Culture

Agrobacterium, "nature's genetic engineer", has been used for over 100 years to create plants that can protect themselves naturally. Though thousands of products are on the market that have been genetically modified, it was only when Monsanto created Genetically Modified Organisms that anyone objected.

Your grandmother told you to eat all your dinner, because people were starving in other countries. She was absolutely correct. Food took up a huge chunk of a family's budget, and some groups preached famine and war if Draconian measures were not taken to cull the population.

Today, we don't have that problem. Science has made it possible for literally any country to be able to feed itself (political beliefs and acceptance of that science are another issue). So now the concern is the environmental strain of producing food, a lot of which goes to waste anyway.

Economic papers released in 2015 and 2016 estimated the burden of diseases attributable to exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), also known as environmental estrogens, and experts suspected right away that these calculations were flawed.

Nonetheless, regulatory bodies on both sides of the Atlantic are moving forward with two relatively distinct approaches to identifying and regulating EDCs.

A joke in The Onion is the lamentations of young men in college who failed to lure actual naked women with posters of naked women. Their inference that led to the experiment was actually sound, but real-life does not always follow reason.

It would seem obvious that milk is not a GMO, nor are cows, and therefore pointless for a yogurt company to be "Non-GMO Project Verified", but the pro-GMO market has shown that they are going to buy goods despite a claim on a label and the anti-GMO market...well, it's unclear. General Mills declared Cheerios non-GMO and cereal sales still went down. ConAgra got rid of BPA in cans and people who bought into the myth of endocrine disuptors didn't suddenly buy Chef Boyardee. They had to lay off over 1,000 people later the same year. Yet companies continue to pay for this certification.

If the growth of cities in the 20th century was marked by “white flight”, the 21st century is shaping up to be the era of “bright flight”. The young, highly educated and restless are being priced out of many of the world’s major cities.

As a psychologist researching misinformation, I focus on reducing its influence. Essentially, my goal is to put myself out of a job.

Recent developments indicate that I haven’t been doing a very good job of it. Misinformation, fake news and “alternative facts” are more prominent than ever. The Oxford Dictionary named “post-truth” as the 2016 word of the year. Science and scientific evidence have been under assault.

PepsiCo has today confirmed that it intends to lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across its value chain by at least 20 percent by 2030. Between 2006 and 2015, it claims to have achieved an 18 percent improvement in the energy efficiency of its legacy operations. It also extended its use of renewable energy and introduced fuel-efficient vehicles, as well as vending machines and coolers free of hydrofluorocarbons. 

Rejection is part of daily life - and it starts early. Many of us can remember sitting in a classroom feeling like we had been left out by classmates. Yet that may be just a feeling. Many kids regarded as popular believe they were rejected. Some children clearly are, they suffer widespread rejection at school and this can this can have a long-term effect. Or the effect was the cause of the rejection.

An online survey of more than 27,000 from around the world found that respondents who exercised more, followed a healthy diet and did not smoke were less likely to have a personal history of colorectal cancer or colon polyps.

The American Council on Science and Health, a pro-science consumer advocacy group, has been squarely in the sights of organizations like Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), Greenpeace and more for decades. Supporting them in their war against (some) science are smaller fringe outlets like Sourcewatch and US Right To Know and 300 other organizations funded by organic corporations. 

With Derby Day, the Kentucky Derby, just around the corner, it's time to think about big hats, horses with one eye, and...chemistry.

No, no, just kidding. Well, sort of. The chemistry of bourbon anyway. While it's not as good as proper whisky, it has its fans and we don't want the world to think we have any sort of Gaelic bias, so the upstarts in the colonies can have their day here also.

Children entering first grade in 2013 had significantly better reading skills than similar students had in 2001. Researchers say this means that in general, children are better readers at a younger age. While Common Core has been widely derided the Bush administration program the Obama White House supplanted, No Child Left Behind, succeeded well in hindsight. Studies have shown girls achieved parity with boys on math scores due to No Child Left Behind while the gap closed in minorities.

It happens after every presidential election. The opposition will be the death of America, friendships are lost, society is doomed. Except it isn't. 

In actuality, proclamations of doom by political activists and those they whip into a frenzy never come to pass, because at heart all Americans share common moral values such as fairness and harm. And that is also why some on both sides are so afraid of new ideas. At least if we can go by social psychologists doing interviews. 

A study of 27,350 adults drawn from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) finds that adults are not trying to lose weight. 

Part of that is cultural. We said women and men in media who were thin were sending an unrealistic body image to everyone else, it was "fat shaming" and they are probably anorexic anyway.

We enabled obesity and it worked.