their best not to ...

Anti-GMO activists have the ‘right to be manipulated’

Keith Kloor | Discover | 
The list of supermarkets, companies and restaurants hopping aboard the anti-GMO train keeps growing. Last year Whole Foods and Chipotle ...

GMOs and the skeptics: Will truth win out?

Keith Kloor | Discover | 
A social movement revolving around food and health concerns has made GMO labeling a galvanizing issue. The grassroots campaign to ...

Anti-biotech backlash attempts to reframe Green Revolution in negative light

Keith Kloor | Discover | 
Can we agree that the Green Revolution was, on balance, a good thing? You know, kinda like the industrial revolution. Yes, ...

How anti-GMO activists sell India ‘suicide seeds’ narrative

Keith Kloor | Discover | 
Over the past decade, the story of hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers being driven to suicide because of the failure of ...

Height might be hazardous to your health

Carrie Arnold | Discover | 
In many areas of life, tall people seem to get all the benefits. On average, they earn more money. They ...
sperm and egg

Are male contraceptives on the horizon?

Breanna Draxler | Discover | 
Using a new approach, scientists have come up with a male contraceptive that has proven 100% effective in early test ...

In GMO French fry debate, conservationists sit on sidelines as ‘mob mentality’ poisons discussion

Keith Kloor | Discover | 
Activists who oppose genetic modification have the “advantage” because of the way they frame their arguments, writes Keith Kloor in ...

Sex and brain structure: Is this really about gender?

Neuroskeptic | Discover | 
The news on December 3, 2013, read "Scientists discover the difference between male and female brains." Britain’s Independent actually made ...
blood

New, fast sequencing process uses online databases to ID new viruses

Cameron Walker | Discover | 
It can take weeks or months to identify a new virus, but only days for one to kill, so researchers ...

Ancestry and bitter tastes

Razib Khan | Discover | 
I do love me some sprouts! Greens, bitters, strong flavors of all sorts. I’ve always been like this. Some of ...
Orange effect Flickr Lip Kee

Your allergies may save your life

Christie Wilcox | Discover | 
According to new research, allergies may have evolved in order to save lives by forcing sufferers to reject and expel ...

Anti-GMO ‘zombie myths’: Influential enviro leaders such as Paul Ehrlich spread propaganda

Keith Kloor | Discover | 
In his latest blog post, Discover's Keith Kloor addresses the spread of popular anti-GMO myths, such as the supposed rise in ...

Cancer cells evolve to outwit body defenses

George Johnson | Discover | 
Cancer is a disease of information, in which a cell becomes reprogrammed into a precision killing machine. In the consensus ...

Why I love genetics

Razib Khan | Discover | 
A few years ago I had a discussion with a friend about our academic backgrounds. She is a neurobiologist by ...

Bad kids can’t blame their genes

Neuroskeptic | Discover | 
A paper just published reports that there are: No Genetic Influence for Childhood Behavior Problems From DNA Analysis This is pretty ...

Stem cell therapy for Parkinson’s proves save in primates

Becky Lang | Discover | 
In a step that brings stem cells closer to the clinic, researchers in Japan have found that transplanting reprogrammed stem ...

Peddlers of disinformation shape GMO discourse

Keith Kloor | Discover | 
Influentials are the information brokers that have major media platforms and big receptive audiences. For example, on the GMO issue, ...

Evolution has a simple genetic skeleton

Razib Khan | Discover | 
Genetics can seem complex, especially theoretical evolutionary models. But the reality is that these models are ultimately grounded in a ...

Tuberculosis and humans have been paired for ~100,000 years

Razib Khan | Discover | 
The paper, Out-of-Africa migration and Neolithic coexpansion of Mycobacterium tuberculosis with modern humans, which just came out recently, has naturally been making a ...

Breeding a better companion cat?

Razib Khan | Discover | 
John Bradshaw, author of Cat Sense: How the New Feline Science Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet, has ...
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