My latest feature article explores CAM, shams and the commodity of wellness. Every day is punctuated by messages about optimal health with a steady barrage of promises and products in the media. There are hundreds of blogs and social influencers promoting the best possible wellness tips and tricks that are accessible to any reader who…
Ahead by a Century? It has been 100 years since the Spanish flu pandemic, but our influenza efforts are still lacking.
Spit Spreads Death This past weekend marked 100 years since the end of the First World War. It has also been a century since the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic tore through Europe and North America, leaving behind more corpses than the ravages of combat. Conservative estimates number 21 million flu fatalities, but recent numbers point…
Science and Society
Breaking the science silence on the blog to share a piece published over at The Sheaf Publishing Society. Read about the importance of science literacy, communication and why we need science in society. Can we talk? Addressing the growing disconnect between science and society Stay tuned for more science stories!
Bugs on the Brain
Imagine you are at a cocktail party. Some sort of creative kickstarter’s big reveal that includes an in-house DJ — some forty-year old guy named Craig with a receding hairline and reflective aviator glasses— set up in the corner next to some fiddle leaf fig plant. You clutch in your grip a cocktail that gives…
What’s light got to do with it?
Lightscapes, nightscapes and glowing screens— how light effects our health and genes Ah, light. The ubiquitous radiation that bombards our humble human bodies. Multiple wavelengths of vibrating photons that illuminate our world. The wonderful, yet minute, visible spectrum that we can detect and the invisible, hidden ranges that slip past our primitive senses. Light is…
The Human Story
This is a blog about science and storytelling. It’s about science writing and communication. Science and writing. This post is a personal reflection of writing, of striving to be a storyteller — a half-ass decent communicator. This is a sharp departure from the science focus but I believe it’s equally important to examine the writing…
“Nature is a Haunted House”: beautiful and somewhat unsettling tricks of microbes and moths.
Bacteria, the great improviser As the cliché goes — one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. And also, perhaps, a viable buffet of tasty, tantalizing delights. Bacteria are notorious for eating our waste. They attack, devour, proliferate and thrive in all kinds of unseemly matter. They colonize rotting food and break down the organic matter…
Tangled in the Sheets of Sleep and Science Part TWO
We left off on our brainstem’s foibles in it’s sleep induced regulation over our bodies. We are merely slaves to the humble pons — our brainstem’s envoy in charge of applying the break to our motor neurons when necessary. Sometimes, the pons gets a little overzealous. I can relate. Sleep paralysis is a phenomenon experienced…
Tangled in the Sheets of Sleep and Science: Part One
“Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care” As the late and ever lovely Oliver Sacks said, “Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality.” Dreaming — that fantastic, frank and, sometimes, quite fu—bizarre activity that we engage in on a nightly basis and yet we know so little…
Who The Hell Are You?
There is a scenario that many of us have had the painful privilege of experiencing. That moment when your eyes flutter open and you glance around while your heart picks up a few beats per minute and your muscles twitch with a sudden increase of adrenaline. Confused, your inner monologue shouts out, “Where the hell…
