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Go the F-k to Sleep

Go the F-k to Sleep

Edgar Allan Poe may have loathed “those little slices of death”, but sleep is even more crucial to us than food. We can survive weeks without food — no more than a week without sleep (the record is 11 days). There’s a reason sleep deprivation is classed as torture. But,

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Has COVID Dealt a Death-Blow to Science?

Has COVID Dealt a Death-Blow to Science?

There is little doubt that we live in an age when reason and the scientific revolution are under concerted assault – from all sides. The left like to demonise the right as “anti-science”, but they might want to take a long, hard look in the mirror. The religious right might get

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The Making of a Mad Scientist
NZ

The Making of a Mad Scientist

Thomas Crow particle.scitech.org.au Thomas Crow is an Australian science writer. He has a background in professional writing, biochemistry and genetics. He writes for Australian and New Zealand research institutes and publications like Crikey. He’s a horror and gothic fantasy fan. He thinks of himself as a

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Was the Real Sodom and Gomorrah Destroyed by a Cosmic Bomb?

Was the Real Sodom and Gomorrah Destroyed by a Cosmic Bomb?

Sodom and Gomorrah are perhaps the best known of the five “cities of the plain” which feature so prominently in Genesis — and a byword for God’s destructive wrath. The historic city and location of the cities has long been debated. But, the Biblical and other Hebrew sources are clear

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Was This the World’s First Predator?

Was This the World’s First Predator?

It’s said that “Whenever something eats, something dies”. But this wasn’t always so: the earliest organisms were likely microbes that absorbed nutrients directly from their environment. Even today “extremophile” organisms feast on the chemical soup spewing out of deep-ocean volcanic vents. But, at some point in Earth’s

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yellow and black no smoking sign

Can We Just Lay Off the Vax Wars Now?

Can we just lay off the vax wars now? We’ve got the vaxholes blaming the unvaccinated for rising Covid cases, while the anti-vaxxers shout back that it’s the vaccinated who are the real Covid Marys. Turns out they’re probably both wrong. A new study has examined the

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Shock! Computer Models Wrong! Again!

Shock! Computer Models Wrong! Again!

Brace yourselves, readers, I’m about to deliver some shocking news: pandemic computer models were wrong! Again! Now that you’ve picked yourselves off the floor, let us share our astonishment. The models that were wrong about Covid in Britain, the US, and Australia. The self-same models that were completely

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We Need Some Healthy Scepticism about Science and Medicine

Hendrik van der Breggen mercatornet.com Hendrik van der Breggen, PhD, is a retired philosopher who lives in Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada. One of his interests is and has been the history and philosophy of science. He is double vaccinated, is inclined to think vaccinations are wise (depending on, in consultations

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Earmuffs That Tell You When You’re Drunk

Michelle Wheeler particle.scitech.org.au Michelle is a former science and environment reporter for The West Australian. Her work has seen her visit a snake-infested island dubbed the most dangerous in the world, test great white shark detectors in a tinny and meet isolated tribes in the Malaysian jungle.

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Are They Really Gene Therapies?

Marc Grey Many of the covid vaccines are made using completely new medical tech involving the use of genetic material instead of proteins from the appropriate virus. This has led to them being described as ‘gene therapies not vaccines’ in some circles. In this article, we discuss these new medical

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When Dinosaurs Roamed the Arctic

When Dinosaurs Roamed the Arctic

Science is never “settled”. No matter how certain something might seem, its certainty is merely provisional. Whether it’s that everything in physics has already been discovered (as Lord Kelvin is apocryphally, but falsely, said to have proclaimed) or that a meteor impact wiped out the dinosaurs. However likely the

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