Brandolini’s law: why you sometimes struggle to refute BS (and how to solve it)
Reading Time: 5 minutes I sometimes find myself in discussions, unable to counter highly doubtful statements that I feel I should be able to debunk. There—I said it. But how about you? You’ve probably been in similar situations: you’re 97% sure a claim is false, but you don’t know how to refute it for whatever reason. Instead, you might…
Do you challenge your idols as you should?
Reading Time: 5 minutes “Listen to me, don’t believe me. Trust but verify.” Former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s final remarks got me thinking almost as much as the actual interview on the tragic war in Ukraine. I consider myself a skeptic who tries to analyze all my consumed information and hope you do too. But how honest…
Back on track but with a slightly different format
Reading Time: 3 minutes Alright. She’s been giving me the evil eye and judging me for too long now. It’s time to pick her off the floor. It’s time to dust off the dandruff-covered old Ivory Embassy laptop and power up. Let’s pick up from where we left off and continue sharing knowledge. I can’t help but feel I…
The Gattaca movie: when your valuable genes get abused
Reading Time: 7 minutes Even an optimist beyond saving like me can, at times, get the shivers from a dystopian science fiction portrayal of the potential dangers of genetics. Especially if they are realistic. These last weeks, I’ve been going through dusty ol’ films that I never had the time to watch. And last weekend, the bottle pointed at…
How long does the coronavirus last in the air? The latest you need to know
Reading Time: 7 minutes Although I’m happy that they finally let us out for an hour a day in our part of the world, I’m sick of wearing a surgical mask whenever I go out running. It’s annoyingly hard to breathe through. All because my saliva may dwell in the air long enough to expose my surroundings with the…
Why you fear science and robots | Fear of the unknown
Reading Time: 9 minutes “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” – H.P. Lovecraft (1927). The thing about fearing the unknown is that it’s a guessing game. You don’t know what scares you and why. The fear of science or scientific advances that can…
Risks of CRISPR weapons – is the danger near? The dark side of gene editing
Reading Time: 8 minutes Did you know that the US intelligence has listed gene-editing technologies like CRISPR-Cas as weapons of mass destruction threats in the Worldwide Threat Assessment? The technology that we’ve welcomed as our disease-fighting, life-saving Messiahs is also considered a weapon. Although suspecting that it would end up in such lists, this was new knowledge to me,…
How to diagnose viral infections | 2 methods, which one is best?
Reading Time: 10 minutes I was about to write another type of post for today, but people keep requesting the answer to one question above all this week. “How do we test for viral infections, and which method is the best?” To satiate your hunger for answers, in particular during these times when the world tries to battle the…
Coronavirus by age group | COVID-19 splitting generations
Reading Time: 10 minutes So much information about who’s affected by the coronavirus and COVID-19 that you ultimately feel like you know even less. Let’s divide the situation with the new coronavirus by age group and explain why we see symptomatic differences, and why everybody needs to participate in the recommended safety measures. The new coronavirus took the world…
Why keeping the cure for cancer secret is implausible and dumb
Reading Time: 7 minutes “Is it true that Big Pharma hides the cure for cancer?”, “Are conspirators keeping the cure for cancer secret?” You cannot imagine how often you get to answer these types of questions once you reveal yourself as a scientist, especially if you work with cancer. I’ve learned to see these questions coming from kilometers (miles)…