Chemistry
Most people use toothbrushes, toothpaste and dental floss to clean their teeth, but their use is by no means universal. Many indigenous groups, as well as people in developing countries, use traditional techniques to clean their teeth. Some of these techniques are more effective than others.
Many people in the Middle East, and some parts of South and Southeast Asia, use twigs from the arak tree (known as miswak) to clean their teeth. They fray the end of the twig, dampen the resulting bristles with water or rosewater and then rub the bristles against their teeth (see video below). The wood…
DDT and other chemicals remain the most effective way to contain malaria - by eliminating the disease vectors that spread it.But even though the U.S. EPA has written the book for how DDT is to be sprayed inside homes, it was banned here over the objections of scientists and remains controversial for environmental groups who want to ban all chemicals. A new method may make chemicals less necessary but it involves another area of science activists oppose; genetic engineering.
Decades ago, scientists identified a strain of bacteria that kills Anopheles stephensi, one of the disease vectors for…
Hank |
Paracelsus famously noted that the dose makes the poison.
What did peasants in the 17th century understand about science that modern environmental scientists lack? Skepticism. Modern academics are armed with gavage tubes and cell cultures, and in those, any "toxic chemical" can change hormones.
While I write this, the coffee I am drinking changed my hormones. It's detectable. Have you seen the LD50? It's 10X as toxic as glyphosate, which activists and trial lawyers are suing over in California. (Yes, they are suing over coffee also, California is a good state for anti-science beliefs)
If you…
Hank |
After attracting scorn with bizarre classifications of a weedkiller, bacon, and hot tea, the French statistics group known as the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) decided to puncture claims that activists had manipulated the process by doing a flip-flop on coffee. Though they were widely expected to increase the hazard designation from 1991's already bizarre "possibly carcinogenic", they suddenly reversed course and lowered a classification of a product for the very first time.
That arbitrary flip-flop showed how weak their work has become - the same shoddy process…
Hank |
If you have cooked a steak or a hamburger you know that by the time you are ready to serve it, and certainly after you cut or bite into it, there will be liquid that oozes out of it.
Anti-meat groups know it isn't blood(1) but they use that imagery to try and sway people to their cause. And groups who make substitutes for meat also use that imagery, because they think that's important to meat eaters. Because marketing groups have long used it, people think it's blood, and even use the term "bloody."
It isn't. I've processed a lot of meat and blood is almost all gone by the time meat…
Advocates for getting rid of gasoline love to use images from the 19th century, asking why the public is not using modern alternatives. They try to allege it is a corporate effort to suppress competitors but the argument doesn't work very well when they also argue in other areas that companies are only inventing new products to have something to sell.
In reality, gasoline is still with us because it has terrific energy density and nothing else compares. We can pretend that electric cars use energy not generated by fossil fuels or nuclear, and that is fine for end consumers, but policymakers…
Hank |
There is a big difference between a trial lawyer convincing a jury in one of America's most anti-science regions that an herbicide that only acts on plants might be able to cause human cancer, and scientists with knowledge of chemistry, biology, and toxicology who know better.
Trial lawyers will use statistical correlation created by epidemiologists hand-picked by a group in France or Italy, using standards that exempt insiders at their International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) from ethical disclosures regarding their conflicts of interest. It's only if you have ever consulted for a…
Consumer hand sanitizers are popular, and they became more popular when brands started advertising they used the same chemicals hospitals use. FDA allowed it starting in 1994 (1994 Health Care Antiseptic
TFM (June 17, 1994, 59 FR
31402)), the same year they gave supplements exemption from real FDA oversight.
But there is such a thing as overuse, and a generation of parents did just that with compounds like triclosan, believing their child needed it to stay healthy. And it caused numerous problems, not to mention helping very little that soap and water would not have resolved. If soap and…
Hank |
Dr. Fred vom Saal of the University of Missouri-Columbia has been promoting endocrine "disruption", drastic changes in our hormones that he claims are caused by trace levels of chemicals, for decades.
Which means he has been promoting homeopathy for decades.
His premise is that there is a magical U-shaped curve for plasticizers like BPA but sometimes his zealotry makes all science look bad, as happened with a recent paper in the favored trade publication of the endocrine disruptor community, which to scientists is far too often the toxicological equivalent of a UFO magazine - …
Though lead levels across America are far safer than even a generation ago, the lack of a solid answer on what the safe level is leads to concern that leaching, such as from water pipes, could be harmful.
As the crisis in Flint, Michigan a few years ago showed, the public can be put in a panic easily, and politicians will use public health concern for advantage, even after their decisions to stop using the science that had protected the public caused the problem.
At the American Chemical Society spring meeting in Orlando, scientists described a cost-effective and quick method that could…