"If a last-minute provision in the Senate farm bill becomes law, irradiated hamburger could become known by a more appealing name: pasteurized beef," New York Times reporter Elizabeth Becker writes. "Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who heads the Senate Agriculture Committee, said today that he had inserted the provision in an effort to 'more clearly define pasteurization,' the process by which disease-producing bacteria have long been destroyed in some foods through heating.

The shocking news that the US epidemic of 'mad deer' disease has jumped from the West to the Midwest and into the huge white tailed deer population in Wisconsin has all players scrambling and pointing fingers. States that depend on money from big game licenses are assuring the public that chronic wasting disease (CWD) cannot infect and kill humans, although there is no proof for that claim and some evidence to the contrary.

In Trust Us, We're Experts, PR Watch editors Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber examined the ways that industry PR manipulates science and gambles with your future. Now British science writer Colin Tudge is exploring similar themes. Whether the topic is pharmaceuticals or genetically modified foods, he says, "people distrust what scientists tell them. And they are perfectly right to do so. ...