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What Does It Mean When a Vaccine Contains an Inactivated Virus?

27 Mar 2020

A vaccine contains an attenuated or inactivated microorganism (or part of one) so that your immune system can prepare itself for an eventual infection. The content of the vaccine must be...

Liquid or Bar? Soapy Tales

6 Mar 2020

Never has “Happy Birthday” been sung with such frequency. Two stanzas are just about the right length of time, about twenty to thirty seconds, for a proper hand wash. And we should be washing....

Nix the Handshake and the Cheek Kiss

5 Mar 2020

The custom of double kissing on the cheek as a form of greeting has always bugged me. Microbugged me. Do we really need to punctuate an encounter by exchanging oral microbes? What’s wrong with a...

The Word "Quarantine" Comes from the Italian Word "Forty Days"

6 Feb 2020

The term derives from “quaranta giorni,” meaning 40 days, and traces back to the 14th century when the city of Dubrovnik, now in Croatia, was under Venetian rule. The Great Pestilence, or the Great...

Nonsense About the Coronavirus Goes Viral

31 Jan 2020

It started with a video of a woman, supposedly in Wuhan, eating a bat. The inference, with racist overtones, is that the Chinese habit of consuming strange foods has now put the population of the...

2019 Year in Review

31 Dec 2019

Scroll to the bottom for links to the articles.

You’re probably storing leftovers wrong (especially if it's rice)

11 Jul 2019

If, like me, you aim to cook dinners that provide both your next day’s lunch as well as a freezer portion to be thawed at some future date, you may want to stop. At least with rice.

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