It was a fearful time. Murderous foreign terrorists were attacking with increasing frequency, slaughtering anyone they could. Their targets couldn't be predicted. Defense seemed impossible. No one, and nowhere, felt safe. It seemed like this could be the most frightening time people had ever faced.

It was the early 800s...

The book Merchants of Doubt by Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes is described as

"the troubling story of how a cadre of influential scientists have clouded the public understanding of scientific facts to advance a political and economic agenda."

It makes a damning case against corporations, principally...

In all the outrage over Donald Trump's outrageous suggestion to keep Muslims out of the United States, a proposal repugnant to most but supported by millions, there has been little comment on what makes such overt bigotry so popular. It's true that "paranoia is overriding reason", as Tom...

The US Supreme Court has just refused to hear an appeal by gun owners of an Illinois ban on semi-automatic "assault" rifles and high capacity ammunition magazines. Curiously, Justice Antonin Scalia (and his apparent intellectual doppleganger Clarence Thomas) dissented with this decision, lamenting that lower courts that uphold...

For years, the tobacco industry knew that their products were harmful to health. To protect their profits they covered up what they knew, paid scientists to cast doubt on that evidence, and right through their CEOs' public testimony in Congress, just plain lied. As a result of these deceits, tens...

When you look in the mirror, who do you see? Beyond the imperfections everybody notices first - the wrinkles or receding hairline or zits - you see someone who is your gender, your age, your skin color. And when you think of yourself in your mental mirror, who do you...

The toll from the Paris terrorist attacks; 129 dead, 352 injured, billions frightened. Relatively few victims, yet global fear. Why? What is it about this particular threat that gives it such inordinate emotional power, far beyond the danger that it actually poses to most of us. Why does terrorism terrorize?...

The first wave of reporting about the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) listing of processed meats as carcinogens, and red meat as a probable carcinogen, was predictably simplistic and alarmist. The second wave, by science journalists with the maturity to give things a bit of analysis,...

For decades cancer has been the disease people fear most. Understandably. Study of the psychology of risk perception has established that we worry more about risks over which we have no control, and, "You have cancer" has always seemed like an inescapable, can't-do-anything-about-it death sentence. We are more afraid of...

Our thoughts and prayers aren't enough, we are told. Our sorrow and anger are not enough. We express them after every mass shooting, but nothing changes.

Why aren't these repeated outpourings of emotion and public opinion overwhelmingly in favor of reasonable gun safety laws, enough to get...

"I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet." -- Mahatma Gandhi

"Few men have virtue enough to withstand the highest bidder." -- George Washington

Much has been said about FoltaGate, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the emails of University of Florida Professor...

It's been an interesting summer for animal welfare issues. Cecil the lion's murder by an American hunter who paid local trackers to lure the popular animal out of the protection of a Zimbabwe national park so he could be killed and beheaded as a trophy fueled international outrage. So did...

Michiko was 11 when the sky flashed a strange blinding white. It was 11:02 a.m., August 9, 1945. Moments later came the roaring sound and the heat and the powerful blast of wind, and then in the distance several kilometers away the young Japanese girl saw from her suburban home...

There is a lot of opining about the Obama Administration's plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Most of these comments deal with the details; what does the plan do and how, does it do enough (the reviews are decidedly mixed), and why does it prefer some forms...

A recent decision by the Berkeley California city council offers some informative, and scary, lessons about how society struggles to intelligently regulate risk. The clearest and scariest message of all is...in the scream-fest that is democracy, government policy making sometimes reflects emotion more than objective analysis. Which doesn't make for...

It's the summer of the shark! Again. And just in time for Shark Week. An unusual spate of attacks off North Carolina, bumping up against the Fourth of July "Hey, let's go to the beach" holiday, has put galeophobia back in the news. And as always, the news coverage leads...

In the middle of the celebration of the Supreme Court decision establishing same-gender marriage is an ominous attack on democracy itself from one of the highest constitutionally sworn officers in America, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. His dissent (in the full decision all dissents) is a direct call...

More than once in China, under a gloaming pall of poisonously polluted air I have watched oceans of people flood the streets and shops of Beijing or Chengdu or Guangzhou acquiring the material goods that they hope might improve their lives, and thought to myself "We're screwed. The earth just...

Opponents of genetically modified food claim that their demand for labeling is only intended to provide choice for consumers. In truth, as many of them have said, they hope that labels will scare people away from buying such products and kill GMO technology itself. But a new survey suggests that...

The voters of Concord Massachusetts decided a few years ago to ban the sale of single serving plastic water bottles. This was the result of a couple things; the strong environmental passions in the community, and the fact that Concord has an open town meeting form of government....