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Processed and Ultra-Processed™  foods have been heavy-rotation buzzwords in the food activist community since the Obama administration but gained increased attention once the Trump administration came into power and a chief evangelist against modern food, former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was placed in charge of the world's most important government science agency, the National Institutes of Health.

Now, epidemiology has become a Supreme Court over science and instead of evidence-based decision-making, the default has become that if a harm or benefit can be suggested using food or chemical surveys, government will ban it and then tell scientists to figure out why.

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Diets high in phytosterols, such as vegetarian diets, have long been linked to lower risk of heart disease and diabetes by lowering low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol but food surveys, questionnaires, and diaries are not reliable enough to make clinical determinations while in mouse experiments the doses were too human to be relevant in the real world.

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The organic process is neither viable nor sustainable but a new paper would like to change that. By allowing modern gene editing. The only way Europe can reach the goal of 25% Organic™ farmland that its government-funded environmental groups demand, a 250% increase, is by moving into the 21st century, they argue.

When the organic process was the only thing available, the food-rich were rich and the poor were poor and the only difference was being born into a natural breadbasket. Cycles of famine were common.

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There is no balance of nature and never has been, the universe is always looking for new ways to kill and create, which is why pathogens evolve resistance to drugs over time. It is estimated that antimicrobial resistance causes over 1,000,000 deaths each year and is involved in 35,000,000 more, if estimates by the United Nations World Health Organisation are accurate. Staphylococcus aureus and Enterococcus sp., two gram-positive pathogens highly likely to develop resistance to known treatments, can cause dangerous hospital-acquired and community-acquired infections.

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It is a time-honored tradition for the young to ridicule the old and vice-versa but some warning signs in the elderly may be serious. Elderly people are often financially savvy, and get more so with age - unless Alzheimer’s begins to set in, according to a new paper.

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Anti-science activists have been in a war on food coloring for decades, and with one of their own having power in the new presidential administration, have even banned some, but artificial dyes have been used in many products for millennia.

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Time is a gentleman - it waits patiently. And in physics, as in all exact sciences, problems and mysteries eventually get resolved, if we give it enough time. That is how science works, after all: the consensus on our explanation of reality changes as we acquire more information on the latter.

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The science and medical response to activists claims that drinking water, weedkillers, and food coloring are killing people is to ask, where are the dead bodies?

They were there because those don't cause cancer, any more than manufacturing a PM2.5 air quality standard 30 years ago saves any lives, because they were never causing deaths.

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Telehealth, replies to messages or a quick video consulation with a health care provider, are designed to save time for everyone and reduce costs.
It may also be causing greater rates of physician burnout, according to a recent paper. 
Female physicians seem to be impacted most, according to the survey results. They spend more time on them, but get more messages they feel are negative or demeaning , and more frequently list messages as a source of burnout.

Greta Branford, M.D., and colleagues looked at data from a year’s worth of patient portal messages handled by University of Michigan primary care physicians, and survey results.

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Young women are at at increased risk of school dropout, transactional sex, gender-based violence, and early pregnancy, leading authors of a new paper to declare climate change a public health emergency rather than just an environmental issue.

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More and more people over the age of 50 are taking up physical exercise. Medical associations resoundingly agree that this is a good thing. Physical exercise is not only key to disease prevention, it is also a recommended part of treatment for many illnesses.

However, starting to move at this stage of life requires some care. This is especially true for those who have not previously been physically active, or for people who are overweight or obese.

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NFL Biosciences is has a Marketing Authorization Application for a smoking cessation technique derived from an allergen treatment in the 1970s that has been quietly used as an unauthorized smoking cessation tool for 10 years. A lot like vaping pens were before the Obama administration tried to claim all tobacco was as harmful as cigarette smoking, an actual carcinogen.

And it works better than placebo, just like vaping, but lots of people have quit using hypnosis and we know that isn't science. This helps due to off-target effects from its original purpose, preventing allergic reactions in workers who used tobacco plants, thanks to how it modifies glucose metabolism.

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Lichens on stone, those “still explosions” as the great American poet Elizabeth Bishop named them, remain unseen to most, which is remarkable when you consider how commonplace they are. It seems these ecologically and culturally significant whatever-they-ares unfairly fall victim to something akin to plant blindness, a known phenomenon and tendency of people to overlook plants, which many of us – when we first encounter lichens – identify them as, even though that’s not what they are at all.

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Illegal firearm trafficking is inseparable from the illegal drug trade: Weapons are often bought with drug money, can strengthen cartels and can be traded for drugs.

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Working people, and the poor, overwhelmingly voted for President Trump. Democrats seemed puzzled that The Deplorables they despise would vote for a candidate who offered lower costs of living. 'Red states use more government assistance' they jeered.

That's the problem. As a former poor person, an organic farmer living in poverty before President Clinton made it a government-endorsed grift as a gift for progressive elites, I know cost is everything. Progressives on Twitter think a dollar is only a dollar. To poor people, it matters. 

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The other day I finally emerged from a very stressful push to submit two grant applications to the European Innovation Council. The call in question is for PATHFINDER_OPEN projects, that aim for proofs of principle of groundbreaking technological innovations. So I thought I would broadly report on that experience (no, I am not new to it, but you never cease to learn!), and disclose just a little about the ideas that brought about one of the two projects.
Grant applications 

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Chicago Sun-Times writer Marco Buscaglia used the popular LLM ChatGPT to create the 2025 "summer reading list" they wanted for subscribers and had enough confidence in the result that he didn't check the work. 

The problem was that LLMs are not really AI, despite claims by companies selling this stuff that they are. They are certainly not Intelligent. So while the list had real authors, half of the books did not exist.

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A new paper argues that academic ecology is culturally corroded. 

'Stay in your lane', 'do you want to die on that hill?' and other territorial and undermining behavior were reported by 44% of predominantly ecologists who responded to a survey. They say it was most common as graduate students, a third of the time by their own supervisor. Of those, 18 percent reported they had experienced it multiple times.

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A whistleblower revealed a shocking document written by the French Ministry of Agriculture to the European Commission.

In response to America retaliating against Europe by placing tariffs on European goods the way European has them on American goods, the French government declared that for the first time this century they wanted 'access to innovation' - which means modern science and technology.

They want food sovereignty, and most bizarre of all from the French, fair competition. All things France has historically opposed in the name of the Green Deal and their Farm to Fork Idyll.

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It is often joked that 'prostitution was the first profession' and, that it is not a profession aside, the sentiment may be true. Someone with a lot of food and the ability to prevent it being taken may have worked out a deal with someone who had no food but willingness to satisfy a different basic need. It would still mean food gathering was the first profession but that's not as funny.

Lots of animals barter and steal and fight, humans are not even very good at it compared to most creatures, but the anthropological consensus is that humans are the only species to understand 'money.' Money is a token whose actual value may be negligible but with intangible value that is not only agreed upon by a larger community, it is fungible. It can be traded for many goods.(1)

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