Perhaps the biggest scientific story of the week has been the promise of a new vaccine for malaria, a scourge that has taken countless lives over the centuries. That one has been so widely reported that there's little point in including another article about it here. However, I would like to give bonus points to the media talking head, mentioned ( Read more... )

To hear a lot of people talk, you'd almost think that the government was giving away truckloads of money to enable the lowest income Americans to live it up without having to worry about such things as working or paying bills. You'd think that we didn't have problems with crushing poverty or food insecurity or a vastly underfunded social safety ( Read more... )

I mentioned in a previous post that I'm not completely opposed to GMO crops. That said, I find Monsanto to be rather creepy in some respects. And it's suspicious when some of their genetically modified wheat ends up in some farmer's field and no one has any idea how it got there.

I'm feeling ambivalent about the marches against Monsanto today. There are serious concerns about giant agri-business corporations, Monsanto included. But there's just as many concerns about Con-Agra and ADM and all the rest. I'm just not all that thrilled about the focus on one company and the focus on "the dangers of genetically modified foods ( Read more... )

Here, go read about where food comes from. Just not over dinner ( Read more... )

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  Dear Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul: The GOP primaries are over. Mitt Romney is the nominee. Your opponent has stopped even referring to any of you. President Obama is campaigning against Governor Romney, not against any of you. In case that's not a big enough hint for you, maybe you should listen to your own party's super- ( Read more... )

Here's what the whole pink slime controversy comes down to as far as I'm concerned. It may or may not be a matter of safety, but it is certainly a matter of consumer choice. The beef industry can insist that the stuff is safe all they want, but that doesn't change the fact that there are obviously a whole lot of consumers out there who don't want ( Read more... )

Now that all the fun of wishing and dreaming about the Mega Millions jackpot has passed (nope! didn't win), it's time to tackle more serious topics. Like what, you ask? Well for starters, what is probably the most dire threat to human civilization as we know it ( Read more... )

Would you like fries with that?

New York City Nanny-in-chief Michael Bloomberg wants to ban the use of food stamps to purchase soda and other sugary drinks, apparently seeing this as a way to combat "a serious public health crisis". Perhaps I'd be less offended by this if the proposal wasn't coming from a man who's drowning in so much money that he probably doesn't know the ( Read more... )