The history of cholera treatment is full of these scientific cul-de-sacs: moments where a breakthrough therapy seemed inevitable but failed to materialize.

Rather, they were trying to work around some rules that they saw as silly and inflexible barriers that were preventing them from accomplishing something important.

“I know the views of certain pediatricians who say that ORS on its own is enough, but it’s difficult. If someone comes from 50 kilome -ters away to see me, what am I supposed to do? Just give them some ORS and send them home again?

The eruption of Mt. Tambora in 1815, for instance, led to the year without summer in 1816, when global temperatures decreased between 0.4 and 0.7 degrees Celsius. There are interesting anecdotes in relation to it. Frankenstein was written because of the terrible summer that year — Mary Shelley spent much of her holiday in Geneva indoors because of... See more

Chinese people don’t reject common vegetarian foods because there is something fundamentally more valuable about meat. They do so because of perceived value — associations of plants with poverty and meat with prosperity

In the 123 years between 1900 and 2022, there were a total of 12 known pandemics, epidemics, or outbreaks. Of these, two were pandemics that killed more than 20 million people within three years, for an annualized probability of ~1.6% in a given year.

This is misleading at best. At its worst, it’s plainly wrong: There is no definitive evidence that eating plant-based meat leads to better health outcomes. And there’s no definitive evidence that it doesn’t.

Abolition is an interesting concept. It seems very nonobvious to me that wild animals have higher welfare lives than domesticated animals. J: And I would say that many people would disagree with you directly

Say you’re a scientist and you want to send a grant to the National Science Foundation (NSF). According to The Rules, you will pro -pose a detailed plan of future work. In some (more theoretical) fields this is absurd: you have to do half the work in order to write that plan! And in other (less theoretical) fields, your grant will be reviewed by... See more