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.
Science History
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.
Daily MOS: The Holy Stomach of Alexis St. Martin
Since digestion is a process that takes hours to truly observe, it remained largely a mystery until a bullet intended for a duck accidentally split open Alexis St. Martin.
Daily MOS: The Long Breakup With Asbestos
A mining company in western Russia sells asbestos branded with Donald Trump’s face. All I’m asking is… why are you still selling asbestos?
Daily MOS: The Radium Girls
In the early twentieth century, radiation was understood about as well as 5G is understood by conspiracy theorists today. How were we supposed to know that mysterious glowy things signaled danger decades before the modern horror movie?
Daily MOS: The Golden Pursuit of Phosphorus
Hennig Brand was the first person in modern times to discover an element. It just took one torrentially putrefied basement and a mid-sized lake of wee.
Daily MOS: The Demon Core
At the end of WWII, we had the unused heart of a nuclear bomb sitting around waiting to fuck shit up. Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory couldn’t be expected to just leave it alone. It was so shiny. So new. So full of untapped data.