'Raw water' – the latest foolish fad to hit people's screens, pockets, & in some instances I'd guess their toilet paper expenditure as well. I first heard of this particular litre of woo when I read an article in the New York Times with the headline: Unfiltered Fervor: the rush to get off the water […]
Continue readingTag: nature of science
attitudes and antibiotics
A recent FB post from Stuff discussed the rising concerns around the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. (This is something that Siouxsie Wiles has often written about: here and here, for example; her excellent book on the subject is reviewed here.) Fairly predictably, it didn't take long for the proponents of essential oils to turn up, soon to be joined by the usual […]
Continue readingsupermarkets & nutritional advice
I rather like our local supermarket. Lovely staff, generally excellent products, & close to home as well. But I really wish the organisation would stay out of giving nutritional advice – or at least, that they do the right sort of consultation about their claims. For example, under 'recipes' there's a post about 'hyper-functional' beverages A. […]
Continue readingnomenclature nonsense, chemical fail
On the stuff page today, Dr Libby was asked how someone could reduce their exposure to chemicals. While she distinguished between 'natural' & 'synthetic' chemicals, sadly, 'natural' doesn't always equate to 'safe' or 'good for you' (as the list of plants growing in the Poison Garden in the UK makes clear). Similarly, there may be […]
Continue readingmore moo woo
Once I started paying attention to the woo around milk I realised how much of it there is. And how ready people are to accept it. I've written about the notoriously non-scientific Food Babe before. Someone with a high pain threshold could probably manage a daily blog post on this young woman and the way she […]
Continue readingshipworms, pillbugs and gribbles – oh my!
I've never heard of gribbles before, & did wonder if they were in some way related to tribbles (or a certain US politician's hair…). But no, it turns out that gribbles are small, wood-boring crustaceans. And they look rather cute: Image by Prof Simon McQueen-Mason & Dr Simon Cragg However, their cuteness should not obscure […]
Continue readingoh sad new world, that has such foolishness in it!
The internet is a seething pool of ‘stuff’, and one of the challenges faced by those using it is to distinguish useful information from foolish fantasy. And there surely is a lot of the latter! Thus we find that According to a BBC news story, the Indian government’s Agriculture Minister has said that yogic farming would […]
Continue readingtips for effective on-line science outreach
As you'll have gathered, I'm finding Facebook – and now Twitter – great sources of information, whether it's for teaching, sharing with my students (& others!), or blogging about. And today, this paper popped up on my Twitter feed: Ten Simple Rules for Effective On-line Outreach. Because it's published on a PLoS journal (in this […]
Continue reading10 mistakes we all make when interpreting research
Will Grant & Rod Lambert, from the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, listed these 10 common mistakes in an article published in The Conversation. And as they say, if we're honest we've probably made at least one of them at some point. This article would probably be a really useful resource […]
Continue readingfood matters aotearoa – an opportunity for real debate? or muddying the waters?
One of the big stories on my Facebook feed at the moment alerted me to Food Matters Aortearoa and its upcoming Wellington conference. The program for this conference has certainly generated a lot of interest among my friends. The focus of that interest lies in the line-up of speakers & the agenda of their tour […]
Continue reading