Martha Rosenberg

According to Science Times, the Tuesday science section in the New York Times, scientific retractions are on the rise because of a "dysfunctional scientific climate" that has created a "winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct." (1)

But...

Thanks to factory farming's massive economies of scale, a lot of food today is disgusting or cruel or disgusting and cruel. Just when people stopped talking about cantaloupes with deadly listeria, "pink slime" hit the news. And just when people stopped talking about pink slime, ground beef treated with ammonia...

Women are in such danger of osteoporosis they need regular bone scans. That was conventional medical "wisdom" since the first lucrative bone drug surfaced over a decade ago. But a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine reveals that the warnings don't apply to 90 percent...

It was not a great surprise that the FDA's new cephalosporin livestock rules have the Agribusiness Seal of Approval. It was Big Pharma and Agribusiness lobbying that killed its stronger cephalosporin rules issued four years after.

"We thought the original order was too broad and unnecessarily prohibited uses...

So far, 2012 is bringing bad news for people who don't want "free antibiotics" in their food.

Antibiotics are routinely given to livestock on factory farms to make them gain weight with less feed and keep them from getting sick in confinement conditions. But the daily dosing, at the same...

It's no secret that drug ads that sow hypochondria, raise health fears and "sell" diseases are often the most common -- and effective -- even when the drugs themselves are of questionable safety.

Before direct-to-consumer advertising, which began in 1999, ads which "sold" diseases said to afflict normal people were...

Who intentionally set off fireworks under a blackbird roost in Beebe, Arkansas on New Year's Eve killing at least 200 birds? In some warped homage to last New Year's when at least 5,000 blackbirds perished?

Do the killers think their prank is funny or that the birds are nothing but...

Like Hollywood, set to ban the sale of fur in 2012, Chicago is no longer a fur capital. One reason is the annual Fur Free Friday parade held the day after Thanksgiving. For 25 years, the march has crawled down the Magnificent Mile, stopping at every furrier along the way....

It's said that it takes 22 FDA safety officers to change a light bulb: 12 to defend the decision to install it, eight to call it another "lighting option," six to quote Big Pharma studies and one to say it doesn't need changing, it just needs a better label. This...

It used to be joked that a consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is. These days, the opportunist is Big Pharma, which raises your insurance premiums and taxes while providing you "low-priced" drugs that you paid for.

How did Pharma get a good...

Anonymous twelve-step programs have helped millions recover from addictions. Yet it is also possible to use the spiritual underpinnings of the programs to avoid addiction-related problems instead of dealing with them, says researcher and psychotherapist Ingrid Mathieu in her new book. We explored these topics in an interview.

Big Pharma has been accused of selling drugs that are so dangerous they cause death and drugs that cause the exact conditions they're supposed to treat. The popular asthma drugs Symbicort, Advair Diskus, Serevent Diskus, Dulera and Foradil do both and actually warn on their labels that they cause an...

So far, 2011 has not been a great year for turkey producers. In May, an article in Clinical Infectious Diseases reported that half of U.S. meat from major grocery chains -- turkey, beef, chicken and pork -- harbors antibiotic resistant staph germs commonly called MRSA. Turkey had twice...

How did Abbott Laboratories' Humira become an $8 billion a year drug, capable of anchoring an entirely new drug company as Abbott splits into two?

How did it become a blockbuster even though such drugs (which include Remicade, Enbrel and Cimzia and are called TNF blockers) are linked...

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner may be in his golden years but he still makes headlines like celebrities a quarter of his age. After his bride-to-be Crystal Harris left him at the altar, he rallied with a new show on NBC, The Playboy Club, and reduced the October issue of Playboy...

The flap over the racist name of the hunting lodge that Texas Governor Rick Perry's family leased is not the first time hunting and racism have conspired to tar a politician.

In 2007, a New York Daily News photographer spotted a Confederate flag hanging inside the Clove Valley Rod &...

The state of Illinois may be broke (like most states after the 2008 economic meltdown) but you can still shoot tame pheasants that the state has hatched and raised expressly for your recreational pleasure at Illinois state parks this fall.

The state-sponsored "controlled hunts" of pen-raised pheasants on state lands...

"No service?" ask two irate customers in a cartoon, waiting to be served in a restaurant. "No shirt! No shoes!" they yell, as they pitch the articles of clothing.

As the retail sector struggles in the recession, stores and restaurants have apparently decided that employees are a dispensable expense. Raise...

Nowhere in science is the "survivorship bias" as well demonstrated as the class reunion.

Where are the people who failed economically, professionally, socially, romantically and physically? They don't show up! And that's not counting the people who really can't show up who are listed in the In Memoriam section of...

Most people know by now that the plethora of antibacterial dish, body and laundry soaps that emerged in the 2000s do less to protect people from germs than to build new and better germs via antibiotic resistance. They also know that such bacterial overkill (soap and water work just as...