PEREGRINE PULP

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.

This is what I understood my ancestry to look like: My father’s family name is extremely English and my mother’s maiden name is a sort of anglicization of an Austrian surname, as I understand it. My maternal grandmother’s maiden name is also extremely English while my paternal grandmother’s could only be Scottish. And all of those folks and some of their parents and grandparents, like my parents and myself, were all born in Canada. Everyone else on the family tree I’m aware o

I was wanting to learn about and write something on how leaded gasoline became a thing. But then I came upon the biography of its inventor. Thomas Midgley, Jr. was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania in 1889. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio and studied engineering at Cornell, earning a Master’s of Engineering in 1908 and a PhD in mechanical engineering in 1911. Five years later he was working for General Motors, at their Dayton Engineering Laboratories (DELCo) subsidiary in Ohio

As a kid I was always a big fan of triceratops. But at that time we knew only half the ceratopsian species we know today. There was a boom of ceratopsid discoveries between 1870 and 1925, then very little for almost a century. Then over the last two decades a whole bunch of new finds arrived. 1996 saw the discovery of Zuniceratops , significant for being the earliest-known ceratopsian with brow horns and, it must be noted, discovered by an eight-year-old in New Mexico. 2006 s

For years we were hearing about the replication crisis in the world of psychology; how so much accepted work in the field had never been...

IS THIS HELPING ANYTHING? ​ • The “Doomsday Glacier” Is Irreversibly Melting, Researchers Say “It could fall apart quickly, in decades.”...

Someone once asked: If I’m not mistaken, you are arguing for humanity banding together to protect ourselves from a plethora of potential...

It's easy to find folks promoting organic. Abundant are claims that organic farming reduces environmental pollutants and greenhouse gas...

[A SOCIALLY DISTANCED PANDEMIC PUB QUIZ] 1) COVID-19 will: A) Soon be forgotten B) Decide to disregard natural and anthropogenic...

Somehow polar bears became the symbol of climate change and species extinction. It makes some sense how this creature arrived at it poster child status. Polar bears are distributed all across the most northern regions of the globe and, given that they are the apex predator in this most climate change-impacted region, folks expected these animals to be the first and most visibly suffering. And now countless news reports, environmental campaigns, and viral social media posts te

I’ve had nearly every common and exotic shot and oral immunization available. In my youth I was given all the typical ones nearly every Canadian receives when little, like measles and diphtheria. I’ve had nearly every other less common one, such as rabies, too. Also, having travelled to rural parts of Southeast Asia and Africa has also meant I've needed immunization for typhoid, Japanese encephalitis, yellow fever, and more. And I've taken every kind of drug out there as a pr

The first unique dinosaur species native to BC has debuted. Ferrisaurus sustutensis (the iron lizard of the Sustut River , named such for the specimen being found along a railway line near the river), is a member of a rare family of little, hornless or small-horned, beaked dinos known as Leptoceratopsidae . You can think of them as Triceratops but only two metres long, standing less than a metre tall, and weighing only 150kgs (they're just wee, hence the "lepto" in the name