| Butter is back. Saturated fat is good for you. Cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease. Claims along these lines keep finding their way into newspapers and mainstream websites even though they contradict decades of medical advice. There is a battle going on for our hearts and minds. | | I'm what you'd call an agnostic. I don't know if God exists, but the question is probably unanswerable, so I'm content to live in the uncertainty. That's probably why I've always found the so-called New Atheists misguided in their critiques of religion.New Atheism is a literary movement that sprung up in 2004, led by prominent authors like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. | | On this day (Oct. 30) 80 years ago, actor Orson Welles announced to audiences in a chilling radio performance that Martians were invading New Jersey, leading terrified listeners to believe that Earth was under attack by hostile aliens. | | Death has always been a fact of life. But somehow, even after endless repetitions of the cycle, we still haven't figured out how we feel about dead bodies. Are they vessels of loved ones that should be preserved for as long as possible? Bundles of organic material that should be reunited with the earth? | | With a huge suite of different observatories for viewing the Universe, innumerable details can be revealed. Occasionally, what we find evokes terrifying feelings within us. In the spirit of Halloween, here are the top 10 scariest sights the Universe has to offer. | | For the first time, scientists have spotted something wobbling around the black hole at the core of our galaxy. Their measurements suggest that this stuff perhaps made of blobs of plasma is spinning not far from the innermost orbit allowed by the laws of physics. | | Not long before he died, tech visionary Paul Allen traveled to the south of France for a personal tour of a 35-country quest to replicate the workings of the Sun. The goal is to one day produce clean, almost limitless energy by fusing atoms together rather than splitting them apart. | | The year is 2038. After 18 months living and working on the surface of Mars, a crew of six explorers boards a deep-space transport rocket and leaves for Earth. No humans are staying behind, but work goes on without them: Autonomous robots will keep running a mining and chemical-synthesis plant they'd started years before this first crewed mission ever set foot on the planet. | | From all appearances, Frances H. Arnold has mastered the art of travel. Seemingly impervious to jet lag, she was a patient and polished subject when C&EN interviewed her in Boston on a Wednesday morning in October, precisely two weeks after the announcement that she won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. | | This month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report concluding that it is all but inevitable that overall global warming will exceed the 1.5 degree Celsius limit dictated in the 2015 Paris Agreement. The report also discusses the potentially catastrophic consequences of this warming, which include extreme weather events, an accelerated rise in sea levels, and shrinking Arctic sea ice. | | Let's have a multiple choice test. If you want to climb Everest you should:a) Hire a Sherpab) Hire a chemistry tutorSeems pretty obvious, no? I mean, wouldn't you want to rely on someone who knew something about mountain climbing? | | Occasionally, there are weekends when I settle down to crank out my usual weekly magnum opus for Science-Based Medicine and there's nothing going on out there that's getting me fired up. (It happens from time to time if you've been doing a regular column for nearly 11 years.) | | Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle brand Goop claims to be "open-minded," and they want you to be, too, especially when it comes to the blatantly BS products that they sell. Never mind that there's no reputable evidence that Goop's overpriced vitamins, supplements, potions, and gadgets actually work. If you're open to the possibility that they work, then maybe they will... | | Bringing a new drug to market now takes, on average, $2.6 billion and more than 10 years. Those numbers could shrink, and countless patients could benefit, if Food and Drug Administration regulators were less risk-averse. I know that from firsthand experience.Oct. 30 marks the 36th anniversary of the FDA's approval of human insulin synthesized in genetically engineered bacteria, the first product made with "gene splicing" techniques. | | Neptune's largest moon Triton is still gathering frost on its surface even after nearly 20 years of accumulation.Backed by new observations, researchers recently announced that frost continues to travel northward from the southern polar cap of Triton. The frost, which is generated by the sun heating and sublimating volatile material before it travels northward, has been observed since the turn of the century. | | Stone tools unearthed in Saudi Arabia's inhospitable Nefud Desert indicate that members of our genus Homo had ventured beyond the familiar borders of Africa and the Levant sometime between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago. And according to climate data captured in the bones of animals found at the site, the environment they moved into may not have been that different from the one they left behind in East Africa. | | |
