Science and health editor and writer Stories in Scientific American and elsewhere. Cohost, Your Health Quickly podcast.
Joined April 2009
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josh fischman (now on Blue Sky) retweeted
As Vinay Prasad returns to FDA, I wrote him an open letter about how he can admit humans make mistakes, actually welcome dissent, and serve public health.
And also, make it so I don't need to write another Vinay Prasad piece for a while!
Dear Vinay: Please embrace dissent, and fade into the background.
statnews.com/2025/08/11/vina…
Scientific American is hiring a senior tech reporter! Great job. Great colleagues who care about you and your work. DM me if you have questions, and here is the official job ad. springernature.wd3.myworkday…
There's a myth that long COVID doesn't affect kids. Bc they didn't get severe disease. But newest research says 6m kids may have long COVID-physical & mental problems. This--not lockdowns--can account for poor school performance. Read how we can fix this. scientificamerican.com/artic…
josh fischman (now on Blue Sky) retweeted
🥹🥹🥹 #goals
This is what winning a #NobelPrize looks like. 😃
HHMI Investigator David Baker fielded calls from reporters and talked to his fellow Nobel Laureates after winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry today.
📷: Ian C Haydon, @UWproteindesign
hhmi.news/4eRxZo0
You can tell from the news stories, which all use the tests in the headline but have few details. Instead they pivot quickly to Woodward's stories about Trump-Putin phone calls--more important than tests, i think--and tales of Biden.
If Trump gave Putin COVID tests in early 2020, did that rob tests from you?
No.
News reports on Bob Woodward's new book say the tests in mid 2020 were Abbott nucleic acid tests, not for home use. The 1st home tests were in Nov. Trump lied on COVID. But this wasn't part of it.
There's been a variety of positive signals about metformin for years.
Metformin, in people with T2 diabetes already taking this medication, was associated with a reduction in risk of developing #LongCovid and mortality 6 months after an infection
diabetesjournals.org/care/ar…
For no particular reason that I can tell, today is National Oyster Day. But what the heck, celebrate the water-cleaning shellfish. Donate to a reef. Eat a few. oysterrecovery.org/get-invol…
The Kate Douglass who won gold in #Olympic swimming yesterday is the same Kate Douglass who just wrote how math makes swimmers faster in SciAm a few weeks ago. scientificamerican.com/artic…
josh fischman (now on Blue Sky) retweeted
Science Quickly (SciAm), 3/14/24: "Large Study of ME/CFS Patients Reveal Measurable Physical Changes"
(12 min episode w/Avindra Nath of NINDS & #pwME Brian Vastag - not sure I caught when it came out in March)
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
josh fischman (now on Blue Sky) retweeted
Another black Lego dragon has escaped its watery lair, 27 years after it plummeted into the ocean. It was discovered on Thursday by Hayley Hardstaff, who found it among shells at Portwrinkle beach in Cornwall. There were 33,941 Lego dragons inside the shipping container that fell off the Tokio Express in 1997, 33,427 black dragons and 514 green. Although many have been found in Cornwall, some drifted much further, washing up on the shores of the Netherlands. Many thanks to Hayley for giving us permission to share her picture.
I'm sorry to interrupt your Sunday morning with politics. But the @PhillyInquirer just got the post-debate whining back on track. With strong evidence, they called for the clearly incompetent, dangerous, and anti-American candidate to withdraw: Trump. inquirer.com/opinion/editori…
Is it possible to be fat and healthy? A puzzling group of people, who seem disease-free for a short time, are causing scientists to debate this question. Read scientificamerican.com/artic… by @cragcrest, an eye-opening and surprising story about obesity, stigma, and medicine.
Weight loss drugs. After laughing at them w/ South Park's The End of Obesity, youtu.be/qRJogSKK-3U?feature…, ("Rich people get Ozempic. Poor people get body positivity."), read the truth about how they work in your brain in @sciam: scientificamerican.com/issue…
1954, about 450 feet from home plate with his back turned, Willie Mays hauls in a line drive and saves World Series Game 1. Say Hey to the hero who passed today, age 93.
And the story says the tech pushes language "beyond the inconceivable." I think that phrase has already done it. 🙂
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Good points about the press, @CharlesCMann . Though on some of these issues, like mask use, there were many studies supporting use, and the science at the time did not seem equivocal, nor does it seem equivocal now. Does it?
This, from a NY Times newsletter, is a bunch of important admissions about falsehoods spread by gov't and academia during the Covid epidemic. But I wish it went on to talk about how those falsehoods were, all too often, amplified by journalists, including those at the Times. 1/4
ALT Text from NY Times newsletter this a.m.: Public health depends on public trust, and public trust in turn depends on honesty. During the pandemic, as I’ve written in the past, government officials and academic experts sometimes made the mistake of deciding that Americans couldn’t handle the truth. Instead, experts emphasized evidence that was convenient to their recommendations and buried inconvenient facts. They exaggerated the risk of outdoor Covid transmission, the virus’s danger to children and the benefits of mask mandates, among other things. The goal may have been admirable — fighting a deadly virus — but the strategy backfired. Many people ended up confused, wondering what the truth was.