Junk science on kitchen utensil toxins proves YET AGAIN our experts are full of it

Hey, remember when a crew of professional scientists proved conclusively that black plastic kitchen utensils might be killing us?The peer-reviewed study generated headline after headline with its frightening finding of unsafe levels of BDE-209, a flame retardant and potential carcinogen, in common cookware. Cancel the panic: The jokers at Toxic-Free Future and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who published the research now admit they got it dead wrong. Not because of some abstruse statistical error in their modeling, or faulty code in the computational-bio toolkit they used. No: Turns out they’re incapable of doing 3rd-grade multiplication.To wit: The safe daily dose of BDE is 7,000 nanograms per kilogram of body weight; their study assumed a body weight of 60kg and came up with a safe dose of 42,000 nanograms — too close to the daily dose of 34,700 from those eeeeeeeevil black-plastic utensils. Except that 7,000 times 60 is not in fact 42,000 but 420,000.Making that “worryingly high” dose of BDE totally trivial. They were off by a literal order of magnitude. It’s bad enough that the three — three! — researchers behind the study, Megan Liu, Erika Schreder and Sicco Brandsma, screwed this up so badly. Brandsma’s a researcher at a major European university, for Pete’s sake; both Schreder and Liu have degrees in molecular biology. In a way, it’s almost worse than fraud. These highly credentialed morons didn’t gin up some complicated chicane.

They messed up basic math. More worrying is the fact that this garbage passed peer review, which means a passel of other “scientists” signed off on it without noticing the massive screw-up.And the last year or two have seen a general collapse of academic credibility over serial plagiarism and data fabrication, not to mention the “replication crisis” that suggests that many social-science “findings” are bunk.So: How much other headline-grabbing “science” is, in fact, pseuoscientific b...