Daily MOS: DDT, Chemical Menace or Savior?
Dr. Muller was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work developing the pesticide. After all, DDT was proven safe for humans, it killed mosquitoes, and wasn’t that enough?
Month: January 2021
Daily MOS: Convergent Evolution & Carcinization
Given millions of years, competition for resources, genetic drift, and if there is a god they have a whacked sense of humor, creatures just keep ostensibly turning into fucking crabs.
Daily MOS: Get Hammered at the Hospital with this One Simple Trick
In order to ensure that your entire available supply of alcohol dehydrogenase is being blocked from breaking down ethylene glycol, you’re gonna have to take a positively heroic amount of alcohol.
Daily MOS: Pablo’s Hippos
When Pablo Escobar brought four hippos to Colombia, did he do much research? Nah. He brought them because having hippos was effing cool and who in God’s name was gonna tell Pablo Escobar, “hey, a word about your hippos?”
Daily MOS: Quinine, the Bark of Barks
Many of our pharmaceutical powerhouses came from some enterprising cave dweller who said “today’s the day I lick that goddamn tree.”
Daily MOS: The Toba Catastrophe That Wasn’t
As has happened to so many other hypotheses in science, what is corrupted by motivated reasoning can be corrected by evidence.
Daily MOS: Thalidomide and Teratogenesis
In an era when people were popping quaaludes like m&ms, this promised to be a drug that didn’t get you high and let you sleep through whatever was so stressful about the 1950s. It was so absurdly non-toxic they couldn’t find a dose that would kill a rat.
Daily MOS: The Death of Alexander Supertramp
When Chris McCandless stumbled into the Alaskan wilderness alone with few skills as an outdoorsman, and his body was found wasting away, the answer seemed obvious. It wasn’t.
Daily MOS: John Snow Knows Epidemiology
Suggesting that cholera spread via sewage earned him a giant ‘you know nothing John Snow,’ because this meant it wasn’t the fault of the poor with all their immoral ungodly behaviors that obviously made them poor. And nobody wanted that, because taking responsibility for fucking up lives of poor people with the water supply is so Flint 2014.
Daily MOS: The Unharnessed Chlorine Trifluoride
There are some chemicals on this Earth that no amount of riches would convince me to work with. ClF3 reacts to almost everything, and the way to fix it once you have an accident? Experts recommend running shoes.