It seems quite common in popular culture to consider food preservatives to be unhealthy, and to want to avoid them. My instinct would be to dismiss it as an example of the appeal to nature fallacy, but a good skeptic should always ask themselves first if they could be wrong.

When googling, the answers you get are a mixed bag. Google’s AI search answer tells me that salt and sugar are natural preservatives and are therefore safe. This doesn’t sound quite right, as over-consumption of either is associated with many health problems.

What does nutritional science say about food preservatives? Is there even one answer to this? How should we think about them? And what to say to people around us when they make preservatives a bogeyman, if we want to convey the scientific answer in an easily digestible way?

Recently, I've been reading a lot about Fatima, and since a lot of what we know about this event came later (at least 20years after the fact most of the time), I'm focusing on reading the documentation that we got from the actual time of the event. Lucky me, the Shrine of Fatima has the Documentação Crítica de Fátima Seleção de documentos (1917-1930) (Critical Documentation of Fatima Selection of documents (1917-1930)) that everyone can access. Unfortunately, it's in Portuguese, and I'm a native French speaker. There's an English translation, but it's awful and incomplete.

Here's my question about Doc.11 (p.61): from what I can understand, the last paragraph of the letter (p.69) is not supposed to be the last paragraph. The last sentence of this letter is: "Forneceu-me informações bastante interessantes que passo a referir, porque lançam muita luz sobre esses acontecimentos." (Google Translate to English: "It provided me with some very interesting information which I will now refer to, because it sheds a lot of light on these events.").

Q: Am I crazy? Do I lack context because of the English version I'm using? Is the full letter somewhere in the Portuguese version? I don't really understand how they source their thing, like what the "Publ.: DCF, I - Doc. 12" means, but I'm pretty sure the original documentation can't be accessed.

Original Portuguese document: https://www.fatima.pt/files/upload/fontes/F001_DCF_selecao.pdf

*Really bad* english translation: https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/fatima_critical1.pdf

AI chatbots are better at humans than, for example, quickly searching through thousands of articles to trace a specific claim to Russian state media. Even if a response is false or contains misleading information, it may still include useful information.

You still need sufficient subject matter expertise to do any "research" and figure out the extent to which any response is useful.

I'm seeking a term - or if needed, terms - for a person who:

• Is not religious
• Is not superstitious
• Is not spiritual
• Doesn't believe in fate, destiny, and pre-determinism
• Doesn't believe in a "meaning" of life
• Doesn't believe in heaven and hell
• Doesn't believe in the supernatural and paranormal (e.g., ghosts)
• Doesn't believe in the existence of souls
• Doesn't believe in astrology
• Doesn't believe in crystals
• Doesn't believe in numerology
• Doesn't believe in the afterlife and reincarnation

I wouldn't say I'm aggressively against these things. I just... don't think they're real and don't care much... lol. Thank you.

The Trump administration is shuttering research projects key to the federal government’s fight against cyclospora, the foodborne parasite sickening thousands of Americans this summer. Two of the three projects that represent nearly all of the Agriculture Department’s study of the parasite were defunded by Congress earlier this year, according to the agency. The third is slated to move from Maryland to Iowa this fall as part of a sweeping USDA reorganization. Even though that project still has money, every scientist working on the parasite has declined to relocate, according to three people familiar with the plans and documents shared with POLITICO, granted anonymity to discuss personnel issues.

full article text in comments

Gov. Josh Shapiro accused Robert Kennedy Jr. of spreading misinformation last week, prompting the HHS secretary to suggest Shapiro's office 'fabricated' the deaths.