nutrition
The concept of "ultra-processed food" has gone from one Brazilian commentary in 2009 to a global policy framework in fifteen years. The term shows up in national dietary guidelines in Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Mexico, Belgium, Israel, Malaysia, and Maldives (Bartholmae et al. 2023), in France'
science-in-society
Meier, Dillard, and Lappas (2026) published "The naturalness bias" in Current Opinion in Psychology, and it only runs to about two printed pages - probably the shortest paper I've ever read. Despite it's length, the paper touches upon an interesting topic: what's
other
Throughout the 1980s, there was a set of studies that seemingly found something very interesting: people who ate more beta-carotene-rich fruits and vegetables appeared to get less lung cancer. The logic was appealing - beta-carotene is an antioxidant and a precursor to vitamin A, which would be a plausible way
skeptic
Recently, in a journal club, we discussed the paper Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress Mediates Axon Initial Segment Shortening: Implications for Diabetic Brain Complications (Shelby et al., 2026), and something in Figure 2C and 2D caught my eye. In the paper, they compare the length of axon initial segments (AIS), which are
skeptic
I was watching a Mrwhosetheboss Youtube video in which he showed off some Korean tech, including a red-light scalp massager. While watching I was getting a bit annoyed, as he pretty much just parroted the sales pitch of the red-light craze. It goes a little like this: shining certain wavelengths
skeptic
A friend recently explained their excess of empathy by confidently talking about their mirror neurons, and my internal skepticism alarm went off in my mind. So I thought I'd write a little article about this topic to figure out why it irked me so much. A single word