In 2016, President Obama listened to reason and signed the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, which amended the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and created a mandatory requirement for EPA to evaluate existing chemicals using transparent methodology and risk-based assessment. No more simplistic epidemiology. Which meant no more junk that had anti-science activists declaring that a weedkiller turned frogs gay or PFAS in pizza boxes created greater risk for obesity than pizza. read more

People are concerned about cranberries again this November, but it isn't a new phenomenon. Cranberries were actually the first modern chemophobia scare, when anti-science activists got government to first do what they have since done to weedkillers, trans fats, ultraprocessed foods, BPA, you name it - terrify the public about a product using bad epidemiology despite there being no science basis for it.(1) read more

1980s photo of the author, right; his father, center; and his sister, left. read more

At the upcoming American Heart Association meeting, participants will learn of the epidemiological results of 63,656 military veterans with Type 2 diabetes in the Million Veteran Program who took GLP-1 receptor agonists (semaglutide - "Wegovy", dulaglutide - "Trulicity", etc.). The survey analysis found that those who also changed their lifestyle habits had a 50% lower risk of serious cardiovascular events(1) compared to those who didn't report a healthier lifestyle and received diabetes care without GLP-1 RA medication. read more

In the various 'Predator' films, the alien hunter can see across various spectra while enabling camouflage from our vision. That happens in nature. Octopuses, squids, and the scariest of them all, cuttlefish, in the cephalopod family have evolved the ablity to modify their skin to blend in with the environment. That is due to the presence of xanthommatin, a natural pigment with color-shifting capabilities. read more

America uses less energy per capita than we did in World War II, and even World War I. Thanks to natural gas, we provide energy in most states at an affordable cost.(1) With the help of a new data set that shows where air conditioning is used, it will be even easier to know where things can be improved. In France, you have to get permission from both the government and your neighbors to put in air conditioning. You will also want to be wealthy because it is more profitable to sell it to the rest of Europe than domestically.(2) America has far more equity, about 90% of people have air conditioning but the new AC Map shows that not all of it is optimal. Portable units in a humid area are not very effective, for example. read more

Today is November 1st, the day dedicated to the dead, and I am in northern Sweden where daylight is scarce this time of the year. The two things conjure to arise thoughts of a darkish nature.  [Above, a lousy picture taken this evening in a cemetery in Gammelstad, close to Lulea, in Norrbotten, Sweden. Sorry for the bad quality... Yet the landscape with all those small lights was really inspiring.] read more

A commenter contested my statement that gang murders are a much greater menace to public safety than homelessness – at least, here in Albuquerque. So let’s unpack. Preliminaries read more

When I wrote Halloween Science 2.0, I wanted to get it down to a brisk 150 pages, which means taking a chainsaw to a lot of the material I had.(1) Like the woman who left her corporeal significant other to become a ghost groupie. Amethyst Realm, that is not her Dungeons&Dragons name, she calls herself that for real, cheated on her totally organic fiancé with a ghost but she suggested it was kind of his fault. He moved them into a haunted house. read more

There is legitimate concern about increased social authoritarianism in governments worldwide. The state has gained more financial control everywhere. Even in the U.S nearly 60% of wealth is controlled by politicians, and it is the most "capitalist" country. It led to a culture where the American federal government forced employees to get a COVID-19 vaccine or be fired. Yet 20,000,000 government employees were not given that same ultimatum. The same mentality has led to countries where companies in the organ transplant business want you to be an organ donor by law. It would create another schism in U.S. culture, where body autonomy remains an issue. There can be no body autonomy if the government can force you to donate your organs. read more

The older you get, the more frail you become. The more frail you become, the greater the risk of falling, hospitalization, and shorter life expectancy. Doctors talk about physical activity to reduce frailty but less attention is paid to biology. A new paper suggests that the hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal (HPG) axis, the body’s system of regulating production of the hormone testosterone, can impact frailty. "Suggests" means this is only EXPLORATORY, not human science, but a relationship between  read more

In early 2018, colleagues and I released The Next Plague and How Science Will Stop It and coronavirus was in there, because there had already been two coronavirus pandemics, SARS and MERS, this century. No one anticipated that SARS-CoV-2 would erupt in Wuhan, China, and be the worst pandemic since the 1950s but one thing I had long been concerned about was how unprepared the CDC was. Thanks to government becoming more overlords and less public servants - sorry, George Soros and friends, 'no kings' was a problem decades before President Trump was elected - and government employees spent their days grasping for more money rather than helping anyone.(1) read more

A National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences paper(1) is sounding the alarm about detectable per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in blood samples of Delaware residents. It sounds scary, but scientifically there are two things to keep in mind: 1. We can detect anything in anything in 2025. 2. Presence is not pathology. read more

Having interacted for a few months with ChatGPT 5 now, both for work-related problems and for private / self-learning tasks, I feel I might share some thoughts here on what these large models can tell us about our own thought processes.  The sentence above is basically giving away my bottomline from square one, but I suppose I can elaborate a bit more on the concept. LLMs have revolutionized a wide range of information-processing tasks in just three or four years. Looking back, the only comparable breakthrough I can recall is the advent of internet search engines in the early 1990s. But as exciting and awesome this breakthrough is, it inspires me still more to ponder on how this is even possible. Let me unpack this. read more

A survey asked 185 practicing transplant hepatologists across the U.S. who are among the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases members across the U.S. about "unhealthy" alcohol use - alcohol is a class 1 carcinogen, so unless you eat healthy amounts of plutonium or smoke healthy amount of cigarettes 'unhealthy' is a strange qualifier only alcohol gets - and found 26.3 percent screened positive for way too much alcohol use. Which is higher than the general United States population but ironic since hepatologists are gastroenterologists who focus on liver diseases and alcohol is the leading cause of liver disease. So common that they had to create a non-alcohol version for the rarer cases of fatty liver disease that don't involve drinking. read more

If a politician who used to be a Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer hasn’t banned all food coloring by the time you read this, here is how you can make your own green slime. In both Gen X - chemicals that sound like chemicals - and more natural-sounding versions of chemicals. Basically, people who think Dawn dishwashing liquid is an organic weedkiller. These are excerpted from Halloween Science 2.0, available on Amazon (and free if you have Kindle Unlimited) Let’s post two ways. Both of these scale, depending on how much slime you want. read more