Chemistry

A new study found that a cup of coffee with milk may create a combination of proteins and antioxidants that doubles the anti-inflammatory properties in immune cells.  That doesn't mean you should listen to 'food is medicine' advocates and start putting dairy in everything, this was a cell study, which is even lower than studies in mice on the human relevance scale. Reduction and oxidation - termed the redox cycle in biology - are an essential part of our daily functioning. Antioxidant supplements seek to slow mitochondria oxidation down and fortunately do nothing or misuse could have had…

Coffee of any kind requires beans and those beans contain caffeine. If you don't want caffeine your choice to remove it is a chemical or...a chemical. Yes, I know some companies claim they use only water but they really use water and “supercritical carbon dioxide”, which is like claiming the chemical that creates banana flavor is different if it's grown in nature or in a building, despite being identical. If you know chemistry you know that methylene chloride or supercritical carbon dioxide is actually irrelevant to the consumer. The beans are washed and roasted to where the traces of either…

Things are getting back to normal because even though activist journalists are now covering a Tripledemic of COVID-19, flu, and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) they have also found time to promote a story that claims a zero-calorie sweetener, asparatame, common in products like Diet Coke, Crystal Light, whatever causes anxiety.  That's right, media have taken time from writing about something that may be important for the public to write about a paper claiming that aspartame gives mice anxiety. We must be safe when we're back to covering mouse studies about safe products. That mouse…

List most planets, Earth was once a newly formed, sterile planet, so a philosophical and scientific question is, how did that change? Its randomness is the best argument for why we may be the most advanced civilization in this galaxy, if not the universe, and also the best argument for why we are not alone by now. For the over four billion years that our terra firma has been around, meteorites have been hurtling through the atmosphere at high speeds toward its surface. and some argue that resulting debris may have included carbonaceous chondrites — a class of meteorite whose members contain…

A new paper accompanied by a scary-looking map claims "people who lived in cities with lead-contaminated water as children had worse baseline cognitive functioning at age 72" and may make every new parent worry their child's grades can be blamed on the water supply, but it leaves out important scientific context. That lead level is also in 80 percent of actual people in US cities of the last 150 years. And nearly 100 percent of ancient Romans and a lot of European cities for the last 2,000. Nearly all the people who put humans on the moon? High lead levels. Because they went to college and…

Food fraud is common. Probably 25 percent of imported food with an "organic" label is just conventional food and even in America some organic farmers are just selling regular food. In Europe, everyone knew that Russia was not magically producing all of the organic food they were selling to France and Germany so those companies could pretend it works to feed the world. Organic food is the largest source of fraud but not alone. Olive oil was often fraudulent long before the Clinton administration made organic food legitimate. And nearly as long has been seafood. Not only may that salmon not be…

The activist group Environment and Climate Change Canada has gotten political allies inside the government's Health Canada division to try and lobby for bans on decabromodiphenyl ethane - without having a replacement for a flame retardant used to keep home appliances, electronics, and electric wires and cables safe. That is an unnecessary increase in risk, not to mention a high price increase for Canadians already in the midst of a supply chain crisis. Beyond fire itself or smoke inhalation, residents once faced risk of explosion too - "flashover", a gaseous reaction caused by the oxidation…

I make macaroni and cheese quite a lot. I like to eat it on Fridays and for friends and family on holidays. I have sampled mac and cheese all across the country. I am no Guy Fieri, but I have gotten around, and I can tell you with a great deal of confidence that most elite - which is to say costly - macaroni and cheese uses Velveeta. Or at least a key chemical in it. The reason is not flavor. It is science.  Velveeta gets a bad rap because back when the US government enforced real standards of identity in food - once upon a time you couldn't rename broccoli as rice or almond juice as…

Eighteenth-century socialites have been depicted as vain, silly women who were poisoned by their white lead makeup. The Countess of Coventry, Maria Gunning — a society hostess renowned for her beauty — is said to have refused to stop wearing foundation containing white lead, even as she lay dying. Why would women of that era knowingly choose to wear makeup that was killing them? Was beauty worth dying for? Or was the makeup not to blame? I am a scientist who has been studying lead poisoning for 30 years, with a particular interest in women’s exposure to lead. My research shows that women…

We may be our own worst critics, but America continues to lead the world in science, science literacy, and science policy. Anyone who has tried to navigate science policy in Europe knows how bad it can get when the discourse is hijacked by government-funded environmental groups who use taxpayer money to prevent sane efforts at progress for European taxpayers. Compared to Europe, American scientists have it good. There are some bad decisions in the US but for the most part American regulatory agencies get it right because science usually comes first. One example is Sulfoxaflor, which most will…