Joel Moskowitz

My research center specializes in health promotion & disease prevention. We also cover wireless radiation health effects & policy. Check out my web site:

[Joel Moskowitz @berkeleyprc]

WHO Radio-Frequency Radiation Cancer Study is "Seriously Flawed." Scientists conclude the review does not assure wireless safety, and should not be used to set public policy. https://t.co/qDiGsSTXf9

[IARC @IARCWHO]

#EWAC2026 came to a close on #WorldNoTobaccoDay.
IARC research shows that tobacco smoking causes at least 20 different types of #cancer.
Using smokeless tobacco products is among the leading causes of oral cancer in countries where they are commonly used.
https://t.co/eXKXJ4Jzsp

[nature @Nature]

New-found immune cells called ‘ruptoblasts’ explode when triggered, ejecting toxic chemicals capable of delivering death to surrounding cells in just minutes. The cells’ discoverers say that this process, which they call ruptosis, seems to be a new form of cell death.

https://t.co/6JtcC1HjY0

[Medical Xpress @medical_xpress]

An experimental molecule pushed microglia back toward beta-amyloid plaques, where they began enclosing the deposits instead of failing around them. @UniversidadMH https://t.co/BSVMHsb4ti

[Science Magazine @ScienceMagazine]

How animals sense Earth’s magnetic field is one of biology’s enduring mysteries.

Researchers in Science have now identified superparamagnetic macrophages in the livers of rock pigeons to be crucial for magnetic sensing.

The finding uncovers an unexpected role for immune cells in sensory perception and may fundamentally change our understanding of animal navigation.

Learn more: https://t.co/afMu07Io5l

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Professor Omar Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley and winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has developed an innovative atmospheric water generator capable of producing up to 1,000 liters of clean drinking water per day directly from dry air.

Using reticular chemistry and advanced metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), the system efficiently captures moisture even in arid desert conditions with very low humidity. The compact, shipping-container-sized units developed by Yaghi’s company, Atoco, operate entirely off-grid using only ultra-low-grade ambient thermal energy or sunlight, requiring no electricity from the grid.

This sustainable technology offers a promising alternative to energy-intensive desalination plants, which often harm marine ecosystems through brine discharge. It is particularly valuable for remote communities, drought-prone regions, and areas affected by natural disasters such as hurricanes in the Caribbean, where centralized water infrastructure may fail.

Yaghi’s personal experience growing up with water scarcity in a refugee community in Jordan has deeply influenced his work. He advocates for scaling decentralized, resilient solutions to address the global water crisis through scientific innovation.

[Atoco official website and related coverage in Interesting Engineering, Food & Wine, and Nobel Prize announcements (2025–2026)]

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The reason we think dandelions are weeds is because of a 1950s marketing campaign.

Dandelions, native to Europe and Asia, were brought to North America in the 1600s by European colonists who grew them deliberately.

Every part is edible. The leaves are a salad green, the flowers were made into wine, and the roots were roasted as a coffee substitute and used medicinally for liver and kidney conditions for thousands of years. They were a kitchen-garden staple well into the 1800s.

The shift happened after World War II, when 2,4-D (originally developed for chemical warfare research) was approved as a residential herbicide. Companies like Scotts built the modern lawn-care industry around the idea that a perfect green lawn meant zero broadleaf plants.

Dandelions, being bright yellow and resistant to mowing, became a visible enemy, and the campaign worked. By the 1970s, "dandelion-free" was synonymous with "well-kept."

They aren't native, but they aren't doing significant ecological harm either. The herbicides used to kill them, on the other hand, kill bees, contaminate groundwater, and have been linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma in humans.

If you hate dandelions, it's most likely due to a marketing campaign that ran before you were born.

[Science Magazine @ScienceMagazine]

A vaccine that could provide protection against multiple pathogens would be invaluable, particularly during pandemics in which knowledge of the causative pathogen is limited.

In a new Science study, researchers found that a nasal vaccine designed to stimulate innate immune cells and T cells provided protection against both viral and bacterial lung infections in mice. https://t.co/SErpKv9RrB

[NBC News @NBCNews]

An experimental vaccine from Moderna shows promise in keeping deadly skin cancer from returning for years, according to new clinical trial results. https://t.co/HM3RcPYkwG

[NRDC 🌎🏡 @NRDC]

The rapid growth of AI data centers is raising public health concerns in Virginia, where most facilities rely on diesel backup generators that release soot and other harmful pollutants linked to serious health risks like respiratory illness and heart disease. https://t.co/9BhdAjgFSg

[Atanas G. Atanasov @_atanas_]

@DrSeeboth @KulikovUNIATF The clinical research demonstrates that in adults with prediabetes, vitamin D is effective in decreasing risk for diabetes.

[California Department of Public Health @CAPublicHealth]

What was public health like in the 90s? Eliminating measles.

3-4 million cases a year before the vaccine. After immunization efforts, the U.S. declared measles eliminated in 2000. Vaccines work.

Get vaccinated to eliminate measles for good. Visit https://t.co/MCFpPGIXci.

[PBS News @NewsHour]

Top nutrition experts question the protein push, saying Americans already consume more protein than they need, and there's no new evidence that people need to drastically ramp up consumption. https://t.co/QBTtL8chbO

[EMF Signal @emfsignal_com]

📡 2.45 GHz Wi-Fi radiation altered reproductive hormones in male rats after 60-day exposure

GnRH increased significantly; testicular testosterone reduced in the 24h/day group.

Source: Int J Mol Sci

via @emfsignal_com https://t.co/TNLFNq9z8S

[Eric Topol @EricTopol]

Finings of an exhaustive review of alcohol effects on 20 health outcomes from 843 studies
https://t.co/Xnzg1LGpGp
—"Current evidence does not support a universally
applicable threshold for alcohol consumption that maximizes health for all."
Associations:
—Increased risk of 10 cancers, pancreatitis, cirrhosis, tuberculosis, atrial fibrillation, pneumonia
—Decreased risk of ischemic heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, ischemic and hemorraghic stroke (with low-moderate intake)
"Our findings should not be interpreted as endorsing alcohol consumption for health benefits."

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

Phone-free schools and the recent parent-led EdTech pushback sweeping the nation show that families have agency in challenging the idea more tech is always better for kids. I love to see @rweingarten and teachers joining in support.

AFT is well-positioned to make real demands of Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, and they should use that leverage.

https://t.co/jSjx5ouf6W

[RF Safe @rfsafe]

https://t.co/mnAJzIV0lC

[Shining Science @ShiningScience]

Kimchi shown to remove plastics from the body before they can spread to organs.

A probiotic bacterium isolated from traditional Korean kimchi could act as a microscopic shield against the rising threat of nanoplastic pollution.

Researchers in South Korea have discovered that Leuconostoc mesenteroides CBA3656, a lactic acid bacterium found in fermented kimchi, possesses a unique ability to bind to nanoplastics—plastic particles smaller than 1 micrometer that can easily cross intestinal walls and accumulate in vital organs like the brain and kidneys.

In simulated laboratory environments designed to mimic the harsh, fluid conditions of the human digestive tract, this specialized strain maintained a 57% binding efficiency to polystyrene nanoplastics, far outperforming standard reference strains which dropped to a mere 3% efficiency. To test these findings in vivo, scientists administered the kimchi-derived probiotic to germ-free mice exposed to nanoplastics. The treated mice successfully excreted more than twice the volume of plastic particles in their feces compared to the control group, demonstrating that the bacteria can effectively capture and escort these synthetic contaminants out of the digestive system before they migrate into deeper tissues.

The biological mechanisms were observed strictly within controlled laboratory cultures and mouse models, meaning further clinical trials are required to confirm if eating standard commercial kimchi yields identical protective effects in the human gut. Nevertheless, the study provides a foundational framework for developing food-derived probiotics engineered to combat systemic plastic ingestion. As global concern over microplastic contamination in drinking water and food supplies reaches unprecedented levels, utilizing natural, fermentation-born microbes offers a highly promising, biocompatible strategy for mitigating the long-term toxicological risks associated with daily environmental plastic exposure.

Reference

Han, S., Kim, J., Lee, H., & Park, S. (2026). Efficient biosorption of nanoplastics by food-derived lactic acid bacterium. Bioresource Technology, 418, 131450.

[EMF Signal @emfsignal_com]

🧠 New research revisits the Danish mobile phone cohort in light of current cancer statistics, arguing Danish brain tumour trends contradict its no-risk conclusion.

Source: Swedish Radiation Protection Foundation

via @emfsignal_com https://t.co/YUV1ZFOKg3

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A British scientist invented the single most valuable piece of technology in human history, then signed a document that legally guaranteed he would never make a cent from it, and he did it on purpose while every university around him was racing to patent everything they could.

His name is Tim Berners-Lee, and the invention was the World Wide Web (WWW).

Not the internet, which already existed as a way to connect computers, but the actual web of pages and links you are using to read this right now. HTML. HTTP. The URL. He built all three while working at CERN, a physics lab in Switzerland, between 1989 and 1991.

He wrote the first browser on a NeXT computer and stuck a label on it that said "DO NOT POWER IT DOWN" because if anyone unplugged it, the entire web would vanish.

Here is the part that should stop you cold.

CERN owned the invention. Under the rules of the time, the lab could have licensed it, charged a fee for every installation, and collected a royalty on every server that ever came online.

His colleague Robert Cailliau confirmed they actively discussed exactly this, because in the early 1990s patenting university inventions and squeezing money out of them was the standard move.

They could have charged for every search. Every upload. Every page load on Earth, forever.

Berners-Lee fought to give it away instead.

He pushed CERN to release the source code into the public domain with no patent and no fee of any kind. On April 30, 1993, two CERN directors signed a half-page document that relinquished all intellectual property rights to the World Wide Web. A few signatures on a single sheet of paper.

That was the moment nobody came to own the thing that now connects more than five billion people.

His reasoning was not sentimental. It was mechanical.

He understood something most inventors never grasp. The value of the web was not in the code. It was in the network. And a network only grows if everyone can join without asking permission.

The second you charge a toll, people route around you, and you end up with a hundred tiny incompatible webs instead of one universal one. He said it plainly years later.

If he had demanded fees, there would be no World Wide Web. There would be lots of small webs, and none of them would have mattered.

So the thing that made the web worth trillions is the exact same thing that guaranteed he would never personally capture any of it. Openness was not a sacrifice he made against the invention's success. Openness was the success. The free part was the product.

People who made far less consequential things became billionaires off the platform he built. He watched it happen and kept running a nonprofit standards body out of an office at MIT, setting the rules that keep the web working for everyone, paid like a normal professor.

When an interviewer once asked him why he never cashed in, he refused the premise of the question. He said that framing only makes sense if you measure a person's worth by their net worth. People are what they have done and what they stand for, not what sits in their bank account.

The man who could have owned a piece of every click ever made chose to own none of it, because he understood that the only way to give the world something this big was to make sure he could never take it back.

The most valuable thing ever built belongs to everyone, and that was the entire point.

[Eric Topol @EricTopol]

Nature-based interventions are good for your health. A new systematic assessment (and they are free)
https://t.co/0xoorjvwss