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Fighting Fire with Fire: how a Nobel Prize Winning Scientists Used Malaria to ‘Cure’ Syphilis

22 Sep 2023

The history of science is full of disproved experiments, revised textbooks, and rewritten hypotheses. Even Nobel prize-winning research, which is often viewed as the best work science has to offer,...

The Microbiome and Its Myth-Making Machine

11 Aug 2023

As promising new discoveries are made in the health sciences, the telephone game begins. Scientists put their best foot forward when presenting their results. The public relations department at...

Does peeing after sex prevent UTIs?

11 Aug 2023

This article was first published in The Skeptical Inquirer.

Tuberculin Under Your Skin

14 Jul 2023

Throughout its lifetime, tuberculosis (or TB) has gone by many names. The ancient Greeks called it “phthisis”. In the 1700s, it was “the white plague”. And in the 1800s, it was “consumption” –...

The Sweet and Sticky Science of Sugar

3 Dec 2021

Sugar is sweet and sticky.  That’s a fact.  In fact, during the reign of Edward the Confessor in the early eleventh century, "ale tasters" were employed to check on the work of brewers.  They would...

Leprosy and Its Stigma Are Both Curable

6 Nov 2021

How is an infectious agent transmitted? How does it jump from person to person and sometimes from animal to person? We can breathe it in or swallow it. We can get bitten or scratched, or rub...

Apples- Getting to the Core

16 Jun 2021

I’m fond of apples. Maybe it has to do with some youthful memories of an upset tummy being soothed with a grated apple sprinkled with lemon juice. Or perhaps biting into one rekindles thoughts of...

The Dark Matter Inside Your Gut

21 May 2021

There is a kind of dark matter inside our intestinal tract. “Dark matter” is the phrase coined for the matter that is implied to be present in the universe based on physicists’ calculations but...

In Death, Our Body Feasts on Itself

20 May 2021

A pretty morbid question perhaps, but why is it that our body does not decompose while we are alive? Most of the post-mortem changes that affect our body are the result of things we already carry...

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