Is a double bacon cheese burger a death sentence?

The news that bacon has been found to increase your risk of cancer make a double bacon cheese burger a death sentence. Well, it's not the healthiest sandwich on Earth.  Too many calories, which is a health risk.  A slice of "American" orange plastic cheese, which may not be bad for you, but eating it shows such poor judgment that you are probably making a lot of questionable health decisions. Grilled beef is both fatty and the grilling makes some sort of nasty stuff that also increases you risk of cancer. However, lots of things can increase your risk of cancer, the question is by how much? The answer in this case is bacon is not a big risk, unless you're eating piles of bacon, and then the fat will probably get you before the cancer. Bacon is not in the same league with smoking, and for those of us who only eat bacon every now and again, it doesn't figure to be a problem. Speaking of bacon one of the cooking magazines that just arrived had a wonderful sounding stuffed, roasted boneless turkey breast recipe that was completely wrapped in bacon. Sounds great and you'll be OK although the turkey did die, but it still wasn't the bacon. The fact that news organizations jumped all over the bacon-cancer news none of the articles TPP has seen so far offered any analysis of how great the risk was. No expert was interviewed and asked to explain. And that's what's wrong with science reporting these days. All they cared about was a sensationalist title, not providing any useful information. The cooking magazine by ignoring the warning altogether and publishing a bacon heavy recipe was more honest. 

Hear those crispy rice grains calling for help? Snap! Crackle! Pop!

New scientific findings are often fun and interesting, but how some "journalists" write about such things is annoying to the nth degree.  Xylem consists of a series of cellulosic tubes and during water stress, the transpirational pull upon the water columns, a force generated by water loss from leaves, can generate air embolisms.  In a manner of speaking, xylem gets the bends.  A research group has found that formation of these air bubbles makes sounds.  Now that's not all that unexpected or surprising.  Ever listen to the bubbles of carbon dioxide rising from your carbonated beverage?  That hiss you hear is the sound of all those bursting bubbles. If you had sufficiently fine listening devices, and slowed down the sounds recorded, you could probably listen to each individual bursting bubble.  Or how about the sound of air bubbles being made in a drinking straw when your sucking has lowered the level of the liquid to nearly the bottom?  Now the finding that air bubbles in the tiny xylem "straws" in a tree make a noise when forming is somewhat interesting but mostly because people don't think about trees making any noise.  Now here's where the newsy report goes seriously arwy.  It's not a "drought distress call" any more than your crispy rice cereal is calling for help to keep from drowning in the milk.  Scheesh!  This puts this report into a category of bad journalism by making a physical thing that can be explained in a non-technical way into something vaguely anthropomorphic. Was embolism too technical?  Or xylem? Where do the find these writers?  Oh, yeah, far away from science.

Genomic studies confirm the tomato is a fruit. Duh!

Really?  Genomics confirms that the tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable?  No, probably just Gisela's lame attempt at humor.  There are a lot of good reasons for genomic research, comparing one genome to another, but it doesn't seem that this science writer touched on any of them. Genomic research wasn't needed to identify the domestic tomato's closest wild ancestor; yes, it confirmed it, but it was already known, well known.  And yes, tomato is pretty close to potato too, but that was already so well known that tomato has been transferred back into the genus Solanum, discarding its colorful genus Lycopersicon ("edible wolf peach", maybe distinguishing it from other toxic red-fruited nightshades), a triumph for Linnaeus who put it there in the first place.  So what did we learn from this fluffy bit of science news?  Not much.