As we approach the week during which the 2023 Nobel Prizes will be announced (October 2-9, 2023), it is perhaps timely to consider the events that surrounded the first Nobel Prize awarded to a...
Serendipitous discoveries are legendary in science. Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Perkin’s of mauve, Silver’s of post-it notes, Roentgen’s of x-rays, Fahlberg’s of saccharin, Plunkett’s of...
We are drowning in fraud. Simply defined, fraud is intentional deception, usually for monetary gain. We have become used to robo-calls telling us that we have been subjected to a tax audit and had...
Harvard University’s Warren Anatomical Museum is a must-visit for anyone interested in the history of medicine. Displays include an ether inhaler as used by dentist William Morton that allowed...
Running on a treadmill is an appealing analogy for both the search for wellness and the investigation of its claims. A lot of effort goes into it, yet we never seem to get anywhere. At least with...
Every year, I’m an invited lecturer at the University of Ottawa to talk to future science communicators about pseudoscience. I use a number of increasingly muddied examples to show these students...
Both groups struggled with the same problem. How to extract and purify a chemical that is part of a complex mixture? For researchers led by Dr. Frederick Banting at the University of Toronto in...
Four hundred years ago Belgian physician Johann Baptist Van Helmont was persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church for promoting the use of the “Powder of Sympathy” that was supposed to treat wounds...
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