David Ropeik
Big Think Contributor, "Risk, Reason & Reality"
David Ropeik is a science journalist and consultant. He formerly taught at Harvard University, wrote a science column for the Boston Globe, and was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. He is the author of Curing Cancerphobia.
![A man in a pink shirt and a pink and white tie.](https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/David-Ropeik.jpg?w=512&h=512&crop=1)
Dear CEO The vote in Washington requiring labels for foods with GMO ingredients is coming up. You’ll lose. Even if you win the vote, you will lose the war…because […]
It is so easy now to mock the millions who freaked out at the “War of the Worlds”, the Halloween radio play 75 years ago this week about an […]
PIPELINES!!!!! Evil! Dangerous! Huge threats to the environment! MUST BE OPPOSED! Could there be a clearer example of how naïve and simplistic we’ve become about the harms of modern […]
The most puzzling thing about the madness of the arch conservatives who have taken America hostage is, how can they be so deep inside their own extremist ideological worldview […]
What a golden age these past few decades have been for learning about how human cognition works. And what a humbling age, as we discover the truth that satirist […]
Have you seen the Chipotle Grill animated video “The Scarecrow”? More than four million people have, since it was first published last week. It’s a cry against unsustainable industrial […]
This is just despicable. Reprehensible. Maria Rodale, the CEO of Rodale, Inc., has likened the purposeful murder of more than 1,400 people in Syria by sarin gas to the […]
Numerous online tools are available to help you figure out your risk of a wide range of health outcomes; diabetes, stroke, heart disease, various kinds of cancer, (see Your […]
If a doctor looked at you or me thoroughly enough, with all the diagnostic tools now at her disposal, she could almost certainly find something wrong. A spot here, […]
We hear the admonishments all the time; smoking ___ cigarettes a day will take ___ years off your life, drinking ___ glasses of alcohol a day will take […]
Ideology often drives people to madness. History is full of frightening examples. The most recent may be California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a member of the House Science Committee, which […]
Jim Morrison and The Doors sang “Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel.” Sorry, that’s not enough. In order to reduce your risk of being […]
A group of experts advising the U.S. National Institutes of Health has added their voice to a rising chorus calling for a War on Cancer…Phobia. They have suggested […]
We sometimes get risk wrong. We fear some things more than the evidence says we need to, and some things less than the evidence says we should. […]
You know those nature documentaries, the ones where hungry polar bears risk their lives attacking dangerous walruses, or starving lions put their lives on the line attacking fierce horned cape […]
As extreme weather events seem to be increasing around the world, changes consistent with the kinds of things climate change is predicted to cause, many people are realizing something […]
Control. Without a sense of control, we feel less safe. With a sense of control – whether we actually have that control or not – we feel safer. A […]
It’s been a bad few weeks for RadioPhobia, the powerful fear of radiation that far exceeds the actual risk. From three different places come new examples of this version […]
It is impossible to overstate how important this is. On Tuesday, President Obama will lay out a plan for dealing with climate change, and reports indicate it will include regulation […]
A recent decision regarding genetically modified food by an appeals court in the Phillipines was a dramatic victory for the emotional appeals of environmentalists, and an ominous defeat for […]
In their continuing efforts to warn us of the threats of climate change, researchers regularly note new harms being produced by a rapidly changing biosphere. Sometimes the threats are […]
This blog often talks about risks that we fret over too much. Time to talk about one we worry about too little; the air we breath…indoors. For a number […]
I remember wondering that day as I was getting ready to go to work if I should pack a toothbrush. A Superior Court judge was set to rule on […]
The most revealing and important line in Angelina Jolie’s OpEd in the New York Times today is not the one in which she reveals she has had her breasts removed […]
The Dow Jones Average is about to break 15,000. Any day now the atmospheric concentration of CO2 will break 400 parts per million. Think there’s a connection? A couple other […]
The idea of Big Brother government snooping on us, listening in on our phone calls, intercepting our e mails, watching us with all kinds of surveillance devices, offends most […]
Last week taught us some important lessons about fear. One is that fear is neither good nor bad. What matters is how we let fear affect us. It spurred racism […]
What a revealing real-time lesson we are living through right now in how humans respond to risk. More than a million people in Boston and several large surrounding cities […]
So how terrorized will we be this time? Maybe terrorized is too strong a word. But how much more worried will we be, how much more uneasy, how much […]
You know how sometimes when you put your foot in your mouth and say something really stupid, you try to recover but only stammer out something even dumber and […]