Category Archives: Health

Biohackers Take DIY Approach to Biological Future

Image of Neil Harbisson
Neil Harbisson, cyborg. Photo by Moon Ribas.

Not terribly long ago, do-it-yourself projects were the province of shade-tree mechanics and people who kept wood lathes in their garages. They dealt with grease and iron, wood and wiring, and left anything biological to the experts.

But today, body-modifying grinders implant jury-rigged biotech via the kitchen cutting board. Elsewhere, basement biohackers collaborate to build a better biological mousetrap, while volunteers teach basic genomics in community biotech spaces. Little by little, small pockets of enterprising people are working to make the long-promised post-human, cyborg, genomic future a reality.

How Biohacking Works

There was Madness to Their Method: The Western World Before the Scientific Method

Cartoon of Mary Toft's doctors.
“My money’s on a lop-eared doe, or perhaps a Britannia Petite.”

One of the many things I enjoy about teaching my university class, Science, Feuds, Scandals and Hoaxes, is the opportunity to explore some of the most outrageous ideas ever to gain traction in the public mind. It’s easy to make fun today, but some of these ideas were grounded in reasoning that, though flawed, eventually gave rise to the right answer. Then again, there’s really no defending those doctors who thought that woman was giving birth to rabbit parts.

10 Things We Thought Were True Before the Scientific Method

How Painkillers Take the Edge Off

If only it were that simple.

Pain is essential to life, and not just in a Nietzschean, what-does-not-destroy-me-makes-me-stronger sense. It alerts us to injuries and prods us to stop poking at our wounds. It’s God’s megaphone, nature’s cone of shame. Pain is so essential, in fact, that losing our capacity for it can have life-threatening consequences.

Yet we’ve really only begun to understand how pain works in the past 40 years or so, thanks in large part to technological advances. Granted, most painkillers sport a list of side effects that reads like a Tomás de Torquemada’s own torture manual, but at least we understand something of the nervous mechanisms that underpin our owies. That said, just what on Earth is a COX inhibitor? Or an NSAID? And most important of all…

How do painkillers know where you hurt?

The Future: At the Corner of Close and Soon

Aerocar 600 fantasy flying car
Not quite what we had in mind.
(Photo by Joe Mabel)

Somehow the future we get is never quite the one we were promised. Then again, sometimes the very ideas wrapped in the pages of sci-fi and Popular Science are right under our noses, in disguise. After all, we have hand-held sensor-communicators and miraculous supermaterials – they just take the rather mundane form of carbon-fiber-wrapped smartphones.

Maybe our blindness arises from our physical and electronic architecture. Has exchanging Googie buildings for Google caused us to overlook the flying-car equivalents that fill our everyday lives, or soon will? Read on.

Our 10 Favorite Replacements for ‘Where’s My Flying Car?’

The Causation-Correlation Conflation

Not equal signThe question of cause  has haunted science and philosophy from their earliest days, in part because humans are wired for pattern-matching and confirmation bias. For all our supposed rationality, we confuse coincidence with correlation and correlation with causality.

Consequently, scientists must carefully design and control their experiments to remove bias, circular reasoning, self-fulfilling prophecies and hidden variables. They must respect the requirements and limitations of their methods, draw from representative samples and not overstate their results. Sometimes, however, that’s easier said than done. Read on to hear about…

10 Correlations that are Not Causations