Credit: R. Carner/Thinkstock
Agents of the Food and Drug Administration know better than anyone else just how bad scientific misbehavior can get. Reading the FDA’s inspection files feels almost like watching a highlights reel from a Scientists Gone Wild video. It’s a seemingly endless stream of lurid vignettes—each of which catches a medical researcher in an unguarded moment, succumbing to the temptation to do things he knows he really shouldn’t be doing. Faked X-ray reports. Forged retinal scans. Phony lab tests. Secretly amputated limbs. All done in the name of science when researchers thought that nobody was watching.
That misconduct happens isn’t shocking. What is: When the FDA finds scientific fraud or misconduct, the agency doesn’t notify the public, the medical establishment, or even the scientific community that the results of a medical experiment are not to be trusted. On the contrary. For more than a decade, the FDA has shown a pattern of burying the details […]
The argument over genetically modified food has been dominated, in recent years, by a debate over food labels — specifically, whether those labels should reveal the presence of GMOs.
The battle, until now, has gone state by state. California refused to pass a labeling initiative, but Maine, Connecticut and Vermont have now passed laws in favor of GMO labeling.
Opponents of GMO labeling, including some of the biggest food manufacturers, have turned to Congress, and this week they achieved their first notable success.
A solid majority of the House of Representatives on Thursday voted in favor of a law that would block states from mandating GMO labels. (emphasis added)
The debate in Congress followed familiar lines. Opponents of the bill, such as Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Democrat from Maine who is also an organic farmer, argued that it’s important for consumers to know what they are eating.
Food labels, she pointed out, already tell consumers many things.
“We know how many calories are in it, thanks to the labels. We know how much vitamin C we get per serving. […]
The findings could help doctors distinguish between more and less aggressive prostate cancers and adjust the way they are treated accordingly.
Credit: The Independent
Scientists have discovered that prostate cancer could in fact be five different diseases, in research that may change the way the condition is treated.
Researchers at Cancer Research UK said they had been able, for the first time, to group prostate cancer tumours into five distinct groups based on their genetic make-up.
The findings, based on analysis of 100 different genes in cancerous tissue from 250 men, could, in the future, help
doctors distinguish between more and less aggressive prostate cancers, and adjust the way they are treated accordingly.
Prostate […]
A cyclist and vehicles negotiate heavily flooded streets as rain falls, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014, in Miami Beach, Fla.
Climate change is set to hit the Southeast United States and Texas hard.
That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Risky Business Project, a nonprofit that focuses on the economic impacts of climate change. The report, which focused on 12 states — 11 states in the Southeastern United States plus Texas — found that the increased heat and humidity that these states are expected to experience as the climate changes will put the region’s recent manufacturing boom at risk.
“While the Southeast and Texas are generally accustomed to heat and humidity, the scale of increased heat — along with other impacts such as sea level rise and storm surge — will likely cause significant and widespread economic harm, especially to a region so heavily invested in physical manufacturing, agriculture and energy infrastructure,” the […]
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Commuters to New York received some overdue welcome news over the weekend. Anticipating substantial delays on Monday, New Jersey Transit pre-emptively allowed them to use their train tickets on private buses and ferries instead. By this point, rail-service interruptions had become so predictable that New Jerseyites were probably happy to traverse the Hudson River by boat. Four of the five workdays last week brought long delays on the line, largely the product of electrical failures in the octogenarian overhead wires running through the centenarian train tunnel under the Hudson.
Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor, responded by excoriating Amtrak, which owns most of the tracks and equipment along the line, for its “indifference to New Jersey commuters and its abject neglect of the infrastructure that New Jersey and our entire region relies upon”. That was a bit rich coming from the man who, in an effort to bolster his reputation as a tough-talking scourge of wasteful spending ahead of his presidential run, scuttled plans for a new tunnel under the Hudson. That project would have helped bring America’s dominant rail corridor into, well, the 20th century at least. Instead, the region is left with hopeless bottlenecks […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
