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Immigration and Crime
Does legal or illegal immigration increase crime? That is an empirical question that should be answerable through rigorous research. Whatever the answer, it should inform our policy priorities and...
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Science – We Have a Reproducibility Problem
John Ioannidis has published an interesting commentary in JAMA about the current reproducibility crisis in basic and clinical scientific research. Ioannidis has built his career on examining the...
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More Anti-Vaccine Nonsense from Trump and Kennedy
We have an anti-vaccine president. One of my concerns about Trump the candidate was that one of his most consistent positions over the years was blaming vaccines for the alleged autism epidemic (there...
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The Science of Smoking Bans
In a recent article for Slate, Jacob Grier argues that the science used to justify widespread bans on smoking in public places was flawed. Recent more robust research has show little to no health...
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Human Gene Editing
The recent rapid development of CRISPR technology, which has made gene editing fast, affordable, and accurate, has rekindled the ethical debate about human gene editing. Last week a special panel put...
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Potential New Pain Drug from Snail Venom
Researchers have published in PNAS promising results from a snail venom analogue used in the treatment of pain. This is exciting for a number of reasons, even if the current compounds under study do...
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Natural News Delisted from Google
It appears that Google has removed all Natural News content from their indexing. This means that Natural News pages will not appear in organic Google searches. This is big news for skeptics, but it is...
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Practicing Evidence-Based Medicine
An excellent article in ProPublica by David Epstein discusses the problem of doctors not adhering to the best evidence-based standards. The full article is worth a read, and I won’t just repeat it...
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The Death of Expertise
Tom Nichols’ book, “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters,” is currently on the Amazon bestsellers list. The book discusses a topic I have delved into...
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De-Extinction
Recently Harvard University geneticist Prof George Church announced that he and his team are close to making a mammoth-elephant hybrid. They have been reconstructing mammoth DNA from frozen remains....
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