• Phil Plait’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

    This article was originally published on RealClearScience. The Apocalypse is here. Science writer Phil Plait’s worst nightmare came true. The Republicans won control of the U.S. Senate. What can we expect to happen? In Plait’s words, the Republicans will “put a cohort of science-deniers [sic] into positions of authority,” which “quite literally affects the future…

  • H7N9: The Next Influenza Pandemic?

    Where did this new H7N9 strain come from? Genetic analyses suggest that four different avian influenza viruses swapped genes in a process known as “reassortment.”

  • The Math Behind the ‘Shoe Size-Age’ Trick

    If you want to impress people with a math trick this Halloween, just be sure their birthday is sometime before November… and don’t show it to any centenarians!

  • From Which Cancer Will You Die?

    About 25% of Americans will end up with “cancer” written on their death certificates.

  • CDC Lost Its Ebola Gamble

    The CDC needs to find a spokesperson who can properly spell out exactly what scientists do and do not know about Ebola.

  • How to Make Scientists Publish the Truth

    This article was originally published on RealClearScience. John Ioannidis is (in)famous in the scientific community. Using straightforward logic and statistics, he convincingly demonstrated that most published research articles are wrong. This is not because scientists are liars and crooks, but because studies often do not have large enough sample sizes or are testing unlikely hypotheses.…