There’s a lot we don’t know about organic food. But one thing we do know? That being a person who both can afford to buy organic and chooses to do so generally means you’re a healthier person. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean organic food makes you a healthier person. That’s the central issue at the heart of a recent study published in JAMA that’s making headlines for purportedly showing that eating organic reduces your risk of cancer. [node:read-more:link]

The stereotype is that poor people eat more fast food than rich people, who virtuously eat only organic salads and cows with names. One problem with this assumption: It isn’t true. According to a new report about American fast food consumption from the Centers for Disease Control, people actually eat more fast food as their income levels go up.The brief is based on data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which uses a combination of interviews and physical examinations to assess the state of American health. [node:read-more:link]

A national environmental research and advocacy group issued a second report documenting traces of herbicides like Roundup in popular oat cereals such as Cheerios, saying that its presence in food creates an unnecessary cancer risk to children. It is the latest development in a raging controversy over glyphosate, the most widely used pesticide in the world, which most government regulators and food industry leaders say poses no health risk in the amounts that people get in their food. [node:read-more:link]

Researchers have discovered a Cas9 enzyme that can target almost half of the locations on the genome, significantly widening its potential use. [node:read-more:link]

 Injury rates have more than doubled at five West Virginia coal mines acquired by Murray Energy Corp. in 2013, according to a Reuters review of federal data, as the firm sharply increased the amount of coal produced per manhour. [node:read-more:link]

New York’s attorney general sued Exxon Mobil claiming the company defrauded shareholders by downplaying the expected risks of climate change to its business. The litigation, which follows more than three years of investigation, represents the most significant legal effort yet to establish that a fossil fuel company misled the public on climate change and to hold it responsible. [node:read-more:link]

Call it a little lite winter reading for America’s produce growers and processors. [node:read-more:link]

Many of the trees that Ford’s Forest Health Company removes are too thin to turn into conventional lumber products, such as boards and planks. So he chips them. And now, six years into his 10-year tree thinning contract with the Forest Service, he has far more chips than he can sell. Four orange-brown heaps of wood chips, as high as 20 feet tall, loom around his small sawmill in the mountain town of Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The heaps collectively cover five acres, he calculates. They’re so vast that his company has halved the area it thins per year to between 500 and 600 acres. [node:read-more:link]

the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) unveiled its five-year action plan for supporting antimicrobial stewardship in veterinary settings. This plan builds upon the important steps CVM has taken to eliminate production uses of medically important antimicrobials (i.e., antimicrobials important for treating human disease) and to bring all remaining therapeutic uses of these drugs under the oversight of licensed veterinarians. [node:read-more:link]

Ohio’s lowest-performing districts, with a performance index score under 70, had eight times as many low-income students on average as districts with scores over 100. Low income is defined as “economically disadvantaged” students with family income below 185 percent of the federal poverty level — $38,443 for a family of three. “There is stuff we know to do, and it takes money,” Fleeter said, pointing to universal preschool, summer programs and extended school days. “We need to get outside the box that school is six hours a day for 180 days of the year and it starts when you turn 5. [node:read-more:link]