PEREGRINE PULP

There’s this local MD I like and whose research and publications I follow because of his good work on some issues I care about. Today he was curiously highlighting a new study about fluoride and noticing that there was never any serious question about its safety. I responded by asking for comment on evidence for the value of fluoridating the water supply to prevent tooth decay? The information I’ve been working with, and have written about at length in the past, comes from th

Parasitism has to be one of the most interesting aspects of biology. You may have come across the better known fungal , worm , or single-celled protist parasites who control the minds of their host for their own purposes. Lesser known are the parasitoid wasps . But with them, if you don't know, you can mostly erase from your mind what you think of when you think of "wasp". Many of these are no bigger than a grain of sand and others are only about the size of a sesame seed. T

Dr Paul Ehrlich, the American biologist (an entomologist specializing in butterflies) and Stanford professor, just died at age 93. As expected, through social and traditional medias folks are all a twitter with condemnations and demonizations , most of which read to me as some kind of weird revisionist history. As we love doing, people look back with hindsight and proclaim the future was simple and obvious and, as a result, perfectly predictable. And to get there they preten

People love bees. Most folks are particularly enamoured with those colony bees who gift us honey but who make up just 5% of bee species and tend to neglect the far more numerous solitary variety comprising the overwhelming majority of bee diversity . But how many bee species are there? Of course it is very difficult to estimate the number of unknown organisms. What we do know is that to date we've identified something like 2.1 million total species. And somewhere on the orde

When I was studying Environmental Communication (it was maybe a 200-level course in undergrad, back in the 2000s) we talked about the great problem with climate change, from a communication standpoint, being that it was so slow moving and effectively invisible. And one of the remedies to that was seen as the adoption of the highly charismatic and imperiled polar bear as a symbol. Famous commercials , investigations, news articles , documentary films , and TV series highlighti

Because of light pollution, many birds around the globe sing almost an hour longer today than historically or those birds who reside in more remote areas. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv9472 Hunted to near extinction, since the 1980s green sea turtles were listed as 'endangered.' Decades of sustained conservation has just resulted in their status being lifted to 'least concern'. https://www.popsci.com/environment/green-sea-turtles-not-endangered The volume of

Last summer I was writing about my continuing confusion around pandemic-related matters and my feeling that there remains a serious lack of dialogue around any of it. No one liked that. So, let’s try this again. A TIMELINE - 2020 - January 22 - The WHO convened an emergency meeting about an outbreak of a novel coronavirus called 2019-nCoV. The committee could not reach consensus on declaring a global emergency. January 25 - Ontario confirmed Canada’s first case. British Co

While we were all distracted with wars and pandemics, politics and social change, our basic understanding of the universe sprung a whole bunch of leaks; or, that's how I'm choosing to read this while knowing some experts may disagree. Starting roughly around 1998, our best model of cosmology, that branch of astrophysics concerning itself with the universe at its largest scales, has been something given the obscurifying acronym ΛCDM ( lambda cold dark matter ). But since the

I’ve had some wonderful moments out on the quiet of the reef with green sea turtles. (If you’ve never done so, it’s really something you must seek out, even just once. I can recommend some spots.) Because they were abundant where I was, and knowing they’re found all over the planet , throughout the tropical and subtropical regions of every ocean, I never appreciated how threatened they were as a species ( Chelonia mydas ). Accidental catches (mostly fisheries bycatch and aba

I was just listening to a jolly gaggle of middle-aged Irishfolk. As happens four pints in, they started talking about their recent doctor visits. With a couple of males involved, the conversation inevitably turned to the digital rectal exam. One declared he'd never had the procedure done and had no interest in ever having one. All the others barked and howled, exclaiming he was foolish at best and what he really needed to do was have his head checked. I couldn't believe all t

A strange dinosaur fossil first found in 1988 along the Puntledge River , flowing from Comox Lake through Courtenay on Vancouver Island (first described in 2002 and declared the Provincial Fossil of BC in 2023), was just now identified as a novel genus and unlike other elasmosaurids . Imagine something like a penguin-whale hybrid but with the neck of a giraffe (only six of those long, unlike the image above) and with the head of a komodo dragon, or something. Maybe a turt

The subject of the peopling of the Americas was always messy and it’s getting even more interesting all the time. Some will insist folks have always been on these lands while others conjecture about a traversal from Asia, across land, ice, or sea, or all of the above. When any of that took place is still more complicated. I bring this up here because so many disruptive findings have emerged in recent years, much of which changes the story pretty significantly but also doesn’t

For the first time ever, dinosaur nerds (who sometimes go by the label paleontologist ) have identified the 100-million-year-old fossilized footprints of an ankylosaurid, and a special one at that. You know the ankylosaurs, those guys from the Cretaceous who were low to the ground and built like a tank, with bony armour and a murder-mallet for a tail, doubtless for keeping carnivores at mating competition at bay. They look something like the ancient cousins of the armadillo

Like many folks, I’ve been playing with artificial intelligence off and on. Initially, back in 2023, I was turned off by how half-baked all the models seemed, especially on the visual front, while being somewhat pleased with what I was seeing and hearing in the realm of text-to-speech. Sometime in the late '80s, my mother brought a Commodore from work to train on. The text-to-speech that system produced was not meaningfully improved upon, by my own assessment, until just rece

I was recently looking for some statistics on iatrogenesis. That's just a fancy term for the medical system screwing up and causing harm rather than preventing or relieving it. Think: hospital acquired infections, adverse drug reactions, medical errors, psychological damage, and the like. However, as so often happens, I couldn't find what I was looking for but accidentally stumbled upon this extremely interesting study on the prevalence of ineffective medical treatments and p

We’ve never really known a lot about blue whales ( Balaenoptera musculus ); yes, despite our long history near and on the sea, blue...

Maybe twenty years ago I was writing about the strangeness of finding myself labelled an ‘atheist’. To begin with, I argued that labelling others was a weird practice, and that gifting someone membership in a group that they themselves haven’t or wouldn’t was a mode of conduct we probably wanted to avoid. (No, I couldn't have imagined the era we were about to enter. And you can imagine my consternation.) But, if you still insisted, then it seemed to me like framing things in

So what is this fluoride panic about? It’s certainly not about the existing evidence.