Skip to content

News

Tea to fight malaria? Yes, but also no.

  • by

Brendan Borell has written a scathing attack on the WHO, published in Slate last week. Because of the basics of the story, I thought I knew what I was in for: someone is advocating the use of a cheap “natural” remedy instead of a well-understood synthetic drug. They’re anecdotally reporting extreme efficacy and no drawbacks. Meanwhile, medical authorities are tearing out their hair and imploring people to stick to the stuff that works.

That’s how stories about herbal medicine typically go in my world. But this isn’t quite one of them.

“Although the tea itself has traditionally been used in treatment, not prevention, in China, a randomized controlled trial on this farm showed that workers who drank it regularly reduced their risk of suffering from multiple episodes of malaria by one-third.”

Randomized controlled trial you say?

“Soon afterward, a researcher named Patrick Ogwang with the Ugandan Ministry of Health documented a decline of malaria incidence among almost 300 workers drinking the tea, and followed up with the randomized controlled trial demonstrating

the tea’s effectiveness.”

Read More »Tea to fight malaria? Yes, but also no.
Image of crowd at Death of Evidence rally.

Science [REDACTED]

  • by

As of this moment, across Canada, there are government appointees who have veto power over new scientific data. This sounds like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. An adjustment to intellectual property law has made it possible for Canadian officials to block new studies from being published. They have stated no intent to use their new power this way, but nor is there any published set of standards on which they’re meant to base their decisions. People at the Science Uncensored project are understandably upset.

Read More »Science [REDACTED]

The uBiome controversy

  • by

uBiome is a cool project serving a widely recognized need: the mapping of the human microbiome. We’ve posted about uBiome on Twitter and Facebook, and have generally been pretty jazzed about the enterprise. Our enthusiasm took a major hit, however, when Melissa Bates and other bloggers began to voice serious concerns about the ethical oversight of the project, or rather the apparent lack thereof.

Read More »The uBiome controversy

Muses: DIY spectroscopy

  • by

The Public Lab is, I think, a generally stellar example of how to go about citizen science: they identify genuine, pressing scientific needs that are underserved by existing institutions, develop effective and practical ways of addressing them, and then deftly articulate both to the public. Those steps are difficult enough to get right individually, let alone all at once—and repeatedly. Their ingenuity, insight and deep understanding of practical citizen science makes them not just role models, but inspirations. And that makes them an excellent subject for our first “Muses” post—a category for people and projects we find inspiring.

A whole lot of science fan culture tends to focus on heavy machinery: think the Large Hadron Collider or the Curiosity rover. These things are important for physicists and astronomers (and fans like me), but if you’re in a wetland, a factory, residential area, or salmon farm and you encounter an unknown substance, particle collision is not going to tell you what’s in your water. For that, you need spectrometry. And for that, it turns out, you do not need a PhD. Read More »Muses: DIY spectroscopy

A Habronattus coecatus jumping spider facing down and to the right.

Jumping spiders: Communication and miniaturization

  • by

This should be evident from the title, but in case it’s not: If the combination of the words “jumping” and “spider” disturbs you, this is not the post for you. But if spiders only make you a little uncomfortable, I suggest sticking this one out, because from the perspective of animal behaviour and physiology, these things are cool. They’re also really small, so if for example you had a traumatic experience once involving a very large spider crawling onto your hand without you noticing (hypothetically of course) the miniature marvels that I talk about in this post should seem friendly enough.

Read More »Jumping spiders: Communication and miniaturization

The chimaera with the wheel of teeth

  • by

This is a majorly cool piece by Becky Crew on the Scientific American blog network. It details the slow, incremental progress toward a scientific consensus on a truly weird anatomical feature exhibited by some prehistoric chimaeras (fish that share a relatively recent common ancestor with the modern shark). It’s a great scientific problem. “We’ve discovered what… Read More »The chimaera with the wheel of teeth

Client showcase: Climate risk management

One of our frequent flyers at Talk Science to Me is the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). IISD is constantly publishing papers about sustainability issues, from just about every sector and every part of the world. They have a massive archive of previous work, which you can browse at your leisure with no paywall. One of the larger projects we’ve worked on for IISD is a series of papers about climate risk management. In this case, IISD contracted with us to help them document an initiative carried out in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme.

Read More »Client showcase: Climate risk management