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American Council on Science and Health Promoting evidence-based science and health since 1978. We debunk hype.

Read our stories: www.acsh.org
Watch our videos: youtube.com/ACSHonTV
Clips & Podcasts on Instagram: The American Council on Science and health was founded in 1978 by a group of scientists who had become concerned that many important public policies related to health and the environment did not have a sound scientific basis. These scientists created the organization to add reason and balance to debates about public health issues and to bring common sense views to the public.

Can science save meetings?lose to 1 billion meetings take place each day around the world. CEOs spend nearly three-quart...
10/16/2026

Can science save meetings?

lose to 1 billion meetings take place each day around the world. CEOs spend nearly three-quarters of their workdays in meetings. Planning for and spearheading meetings eats up the lion’s share of managers’ time. In much of the industrialized world, meetings are both the metronomes and menaces of people’s working lives.

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/society/2026/can-science-save-meetings

10/16/2026

From false alarms surrounding consumer plastics to the return of the plague(!), our experts continue to drive the national science and health conversation. Here's a look at recent media pickups and features highlighting ACSH coverage across the digital landscape.

Check out our original articles at acsh.org

Before the first contraction: the hidden biology of laborWhat if preventing premature birth starts not by stopping contr...
10/16/2026

Before the first contraction: the hidden biology of labor

What if preventing premature birth starts not by stopping contractions, but by understanding what sets them in motion? As we recognize World Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day, new research sheds light on how immune cells may help trigger labor, revealing a previously unrecognized biological pathway. The findings offer a fresh perspective on why current treatments often fall short and where future therapies might intervene earlier.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2026/10/15/first-contraction-hidden-biology-labor-50386

RIP Nickels? A poor man's coin with a rich historyAlong with pennies, nickels may be on the chopping block. So what? Is ...
10/16/2026

RIP Nickels? A poor man's coin with a rich history

Along with pennies, nickels may be on the chopping block. So what? Is there anything more boring than a nickel? You might be surprised. Behind this lowly five-cent coin lies more than two centuries of American history, including counterfeiting, wartime shortages, suspicious rarities, and coins that can be worth millions.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2026/10/15/rip-nickels-poor-mans-coin-rich-history-50389

October 16th is National Ether Day, commemorating one of the most important events in the history of medicine. A remarka...
10/16/2026

October 16th is National Ether Day, commemorating one of the most important events in the history of medicine. A remarkably simple chemical transformed surgery, saved patients from unimaginable agony, and later became indispensable in organic chemistry. Here's the strange story of diethyl ether. And a television review, at no extra cost. Link in bio for the history lesson.

Sugar Could Be Making You DepressedFor decades, psychiatrists have believed that depression is caused by a deficiency of...
10/16/2026

Sugar Could Be Making You Depressed

For decades, psychiatrists have believed that depression is caused by a deficiency of chemical messengers known as neurotransmitters. A lack of these chemicals has been touted as the cause of depression, and antidepressant medicines were believed to work by increasing them. But about one third of patients with depression don’t respond to conventional antidepressants. This suggests there’s more to this story, and new research suggests that our blood sugar may be a missing piece in the depression puzzle.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-leading-edge/202610/sugar-could-be-making-you-depressed

Is Meditating Bad for You?My college years were in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in those days, many of us were lo...
10/15/2026

Is Meditating Bad for You?

My college years were in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in those days, many of us were looking for something we could hold on to. I had friends who became political radicals, hippy farmers, Scientologists, or followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Although I never fully committed to any of these movements, I tried a number of them, and somewhere along the way, I took a Transcendental Meditation (TM) class and got a mantra. By then the Beatles and other celebrities had been to India to study with the Maharishi, and TM was a wildly popular secularized form of meditation that involved sitting quietly and silently repeating a mantra—a short phrase—over and over. In our initiation session, we were given a mantra that we were told was unique to us, and we were admonished to keep our mantras secret. I suspected the secrecy was designed to hide the fact that—similar to the classic Barnum effect demonstration—we’d all been given the same mantra, but I had no evidence to back this up.

https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/is-meditating-bad-for-you/

Longevity Research Has a Bu****it ProblemDebunking a case that is widely accepted by the scientific community is like se...
10/15/2026

Longevity Research Has a Bu****it Problem

Debunking a case that is widely accepted by the scientific community is like seeing a piece of a movie set fall over: You realize in a moment that the saloon in the spaghetti western is not a two-­story building but a painted two-­dimensional prop made of plywood. You have the illusion of solidity in one moment, an incredulous feeling of having been tricked in the next, and after a stunned second you begin looking at the entire street thinking, “I bet that brothel’s made of cardboard.”

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/longevity-research-has-a-bullsh*t-problem/

From celery juice to 'proteinmaxxing': A short history of fad dietsFrom celery juice and carnivore diets to gluten avoid...
10/15/2026

From celery juice to 'proteinmaxxing': A short history of fad diets

From celery juice and carnivore diets to gluten avoidance and "proteinmaxxing," nutritional advice has become a bewildering mix of science, pseudoscience, and outright nonsense. But dietary fads are nothing new. From Hippocrates to today's social media influencers, people have been promoting questionable nutritional advice for thousands of years. Here's a look at how we got here.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2026/10/14/celery-juice-proteinmaxxing-short-history-fad-diets-50392

10/15/2026

Why you should be skeptical of health skeptics. That sounds backwards—until you realize skepticism can turn into a brand, not just a method. Veteran science journalist Matt Fuchts explains in our latest Science Dispatch podcast.

🔗🎧Full listen here: https://tinyurl.com/2s3zrnz8

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