Category: Science Communication (Page 1 of 12)

Illusion-schmillusion, if I fits, I sits.

Engaged in a cupboard reorganization spree, we never anticipated it. Sujayita, my wife, was folding her purple woollen cardigan in order to stash it in a drawer. The cardigan has a woollen belt that runs through a solitary buckle at the back of the waist. The belt was on the bed, and I happened to lay it out in form of a closed circle. Whoosh! Our cat baby Widget Greything (a.k.a. Baghum, the bitty hauspanther), who seems adept at Disapparating and Apparating at will, appeared right at the center of the circle, nonchalant, in a statuesque manner.

“Whoa! It’s true, what they say about cats and geometric shapes,” I exclaimed.

“Of course. There are studies that show this too,” Sujayita said. “But not all cats, though, you know. . .”

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Red And Green Mingles At Tsavo

[FOREWORD: In commemoration of the World Elephant Day 2020, August 12, here is a nature essay I had written earlier in the year for coursework.]

The brilliant azure of the sky adorned with cottony cumulus would strenuously belie that fact now, but it did rain by the gallons throughout the night, continuing the trend of the past few days at the Tsavo East National Park.

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Of COVID-19: Immunity, Vaccines, Herd Immunity

Today is the 15th of July. For more than half a year, humanity in the entire world has been witnessing the ravages of a deadly pandemic, caused by a respiratory virus that belongs to the ‘Coronavirus’ family and is named SARS-CoV-2. Currently, we are practically defenceless against the disease, termed COVID-19, caused by this virus. In clinical studies, limited effects, in overall small number of patients under special conditions, have been seen with an antiviral medication (remdesivir) and the use of an anti-inflammatory medicine (dexamethasone), while a few other medicines fell off the wayside when rigorously tested for efficacy against COVID-19.

But that situation may change. All hope is not lost.

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Pseudoscience of Homeopathy Exacts a Tragic Cost; What Would Science Advocates Do?

The mood in New South Wales State Supreme Court was somber that early June day in 2009. Seven years earlier a little girl of nine-months from Earlwood, Sydney, had died under tragic circumstances, and in the dock for medical negligence were her Indian immigrant parents, Mrs. Manju and Thomas Sam. The jury heard, from experts and other witnesses, how baby Gloria Thomas suffered from significant malnutrition early in her short life, which compromised her immunity; how she was diagnosed with eczema at four months, and through her broken skin, disease-causing bacteria entered her bloodstream, attacking her lungs and one eye; and how throughout the entire, extremely painful ordeal, her father—a homeopath—steadfastly, repeatedly refused medical care, electing instead to treat her with one homeopathic remedy after another, until she passed away. The jury returned a verdict of manslaughter, and the judge sentenced the couple to up to 8 years in prison.[1]

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Methods Section of a Research Paper: What is it good for? Absolutely Everything.

I love a well-written methods section in a research communication. There, I said it. And as a peer reviewer, I often go to the methods in the manuscript under review in order to understand both the experiments that authors have designed and performed, and the rationale behind the flow and organization of different experiments, each yielding a separate piece of the overall puzzle in form of data. But I didn’t start out this way; this is the story of my evolution, as well as the woeful tale of a long-held (and recently re-encountered, in a high impact journal, no less) annoyance—poorly or inadequately written, incomplete methods.

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Nature Publishing Group dabbling in Homeopathy is a loss of opportunity for good pharmacognostic research

This morning, I was alerted to the latest homeopathy shenanigan via the Forbes column of Dr. Steven Salzberg. (COI statement: I don’t know Dr. Salzberg personally, but I follow his columns, and he is a faculty member at my institution—albeit in a discipline not directly related to mine.) At the heart of it is yet another bog-standard ridiculous “study” purporting to show “clinical effect” of homeopathy, despite the preponderant evidence that homeopathy does not work. What makes this instance special enough for me to take time out from my over-burdened work schedule? The fact that it was published in Scientific Reports from the—wait for it!—Nature Publishing Group. Yes, THAT Nature.

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In Which I Discover My First Homeopathic Remedy

It has been a while since I last posted on homeopathy. Frankly speaking, having written about it quite a bit, I have grown kinda tired of the utterly unscientific, nonsensical nature of homeopathy, and foolishness of its relentless proponents. However, a few days ago on Twitter, my attention was brought to a whole new level of ridiculousness in this quackery modality, and I found it concerning anew because of what it implies for the hapless, gullible and vulnerable patients desperately seeking medical care. Today’s short post touches on this.

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Evolution of Sodium Benzoate Chemophobia Promoted by Panera Bread, from ‘complex structure’ to ‘present in fireworks’

Oh the humanity of it all! Back in November I had written about the decidedly weird chemophobia around Sodium Benzoate being promoted by Panera Bread, one of my favorite bakery and soup-salad places in the US. As I wrote, my wife and I love to eat there, but its anti-science, pro-pseudoscience stance on this issue was profoundly disappointing. Well, three-quarters of a year later, it turns out they are still assiduously at it.

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Worrisome Trends in Anti-Science Push Targeting School Children in the US

This morning I came across an unsettling BuzzFeed report by Zahra Hirji (@Zhirji28 on Twitter) on how climate change denialism is being peddled to school teachers in the US.  Reports Zahra:

Teachers nationwide are being targeted in a campaign to spread bogus information about climate change…

Packages holding a cover letter, a 135-page book, and an 11-minute DVD, all falsely claiming that there is no scientific consensus on man-made climate change, started arriving in teacher mailboxes in March. The mailings were sent to more than 300,000 teachers, according to the group behind the campaign, the Heartland Institute.

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Asparagus, Odorants and SNPees; with a hat tip to SciAm’s Steve Mirsky

This morning I chanced upon, via that inexhaustible font of newsly tidbits otherwise known as Twitter, this fresh Scientific American essay by veteran science writer Steve Mirsky expounding upon a commonplace phenomenon that has been a lasting mystery as well as, interestingly, a source of conversation around science —the strong smell in urine following the consumption of Asparagus, that well-loved, delectable vegetable of Le Printemps known to mankind since 3000 BCE.

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