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Photo Credit: Oceana/Jenn Hueting Dining out or shopping in a grocery store are seemingly straightforward: as the consumer, you make your selection and exchange money for goods. These interactions are based on an implicit trust that you get what you paid for. However, in recent years consumers have begun to demand more transparency with reports of mislabeled seafood at retailers and restaurants being greater than 70% in some instances [1]. Seafood is one of the most traded food items in the wor ...read more

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(Credit: AVA Bitter/Shutterstock) Bioengineers have made great strides harnessing the body’s ability to start over, whether regenerating heart tissue and bones, or using stem cells to regrow fingertips. Still, much of regenerative medicine’s promise remains inside the laboratory—or at least that was what I thought when I began reporting for The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human. Some clinicians, like Dr. Eugenio Rodriguez, aren’t waiting for tria ...read more

One of the larger sauropod footprints. The border of the imprint has been digitally outlined. (Credit: Steven Salisbury) Their physical remains may be absent, but dinosaurs left unmistakable impressions in the landscape of Western Australia. A new analysis of dinosaur footprints from the Broome Sandstone region, called “Australia’s Jurassic Park,” has revealed that thousands of imprints dotting the coastal landscape belong to at least 21 different dinosaur species. ...read more

Back in 2015, I ran a three part post (1,2,3) on Dr Kenneth Blum and his claim to be able to treat what he calls “Reward Deficiency Syndrome” (RDS) with nutritional supplements. Today my interest was drawn to a 2015 paper from Blum and colleagues, called Neuroquantum Theories of Psychiatric Genetics: Can Physical Forces Induce Epigenetic Influence on Future Genomes?. In this paper, Blum et al. put forward some novel proposals about possible links between physics, epigenetics, and ne ...read more

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Calvin the alien: young, curious, and full of life. What could possibly go wrong? (Credit: Skydance/Columbia Pictures) LIFE the movie is both predictable and full of surprises, much like…er…life itself. In the broad sense, it is a monster-run-amok genre movie. No spoilers there; you already know that if you’ve seen the trailers or even just the promotional posters. The interesting parts lie in some of the movie’s details, which deviate from expectations in provocative ...read more

Over at Data Colada, Uri Simonsohn argues that The Funnel Plot is Invalid. Funnel plots are a form of scatter diagram which are widely used to visualize possible publication bias in the context of a meta-analysis. In a funnel plot, each data point represents one of the studies in the meta-analysis. The x-axis shows the effect size reported by the study, while the y-axis represents the standard error of the effect size, which is usually inversely related to the sample size. In theory, the points ...read more

Today is World TB Day, commemorating Dr. Robert Koch’s groundbreaking 1882 discovery of the organism that causes tuberculosis. At the announcement of his research to the public, he declared, “If the importance of a disease for mankind is measured by the number of fatalities it causes, then tuberculosis must be considered much more important than those most feared infectious diseases, plague, cholera and the like.” Thirteen years later he would be awarded the Noble Prize for his ...read more