Daily MOS: The Most Cancelled Chemist
Thomas Midgley Jr. died a hero, but his creations survived him to become the biggest chemical villains of the last century: CFCs and leaded gasoline.
SCIENCE
Daily MOS: The No Fear Disease
Urbach-Wiethe Disease will, neuron by neuron, remove every trace of your fear. But at what cost?
Daily MOS: Dr. Freddy Bang and the Blue Bloods
We used to check for contamination by injecting shit into a rabbit and hoping it didn’t get too dead. How did “inject horseshoe crab blood into it and see if it clots” become the standard?
Daily MOS: Day of the Zebra
I live with an illness that has adopted the mascot of the zebra. Because so often, doctors see us zebras up close and can’t help but try to diagnose a striped horse.
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: 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: 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: 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.