causation

How many of the risks for chronic diseases, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and dementia, can be traced back to your first 1,000 days of existence, from the moment you were conceived? Shermer and Finlayson discuss: epigenetics • epidemiology • difficulty determining causality in medical sciences • why correlation is not necessarily causation, but how it can be used to advise on diet and lifestyle changes • fruits and vegetables or meat and fat?
In Science Salon # 104 Michael Shermer speaks with Judith Finlayson about her book You Are What Your Grandparents Ate: What You Need to Know About Nutrition, Experience, Epigenetics and the Origins of Chronic Disease. PLUS: Carol Tavris avers that organizations’ Codes of Conduct that try to specify each and every possible behavior they wish to prohibit (or encourage), will find themselves in linguistic and psychological quicksand.
Dr. Raymond Barglow discusses three mistaken approaches to the opioid epidemic in this article that appeared in Skeptic magazine 24.1 (2019). Plus, Michael Shermer dialogues On Freedom with New York Times bestselling author Cass Sunstein.

Dr. Raymond Barglow discusses three mistaken approaches to the opioid epidemic in this article that appeared in Skeptic magazine 24.1 (2019).
Physicist Dr. Leikind responds to critics of his article on cell phone use and cancer (see eSkeptic for June 9, 2010) and Michael Shermer’s subsequent Scientific American article on the same topic. The SkepDoc Harriet Hall, M.D. along with oncologist Dr. David Gorski, both of whom blog at ScienceBasedMedicine.org, also chime in.
In this week’s eSkeptic, we present the shortened, non-technical companion essay to physicist Bernard Leikind article of the same title that appears in the printed edition of Skeptic magazine Vol. 15, no. 4. Leikind describes what all physicists know to be true about what happens when human tissue absorbs microwave radiation from cell phones.
In this week’s eSkeptic, Gary J. Whittenberger investigates whether the prayer of Georgia State Governor Sonny Perdue correlates to an increase in precipitation and how likely it was to have actually caused the increase.