McGill Office for Science and Society (OSS)
801 Sherbrooke Street West, Rm. 110 H3A 0B8 Montreal, QC, Canada

You asked, and Dr. Joe answered: What is modified palm oil? This is a term you will see on the ingredients list of numerous products ranging from margarine and shortening to chocolate bars. I’ve been repeatedly asked about the presence of modified palm oil in Nutella, the popular chocolate hazelnut spread. Let’s squash one misconception right away. There is no genetic modification involved here, rather the term refers to altering the molecular structure of the naturally occur...ring fats in palm oil to produce fats with the desired melting point, consistency and mouthfeel. First, we need to tackle a bit of chemistry and then a touch of history. A comb with three teeth serves as an analogy for the molecular structure of fats. The teeth represent fatty acids that are attached to a backbone of three carbon atoms, which is a molecule called glycerol. (In chemical parlance this comb is a triglyceride.) The fatty acids can be saturated, meaning that they are composed of a chain of carbon atoms linked by single bonds, monounsaturated, in which there is one double bond in the chain or polyunsaturated in which multiple double bonds are present. In each case, the number of carbon atoms in the chain can also vary. Read the rest of the article here-

Like most chemists, Dr. Joe likes to cook. After all, what is cooking but the appropriate mixing of chemicals? In the lab we use flasks and beakers, but how do we equip our kitchen? Tiffany's in New York offers a silver frying pan for thousands of dollars, specialty stores sell gleaming copper pots for a couple of hundred while a thin aluminum pot can be had almost anywhere for a few bucks. What's the difference? Copper, aluminum, stainless steel, and even pure silver, cooking pots and pans can be purchased in a range of materials. But is one better, or safer?

Imagine you have been walking the aisles of your favourite bookstore for an hour, letting your gaze gaily hop from one spine to the next. You smell the ink and the paper. You hear the dulcet tones of a piano over the PA system. And then it hits you, like a cannonball dropping in your lower abdomen. The acute, undeniable urge to evacuate your bowels.... As you make a run for the nearest public washroom, you think to yourself, Not again! The scenario above will divide our readers. Some will be left scratching their head, wondering why I cooked up such a strange story. Others will be blushing. They will feel seen. It’s called the Mariko Aoki phenomenon and it means the sudden urge some people feel to empty their bowels when in a bookstore. We are not kidding. Don't miss the entire article- https://www.mcgill.ca//gene/unbearable-poopness-bookstores

Once used as an aftershave, Today we worry about even a few parts per billion of benzene in our water, food or cosmetics. Benzene is an established carcinogen and should be avoided. But, given that eliminating benzene from the environment is impossible, what we need is a reasonable risk analysis. Dr. Joe's latest-

Juggle Balls, Not Numbers! We see a great deal of juggling of numbers these days. Various agendas are pushed by manipulating COVID vaccination effectiveness rates, the supposed successes of treatments with hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin and even number of hospitalizations. Sometimes the twisting of numbers is deliberate but sometimes it just the result of a lack of mental dexterity. Could such dexterity be improved by some actual juggling? Let’s take a look.

Despite what some people say, recent hospitalization numbers do not prove the vaccines are not useful, quite the opposite. If you consult the Quebec government’s daily dashboard on the COVID-19 situation, you can get an informative snapshot of where we are in terms of infections, hospitalizations and vaccinations. On Jan. 10, there were 433 new hospitalizations. Of those people, 117 were unvaccinated, 13 had received one dose, 290 had received two doses and 13 were too young to be eligible. On the surface, it would seem concerning that so many vaccinated people are landing in hospital, and even shocking that there are more vaccinated than unvaccinated people. But these raw numbers are misleading. They fail to account for two important factors: the size of the vaccinated population and the age of that population.

With COVID-19, air is both the problem and the solution. SARS-CoV-2 can linger in the air. Dealing with it can be relatively easy, but first, we have to admit we have a problem. On March 28, 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) tweeted out, FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.... For medical doctors and biomedical scientists (including me), this made sense. Few diseases were known to be airborne. But to aerosol scientists, this was both puzzling and infuriating. Over the next two years, the WHO and other organizations that had initially denied that the new coronavirus could stay in the air and move around like smoke quietly changed their stance. The virus could spread via respiratory dropletsthose heavy globs that come out of our nose and mouth and rapidly fall to the groundbut it could also, these public bodies begrudgingly admitted, hang in the air and be breathed in by someone further away. Now that the droplet dogma has been appropriately pilloried, the questions are: can ventilation and air filtration rescue us? And what made aerosols so taboo in our public discussions?

Dr. David Julius, co-recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology, discovered a gene that codes for a protein that acts as a receptor for capsaicin on the surface of nerve cells. When capsaicin engages this receptor, the nerve cell is activated and sends a message to the brain that is sensed as boy, is this ever hot! What does that have to do with Dr. Joe meeting his maker? Well, it all started with a bottle of hot sauce called Meet Your Maker...

You asked: Can you fool a COVID rapid test by putting Vaseline in your nostrils? In general, putting Vaseline into the nose that some people do to prevent dryness is not a good idea. Once in a while doesn’t hurt, but there are cases recorded in the literature of lung damage after protracted use of Vaseline in this fashion.

Betty White, comedienne extraordinaire, passed away on December 31, just eighteen days shy of her one-hundredth birthday. It didn’t take long for zealous members of the anti-vax community to link her death with the booster shot she received three days earlier. There are two issues here, both of which are classic examples of weapons found in the arsenal of agenda-driven misinformants. First, there is the fabrication of facts. Contrary to the anti-vaxxers’ assertions, Betty never posted a message about having received a booster on any social media site. There is a good reason why she never did this. According to her publicist, she had not received a booster! Next is the usual post hoc ergo propter hoc argument that I first learned about in my high school Latin class.

Smoke Alarms Are Not Created Equal We often think of smoke alarms as those annoying devices that loudly remind us that the dinner we put in the oven will inadvertently be served Cajun style tonight. But inside their plastic casing, there are fascinating technologies, making use of light sources and radioactive molecules, to alert us to the presence of smoke.... Since their invention in the 1960s, smoke alarms have become integral parts of our homes, often mandated by law. There are two main types of residential smoke alarms, an important fact that is often not mentioned. Moreover, some have argued that one of these kinds of alarms is both unreliable and slow to be triggered by the type of fire likely to occur while we’re sleeping. That kind of smoke alarm is by far the most common one found in homes. They may all look the same, but smoke alarms mainly use one of two ways to detect smoke. Some argue one kind is clearly superior to the other. https://www.mcgill.ca///smoke-alarms-are-not-created-equal

Some things to know about COVID rapid tests: They are not perfect, but a test doesn’t have to be perfect in order to be useful. Starting this week, Quebecers are able to get rapid test kits from pharmacies so that they can test themselves at home. Compared to going to a test centre where lineups are starting to stretch into hours-long waits, the convenience of an at-home kit is obvious. The tests can be done anywhere and are easy to perform. Everything you need is in the testing kit. They are less expensive than PCR tests and provide results in 15 minutes. On the surface, the appeal of these tests should be obvious, and yet their rollout here has been slow compared to other countries, especially in Europe, where they have been widely used for months.

How does one contract the so-called non-smoker’s lung cancer? The answer, one might say, is blowing in the wind. Radon is a naturally occurring colourless and odourless radioactive gas that according to the World Health Organization (WHO) is responsible for up to 14% of all cases of lung cancer. The source of radon is uranium, a radioactive element found in soil and rocks. Read the entire article:

It is always a challenge to find a catchy headline for an article. For this one, a connection to the classic 1966 spaghetti western that propelled Clint Eastwood to fame seems fitting. The film is about three gunslingers who battle each other as they look for a stash of gold. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, is a great title that I hereby propose to swipe because I think it also captures the essence of the health supplement industry. Some supplements are potentially usef...ul, some are useless, and some are outright ugly. But when it comes to profits, there is gold to be had, and marketers battle each other for it in pharmacies, health food stores and online. Their weapons are not guns, but claims, often outlandish, of enhanced health. Dr. Joe doesn't hold back in this article, click below to read it and find out which supplements he deems good, which bad and which downright ugly. See more

There is a word more and more popular in science communication circles: pre-bunking. There is so much bunk out theremisinformation, lies and unwarranted hypethat it always feels like we are playing catch-up. The idea of pre-bunking is to get in front of the bunk and warn people in advance so they can recognize the signs of rubbish when they see them. A sort of vaccine for the mind, if you will. So consider this a bit of pre-bunking. A few days ago, a scientific paper was pu...blished that reported on laboratory work done with the leaves of the Ginkgo biloba tree. To be abundantly generous, the work shows very early promise for the possible development of new anti-COVID-19 medications. The study will undoubtedly be used as validation for supplement pushers: taking ginkgo pills, they will say, is an all-natural way to effectively treat or even prevent COVID-19 (and, of course, this knowledge is being suppressed by the pharmaceutical industry). This is not what this study shows by a long shot. See more

Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, 30, is a native of the Marshall Islands in the western Pacific Ocean. This country of ~53,000 people is spread out over 1,159 islands with most of the population on 29 coral atolls. As a poet, Kathy writes about sea-level rise, and the damage to homes, businesses and their way of life. Most of the islands are only a few feet above sea level. With very little total land area it has a significant population density per square mile. By contrast, we have the... island of Greenland. This island is the largest non-continental island in the world. It is huge! It also has a similar population to that of the Marshall Islands; about 56,000. Height above sea level is not a problem for Greenland with its highest point some 12,000 feet above sea level. In the 1990’s scientists drilled through almost 2 miles of ice in central Greenland and obtained ice cores that have given us climate history going back over 100,000 years. Here we now have another poet and climate activist, a 23-year-old Greenlander named Aka Niviana. As the ice thaws and melts, Aka senses that her traditional way of life is disappearing. As the ice melt pours into the ocean from the island glaciers and raises sea levels, the impact on Kathy’s way of life in the Marshall Islands is also disappearing. The poetry made when these two women got together was beautiful, angry, and poignant. Read the article here:

The recent announcement that some people will be getting a second COVID-19 vaccine that is different from their first has created some public confusion about the change in strategy. From the beginning, the official line was that your first and second doses had to be the same, but necessity and expediency have dictated a change in government policy. And in reality, the mixing and matching of vaccine doses will probably be OK. Ideally, we would have kept to the original study protocols. But the practical realities of this pandemic have forced us to change course. Read more:

Join us as we discuss green chemistry with Dr. Audrey Moores, a distinguished professor from the McGill University chemistry department. If you don't even know what green chemistry is, don't worry we'll explain that too!

The COVID-19 PCR test IS reliable despite the commotion about Ct values. Different laboratories have set up different PCR tests to look for the coronavirus, using different probe-and-primer combinations to look for different genes in the coronavirus’ genome on different PCR machines [click the link below for a nice explanation]. Unsurprisingly, when 26 Ontario laboratories that test for the coronavirus participated in a proficiency test, they saw a variability of Ct (Cycle ...threshold) values of up to 8 cycles across them when testing the same specimen. Samples that are known to be and for the coronavirus are run alongside the unknown samples, and their behaviour during the run also affects interpretation of the results. This is why reporting the Ct value is not recommended in Canada: on its own, it does not mean much. Let us use a soup analogy. Many families have their own recipe. As long as it’s been internally validated - if it looks like chicken soup & tastes like chicken soup and the people eating it are happy with it, then it’s a perfectly functional chicken soup. PCR tests come in many different flavours, but as long as they are validated (by using a known quantity of virus, diluting it many times and running these samples to see what Ct values they generate), they are reliable. They are not perfect, because no test is perfect, but they are absolutely not the futile garbage some folks on the Internet would have you believe. The pandemic saw a rise in armchair experts, people who had never stepped foot in a laboratory suddenly learning about PCR and thinking, as in true-crime series like "Serial" and "Making a Murderer", that they had cracked the case wide open . But the interpretation of PCR tests for the coronavirus relies on a lot more than a single Ct value: it depends on all of the above chicken soup variability. And then some. The blind reliance on Ct values, unfortunately, shows a misunderstanding of the complexities of molecular diagnostics. Ct values are not elementary; they require expertise to interpret. mcgill.ca/x/oqT

Faked and decontextualized photos are a plague in and of themselves, but there are tricks to avoid getting tricked! Faked photographs have been with us since the beginning of photography itself, but the wide availability of software and social media has made the creation and distribution of these visual fabrications so much easier. As we hunger for information during the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to be constantly aware that the shocking photos our friends share with us on th...Continue reading

Ever wonder why it smells when you're getting a root canal? Undergoing a root canal procedure is not one of the great pleasures of life, but it is a highly effective technique for saving teeth. The idea is to remove the diseased pulp of a tooth and then fill the root canals with gutta-percha, a rubber-like material from the sap of sapodilla trees that grow in East Asia. The gutta-percha has to be heated to reduce its viscosity so that it can easily flow into the vacated canal...s. The heat causes some degradation of the gutta-percha with the release of isoprene, a compound that has a characteristic fragrance. Gutta-percha is very similar to rubber which is also derived from the exudate of a tree (Hevea brasiliensis), but it is harder and more resistant to water. Long before root canals, gutta-percha had an interesting use. Golf balls! Specifically, those made roughly between 1850 and 1900. That’s when gutta-percha balls replaced leather balls stuffed with feathers. The earliest gutties were hand made from pieces of gutta-percha that were softened by heating in water. Eventually, a skilled gutty maker was able to produce six dozen or more balls a day, 25 times what a feather ball maker could turn out. This meant that the price of golf balls dropped and consequently allowing golfers of all means to play the game. Today, if you're lucky, gutta-percha golf balls can be found for a few hundred dollars, but the hand-hammered balls produced between 1855 and 1875 have been auctioned for as much as $28,000. For that amount of money, you can even get a root canal. And when you get one, you’ll note the isoprene smell, which is released once the gutta-percha is heated. It may even be a familiar smell since human sweat also contains isoprene from the breakdown of vitamin A! And since you likely do some sweating as you grip the arms of the dental chair while the dentist is digging into your roots, you may well be contributing some isoprene to the scent that wafts into your nose. mcgill.ca/x/o5C

Her views on the COVID-19 pandemic, shaped by her mantra that it doesn’t make sense, are unscientific, reckless and asinine. She does not believe vaccines are necessary if your body is healthy and has spread unsubstantiated fears about safe vaccines throughout her career. She has claimed that the COVID-19 vaccines will target specific chromosomes that act as the seat of our empathy, an utterly absurd and unscientific statement. She believes that artificial intelligence has ...somehow been incorporated into these vaccines (complete nonsense) and that this A.I. will integrate itself into our DNA. She warns her viewers that the injection of patented vaccines inside our body will turn us into the property of the patent holders. But before you call her an anti-vaxxer, know that she believes the term is meaningless and that it was coined by Big Pharma. In the same breath, she declares that conspiracy theorist was a phrase invented by the CIA, which is apparently run out of China. She read about it, you see. Believe it or not, these views are held by Dr. Christiane Northrup, an obstetrician-gynecologist by training, and who was once named by Reader’s Digest as one of the 100 most trusted people in America. Northrup admits to having dozens of people over at her house during the pandemic for peaceful protests that are linked to two organizations she participates in, Make America Free Again and Millions Against Medical Mandates. She frequently invites her viewers to disobey the rules during the pandemic to show everyone that it’s all a scam, and to stop watching mainstream media news because their broadcast contains a flicker meant to hypnotize you. She recommends pseudoscientists, health gurus, and discredited news sources like Joe Mercola, Andrew Wakefield, and InfoWars, all the while avoiding posting links to specific websites. Her videos are not unlike the Q drops of the QAnon movement: filled with somewhat vague references that make viewers want to complete a quest to become part of the inner circle. How did a medical doctor end up living in this fantasy universe? mcgill.ca/x/o5j

In an effort to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible, governments around the world have been openly debating how to stretch the vaccine supply as far as possible. The U.K. government has decided that it may swap one vaccine for another for the second dose, the United States is discussing whether people could receive two half doses of the Moderna vaccine rather than two full doses and in Canada the discussion is about delaying or deferring the second dose altogether...Continue reading

As is the case with anything new, there is a fear of the unknown. And Pfizer's #COVID vaccine is no different. Because the vaccine contains genetic material and because it was developed very quickly, fears abound that must be addressed. 1 There is no plausible way in which this RNA vaccine could alter our genome. NADA. None. . The RNA is degraded fairly quickly and has no mechanism by which it can enter the nucleus of our cells and no way for it to be turned back into DNA... and integrated into our genome. [For more detail, refer to the full article. Link below ] 2 There is absolutely no evidence that Pfizer’s vaccine (or any COVID vaccine based on the virus’ spike protein) will make us sterile. This bit of misinformation would have you believe that the spike protein is just the same as a protein called syncytin-1, which our body needs to make the placenta. While they are both proteins that help with cellular membrane fusion, they are absolutely not the same. The flu vaccine also contains a viral fusion protein and it doesn’t hamper pregnancies. This is pseudoscientific alarmism. 3 Some are concerned about the vaccine backfiring and resulting in vaccine-enhanced disease. Pfizer’s trial data do not indicate a risk for this, but the data is limited. The risk of vaccine-enhanced disease with this coronavirus is theoretical at the moment, & longer follow-ups will be needed to see if this is something worth worrying about. 4 The vaccine has been rushed and that corners were cut. Again, nope. There are many reasons why we have an authorized vaccine to a new disease so quickly, none of which imply a lack of rigour. The investment of and resources was unprecedented, volunteers abounded, & mRNA vaccines can be quickly synthesized in the lab, whereas the vaccines we are familiar with require much longer manufacturing times. Scientists also got uber lucky with the spike protein, which turned out to be an excellent target. mcgill.ca/x/o3W

2020 has come and is (almost) gone. And with that, comes the last COVID & More: Conversations with the McGill OSS of the year. Join Joe Schwarcz, Jonathan Jarry, Emily Shore, & Ada McVean today at 12pm as we take a look back at the year in science (hmmm anything happen in science this year??), vaccine progress, & also talk holiday science. Stream live: YouTube.com/McGillOSS/live

What happens when you shoot first and draw the bullseye later? Jonathan Jarry on "the Texas sharpshooter fallacy": As we sift through more information than ever before, I would argue it’s becoming easier to commit an error in thinking known as the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Imagine the stereotype of a Texan cowboy who randomly shoots up the side of a barn, goes up to it and traces a bullseye around the tightest cluster of bullet holes. It’s easy to declare yourself Texas’ s...Continue reading

@JoeSchwarcz on the role sharks play when it comes to vaccines. #sharks #squalene #vaccines #moderna #pfizer #coronavirus #immunity #herdimmunity

Our subconscious desire to look for information that confirms we were right all along is probably the biggest flaw in our thinking. If the year 2020 can be thought of as a massive, uncontrolled experiment in psychology, I hope one of the takeaways is that confirmation bias is, unfortunately, alive and well. When it comes to flaws in our thinking, confirmation bias is king. It’s what happens when we seek out, often without being aware of it, information that confirms what we a...lready believe and push away the data that might invite us to change our minds. This tendency of ours, also known as the myside bias and the congeniality bias, plays out in politics, in medicine, and even in scientific research. We can think of confirmation bias as what happens when our brain has to weigh two conflicting goals: being accurate and defending what we value. We all want to find out what is true and factual but at what cost? It’s like an opinion is a baby that you want to protect from harm, which motivates you to look for harmless information, to spin what you find in the best way possible for the baby, and to remember only what benefits them. It has been hypothesized that this bias is nurtured by a number of things: how easy it is to take mental shortcuts; our preference for positive thoughts; even our need to cope with harsh realities and believe reassuring fantasies. And because real life often provides us with a mixture of contradictory information, it’s easy to let our preconceptions guide our Googling for maximum reassurance. The influence confirmation bias has on us can sometimes be overstated: it has actually been described as moderate. But given how universal this inclination is, we have to wonder if it’s been helpful to our survival. It can certainly protect our ego and prevent us from changing our opinion on a dime. But the ways in which it harms us are much greater. Believers in alternative medicine often fall prey to confirmation bias by trusting positive anecdotes and rejecting rigorous but negative studies. Yet for the science-minded skeptic, it’s easy to let the myside bias blind us to bad scientific research and hyped-up press releases for the latest COVID therapeutic or vaccine. The bias cuts both ways. It doesn’t seem possible to get rid of confirmation bias, but being aware of it and taking a step back to reconsider the information we seek can help overcome it in theory. Our modern information landscape certainly doesn’t help matters. The poet Dante Alighieri wrote in The Divine Comedy that opinionhastyoften can incline to the wrong side, and then affection for one’s own opinion binds, confines the mind. How much more forceful his assertion might have been had he known about social media? Our subconscious desire to look for information that confirms we were right all along is probably the biggest flaw in our thinking. mcgill.ca/x/4yX

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization announced that COVID-19 could be characterized as a pandemic, meaning that this new disease was now spreading all over the world. One day, we will be able to declare this pandemic over. The questions are: what needs to be in place to get us there and how will we know when we have reached this destination? Well, a combination of factors: 1 Vaccination: some vaccines are very good at preparing our immune system to encounter t...he real deal; others, much less so. There's also #vaccinehesitancy, where some ppl are a) skeptical of vaccines altogether, or b) skeptical of this vaccine, since it was made pretty much manufactured, on a vaccine timeline, as speedily as ever. [visit http://mcgill.ca/oss for more vaccination hurdles] 2 Got to have some skin in the game: from a public health standpoint, we can only hope that our culture in the Western world can echo the mindset of Eastern Asian countries, where wearing a mask when sick is much more common. A further culture shift would be for more people to work from home if they can and for sick employees to be allowed to stay home to prevent the spread of infection. 3 A pregnancy test for COVID: basically, #rapidtesting. Together, we will have to decide how many deaths from COVID moving forward do we, as a society, consider acceptable. This threshold will fall into the background and we will come to forget about it. Some of us will never overlook our experiences in 2020 and will continue to wear masks in risky situations. Others will gladly attend sporting events and concerts indoors, their noses and mouths fully exposed. When the proper measures are in place, the pandemic will end one mind at a time. mcgill.ca/x/4FH

This kind of stuff is enough to make scientists cry! Joe Schwarcz weighs in on some recent anti-vaxx videos circulating.... People have been asking about a video by anti-vaxxer Del Bigtree who claims that the COVID-19 vaccines have not been properly tested, made animals deathly ill in trials, and are ineffective and dangerous for humans. I'm not going to share the video here because it is ludicrous. Bigtree is a notorious conspiracy theorist with no medical background who sp...outs banalities left and right. The video that is making the rounds is a collage of misinformation and outright lies. He spews the usual drivel about COVID being no more dangerous than the common cold...yeah...tell that to the hundreds of thousands who have died. Anything that comes from the fetid mouth of Bigtree should be directed straight towards the nearest toxic waste disposal site. Then we have another scandalous video from osteopathic physician Carrie Madej that is so ridiculous that it is hard to believe she has had any scientific education. Madej starts out by describing correctly the role that DNA plays as the blueprint for virtually everything that happens in our body, and then proceeds to jump off the springboard directly into an empty pool. The mRNA vaccines, she says, are going to convert us into genetically modified organisms by altering our DNA. This is absolute nonsense. mRNA does not get incorporated into DNA. All it does is code for the production of the virus’ spike protein which in turn stimulates antibody production. Next, Madej goes on to say that the vaccines have not been tested in animals, which is totally false. This is followed by the claim that there have been no randomized double-blind human trials which is also false. As if that were not enough rubbish, she then goes on to claim that the vaccines will hook us all up to an artificial intelligence interface whatever that may mean. She then tells us that she knows this is a lot of information to digest, which she apparently has not been able to do because she has to read every word of this diatribe. As a finale, this specimen gets all emotional, and believe it or not, starts to cry at the prospect of the world being exposed to the vaccine. The barrage of crocodile tears loaded with putrid pseudoscience is enough to make anyone with a modest scientific background cry. mcgill.ca/x/oJv

Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of adult blindness in developed countries. Can supplements help? Though most people have probably never heard the term, age-related macular degeneration, or AMD, it is the leading cause of adult blindness in developed countries. As the name implies, it is a degenerative condition that slowly robs people of their sight. The incidence increases sharply with age, affecting virtually no one under age 55, 0.2 percent of people...Continue reading

Six months since reopening, visits to the dentist have proven to be safe. Dr. Mark Grossman shares some good news when it comes to paying a visit to your dentist during the pandemic. "Given the intimate contact with patients and frequent generation of aerosols during procedures, the absence of reports linking spread of the virus to dental offices has been reassuring to both dentists and the public. So how can we account for this seemingly good news?" mcgill.ca/x/oJq

You have a lottery ticket in hand, your last ten tickets have been duds, are you due for a win? If you flipped a coin in the air and got five heads in a row, would you feel like tail is due? If so, congratulations! You just experienced the gambler’s fallacy. This thinking error comes about because we find it difficult to come to terms with the fact that random events are independent of one another. For example, researchers studied security camera footage of a roulette wheel a...t a large Reno, Nevada casino in 1998. They paid close attention to bets that were made that had odds of 50:50 (betting on a red number versus a black number, for example, or on an odd versus an even number). They noticed that bets overall were pretty much split down the middle, but as gamblers encountered streaks of five or more (e.g. five red numbers in a row), they significantly changed their bets (e.g. to a black number) as if it was due. But it wasn’t. Whenever the ball is spun on the roulette wheel, it has no way of remembering where it landed before. Each spin on the roulette wheel, each coin toss, each lottery ticket you buy is a beginning. It is not a continuation of a series of similar events. In the heat of the moment, however, it can be difficult to remember this lesson, and there are of course exceptions. Once a card is played in blackjack, it doesn’t immediately return to the deck, which means that the odds of receiving a certain card do change from hand to hand. And if you get 16 heads in a row when a friend flips a coin for you, you may suspect foul play. But if you are dealing with a fair coin and no magnets, and you somehow end up getting 16 heads in a row, the odds of your next toss are still, incredibly, 50:50. mcgill.ca/x/4Vd

[Updated: A recording of this video can be found here: https://youtu.be/-m2bgDio9rk] TODAY at 12pm the OSS speaks with guest Dr. David Zlotnick, Medical Director of the TEREM Urgent Care Centres in Israel, on "COVID & More". They take a look at the 2nd wave of coronavirus that completely shut down Israel, what went wrong, and how (or if) they have learned from previous mistakes upon the reopening of the country. And of course, also on tap, any other scientific developments of the week. Questions welcome and will be answered in real-time! Stream LIVE: YouTube.com/mcgilloss/live

Joe Schwarcz on food dyes & everyone's favourite snack - M&Ms. So question for you, what colour do you save for last? #chocolate #fooddye #reddyenumber2 #foodcolouring #foodcoloring #foodsafety #meltinyourmouth

We feel like now's a good time for Joe Schwarcz to give some background on #Dexamethasone, the steroid making the news these days. Whenever the leader of the free world has a health issue, the media explodes with a mix of facts and conjecture. President Trump’s bout with COVID-19 has focused attention on the treatments he has received which include dexamethasone, a steroid that has a wide spectrum of uses including reduction of inflammation in the bronchi, the airways that ...Continue reading

Despite incredible scientific progress since its creation millennia ago, #astrology hasn’t lost its attraction. Its claims have been refuted over and over again, but in times of anxiety, many find the practice useful. Even individuals skeptical of astrology can start to warm up to it when it produces positive descriptions of themselves. This appeal for the pseudoscience is reinforced by our brain’s deep wiring for seeing patterns and agents even where there are none. In times... of great stress, the predictions of astrology can give the illusion of control. Not knowing what the future holds can be untenable for some. Even when astrology predicts bad outcomes, it’s something concrete on which to hang your hat. So - what sign are you? mcgill.ca/x/4DY

Another set of great talks for #Trottier2020 In Whom Do We Trust? today at noon! Wendy Zukerman, host of the @science_vs podcast, will look at how science is doing in keeping up with the fast-paced & ever-changing pandemic needs, and Angry Chef Anthony Warner on why people are misled with false information about food and the environment. Grab your lunch & tune in live at 12pm ET: YouTube.com/mcgilloss:live... & if you can’t tune in, the videos will be made available on our YouTube channel afterward! So again, our question of the day is - WHO DO YOU TRUST?

Debbie Schwarcz Gonshor is back on this week's "COVID & More" with the OSS to discuss Quebec's actions with respect to school openings, school reopenings, thoughts on a 2nd wave, flu season, and where we stand when it comes to COVID-19 preparedness as the colder months approach.

Another set of great talks for "In Whom Do We Trust?", #Trottier2020, is coming up TODAY at noon! Wendy Zukerman, host of the Science Vs. podcast will look at how science is doing in keeping up with the fast-paced and ever-changing pandemic news & Angry Chef Anthony Warner on why people are misled with false information about food and the environment. Grab your lunch & tune in live at 12pm ET: youtube.com/mcgilloss/live (And if you can't tune in, the video will be available afterward).

Tips for Better Thinking: Surviving Is Only Half the Story Our brain is not a computer; it is a squishy belief engine that can lead us astray in a myriad of ways. Learning to recognize how our brain misleads us can help us think more clearly and make better sense of the world around us. Take airplanes, for example. Imagine you’re in charge of sending airplanes out to fight a war. The planes that do come back to base have been hit in the spots indicated by the red dots. Where... should you add armour to reinforce them? Our first instinct is to say on the red dots! This is where the planes were hit: let’s make these areas stronger! But when we slow our thinking down, we realize that this is mistaken. If a plane was hit in these spots and made it home, the damage was not fatal. It is the planes that did not return to basethe ones that did not survivethat we should be concerned about. Indeed, when this scenario arose in World War II, statistician Abraham Wald recommended that planes be reinforced where there were no red dots, assuming that these were the spots that would deal a lethal blow to an airplane. This is known as the survivorship bias. It’s when we focus on paintings that have been chosen by art historians to be preserved and assume that every painting from that era was just as good. It’s when we concentrate on an old building that has survived in our city and observe that they don’t make them like they used to, not taking into account all of the old buildings that have been torn down in the intervening years for not being sturdy enough. It’s when we think that because highly-paid Hollywood actors exist, all we need is determination and hard work to make it, without considering the hundreds of thousands of would-be actors who don’t survive the process. It’s when we point out a few smokers who lived to be one hundred and turn a blind eye to all the ones who died at 50. The next time you find yourself looking at a multimillionaire CEO who dropped out of high school and wanting to hear their advice, ask yourself: where are all the high-school dropouts who aren’t multimillionaires? mcgill.ca/x/4aC

Dr. Debbie Schwarcz is back on this week's "COVID & More" with the OSS to discuss Quebec's actions with respect to school openings, school reopenings, thoughts on a 2nd wave, flu season, and where we stand when it comes to COVID-19 preparedness as the colder months approach.

In less than 2 weeks, we kick off #Trottier2020. And on tap we have Britt Hermes, former naturopathic doctor, talking about her time as a naturopath and what made her realize the profession was not what it had promised to be. Here, she speaks with the McGill Reporter about why naturopathy could seem appealing, some of the falsehoods she learned while in the profession, & how easy it is in today's "wellness" world for alternative medicine to appear legitimate. mcgill.ca/x/4aa

We've been getting a lot of questions about salt. Table salt, kosher salt, sea salt, Himalayan salt. So - which one should you buy? @Joe Schwarcz weighs in: Salt was the first seasoning used by our ancestors. They got it by evaporating seawater, or by mining it. The origin of salt deposits in the ground can also be traced back to oceans which no longer exist so that basically all salt is "sea salt." Salt was mined near Salzburg ("City of Salt") in Austria as early as 6500 BC ...Continue reading

@JoeSchwarcz explores how knowledge of molecular structure led to the development of synthetic antihistamines. #histamine #antihistamines #drugs #drugdevelopment

Did you know you have rocks in your head? Well, sort of. Sometimes called ear rocks, small crystals of calcium carbonate (essentially limestone) are found in your inner ear. The technical name for these tiny stones wrapped in a matrix of protein is otoconia. They play no role in hearing, but rather are part of the vestibular system that has several functions such as helping you keep your balance and coordinating your eye movements while your head is in motion. Otoconia ar...e an essential component of the utricle and saccule, two vestibular organs in the inner ear that help relay information about linear acceleration and tilting of the head to the brain. In both these organs, specialized hair cells are attached to a gelatinous membrane that contains the otoconia. When the head is tilted, gravity pulls more on the crystals than on the liquid surrounding the hair cells. This results in bending of the hair cells, which is translated into electrical impulses that make their way to the brain. Basically, otoconia keep you from getting dizzy every time you move your head. Isn’t the human body amazing? Dizzyingly so. mcgill.ca/x/4Eb

Do you believe the last thing someone sees before they die gets imprinted on their #retinas? It turns out this idea is a myth... mostly. There is a grain of scientific truth to this idea that became formally known as optography (meaning writing of the eye). But the idea that a murder victim could nab the perpetrator from the great beyond with help from the emerging science of ophthalmology? While immensely seductive and a good plot for a TV show, it is not totally scient...ific or accurate. And reassuringly, the myth that retinas can be used by crime scene investigators has pretty much always travelled side by side with a reasoned scientific critique of this idea. Jonathan Jarry delves in to #optography, the idea that we can identify a person who committed a murder because the victim’s eyes recorded that image.

DYK that at one point in history, bicycles caused a moral and medical panic? Under the reign of Queen Victoria, a woman was typically seen as the angel in the house, a man’s opposite whose main purpose was in making and raising children and whose desired traits were to be pure, docile and prude. Medical doctors were not initially keen on women bicycling. They promoted what could generously be described as misguided fears or, more accurately, as misogynistic pseudoscience. ...Bicycling was claimed to disgrace a woman’s walk, turning it into a plunging kind of motion. Riding a bicycle was thought to alter one’s body right down to the skeleton, with conditions such as bicycle foot and bicycle hand being deplored. Even your face was not immune to the transformative power of riding the steed of steel: the combination of fierce winds and facial strain was thought to permanently result in bicycle face! And all of this exertion was bound to turn a delicate woman’s body into something much too masculine for the times. It turns out that Victorian stereotypes were wedded to pseudoscientific theories about the female body: it was thought that women were mentally and physically impaired by the demands of their reproductive apparatus and menstruation cycles. Riding around on a tricycle was considered fine but on a strenuous bicycle? Why, it might cause a woman’s finite physical energy to be extinguished! Medical journals at the time would seek out anomalies linked to bicycle riding and confuse an association with a cause-and-effect relationship, although perhaps the confusion was a little bit voluntary. Riding a bicycle could cause appendicitis, they reported, internal inflammation and swelling of the throat from all the excitement and teenage girls whose reproductive system was still developing were thought to be at risk of displacement of the uterus, physical shocks, and all sorts of bodily transformations brought about by the bicycle that would render them unable to bear children. While there still exists some concerns with bicycles today, none of them have to do with a "flying-out" of the uterus . mcgill.ca/x/4a4

The onset of the coronavirus is not the first time that bats have received a fair amount of (unwarranted) negative attention. Why is it that these mammals get such a bad rap? The original cause of COVID-19 was not someone eating bats in China (myth!), but bats are not off the hook just yet since there is a chance that the SARS CoV-2 virus did originate in bat poop from where it migrated to an animal, likely the pangolin, from where it jumped to humans. Interestingly, this is ...Continue reading

This week the world lost one of our greatest promoters of science and critical thinking. James Randi was a champion of the scientific method and a fierce opponent of pseudoscience. Much will be written about his life by others but Joe Schwarcz wanted to share an article he wrote about twenty-five years ago after he had the pleasure of meeting the Amazing One for the first time. mcgill.ca/x/4HS

A European manifesto against pseudotherapies?? When medicine fails to rise to the challenge of a disease with effective therapies, promoters of pseudotherapies rush in to fill the void. Pseudo means false, so that a pseudotherapy is one that is based on claims that are false in the sense that they have not been shown to be effective through proper scientific trials. Although most pseudotherapies are innocuous as far as actually causing physical harm, they present a clea...r danger in potentially distracting people from evidence-based treatments. In view of the increasing infiltration of pseudotherapies into medical care, a group of experts in Europe have compiled a manifesto urging governments to protect the population from promoters of false therapies. These are their personal views and not necessarily those of any organizations with which they may be affiliated. https://pseudoscience-manifesto.apetp.com/

@joeschwarcz talks about variolation, a method of inoculation first used to immunize individuals against smallpox. #vaccines #variolation #smallpox #measles #pandemic #antivax

Thinking clearly is not just about recognizing the ways in which our brain misbehaves. Sometimes, it’s about realizing that the information we find in the world is incomplete. We all know that political information can be cherry-picked in the service of ideology, but science unfortunately does not escape from this phenomenon. Since at least 1959, scientists have suspected that not every study conducted ends up getting published. That suspicion was largely derived from the rea...lization that almost all of the studies published in four major psychology journals were reporting statistically significant results. That’s like if a casino claimed to publish a list of all their visitors and every visitor listed happened to win big. We’d suspect the casino of carefully curating the list. We now know that publication bias is very real: it’s when a study does not get published, often because the researchers decide its results are not interesting enough to warrant the hard work of writing it up and submitting it to a journal. It’s also known as the file drawer problem, since these studies, which are informative if not sexy, end up accumulating dust in the figurative junk drawer of the lab. Studies with positive results and large effects tend to get published more quickly, in English, and in journals whose articles get cited a lot. This has an impact on summaries of the evidence that get published (reviews and meta-analyses), because they can only round up the evidence they can see. And when decision-makers rely on these summaries, publication bias can bias the decision itself. There may also be cultural pressures behind some publication biases. When we learned that virtually every trial of acupuncture coming out of China praises the technique for its effectiveness, we had to wonder if negative studies of acupuncture in China were being suppressed. To reduce publication bias in general, we need more academic journals specifically courting unsexy results. We need to register more and more studies in advance of doing them so there is accountability. And scientists who summarize the evidence need to use statistical tests to assess if the body of evidence they have found may be biased in this way. And when we look for scientific evidence to answer our questions, we should never forget that somewhere out there, there’s a file drawer with important data in it that we cannot see. mcgill.ca/x/4rX

"Why is my dog's pee ruining my lawn?" Very good question and a real annoyance for dog owners! Most homeowners let their dogs use the backyard as their own personal toilet. Often after a winter of such potty practice, when the snow melts, you’ll often find your lawn speckled with unsightly yellow patches. First of all, what causes these patches? Dog urine contains a variety of nitrogen compounds. Too much nitrogen will burn the grass and create yellow patches. But appropriate... concentrations of nitrogen can actually be beneficial to the lawn, which is why you’ll often see rings of thick dark green grass around the yellow patches. This makes sense since the main ingredient in lawn fertilizer is nitrogen. The concentration of nitrogen in the dog’s urine depends on the type of dog, its sex, and what the animal eats. Larger dogs will pee more and cause more damage. Female dogs also tend to cause more damage than males because they squat and urinate in one concentrated patch whereas the males spray their urine over a larger area. Finally, diets high in protein can increase the concentration of nitrogen in the urine since protein breaks down to release nitrogen compounds. So how do you prevent the appearance of these unsightly patches? There are two ways change the nitrogen concentration of your dog’s urine or focus on the lawn. You can start by changing your dog’s diet. Feed the dog with a type of food that has lower protein content so there is less protein, and subsequently less nitrogen, in the urine. Interestingly enough, many dog foods on the market actually have much more protein than an average dog requires. You can also try to dilute the dog’s urine by watering down the food. Or you can deal with the lawn directly by spraying the patches with water or treating them with gypsum pellets (made up of calcium sulfate hydrate) which expand in water to break up soil. You may also want to designate a certain area of the yard, such as a rock garden or gravel patch, as the "urine area" where you train your dog to go there every time. Another suggestion has been to give the dog tomato juice to neutralize the nitrates in the urine. This does not work and is scientifically unfounded. Then there are products like Ammonil or Green-um pills to try and neutralize the ammonia in the urine, or lawn care products like Dog Patch Spot Repair to be sprinkled on the yellow patches. Watering the lawn might be a cheaper alternative. With a little careful monitoring of your pet and the lawn, you should be able to let your dog out of the house (and the dog house) without worry. mcgill.ca/x/4Lc

What on earth does jet propulsion and Jean Harlow have in common?! @joeschwarcz tells us!

How long does the COVID virus live on surfaces? A new study from the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness has suggested that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can survive on surfaces for up to 28 days. The study, as reported by many media outlets, was worrisome. It implied that the virus could linger on surfaces for much longer than previously thought and meant that even the most meticulous person might come into contact with some virus during normal activitie...Continue reading

The first day of #Trottier2020 "In Whom Do We Trust?" kicks off at noon today! With Brendan Nyhan on why it is people read and trust untrustworthy sources online & Britt Hermes, talking about her journey from naturopathy to pursuing a Masters of Science. Stream live on YouTube, 12 pm ET. (And if you can't tune in live, the talks will be available afterward. Keep your eyes peeled for the link!) youtube.com/mcgilloss/live

COVID denialism, belief in detox regimens, libertarian calls to protect individual freedoms, all of these tropes are being stitched together into a Frankenstein’s monster by unscientific people like Dr. Andrew Kaufman. Dr. Andrew Kaufman, a psychiatrist essentially turned naturopath, has become very popular on YouTube for denying the existence of the coronavirus. Kaufman rose to fame in the early days of the pandemic by claiming that what scientists were actually seeing with ...their electron microscopes was not a new coronavirus but rather exosomes, a tiny bubble that buds off from that soap bubble and starts floating around, maybe eventually fusing with another soap bubble. And because they do look a lot like many viruses, Kaufman claims the virus does not exist. It’s all exosomes. He further implies that the pandemic just doesn’t add up. He has called lockdowns a form of house arrest and martial law, taking away people’s right to assemble and right to religion. He has claimed (erroneously) that vaccines are syringes full of poison and that masks simultaneously have pores too big to block the virus but small enough to significantly reduce your oxygen supply, which makes no scientific sense. He rhetorically asks the question, Who wears masks?, but does not answer it with doctors, dentists, nurses", but rather "people who are hiding something." Not surprisingly, he lost his remaining part-time doctor job recently for refusing to wear a mask. He worries this manufactured crisis has a goal, which is to make people reliant on government handouts, a common conspiracist belief of the freedom reactionaries. This Andy Kaufman is no joke. mcgill.ca/x/4uF

The law of buoyancy as first stated in the third century BC by Archimedes is responsible for every helium-filled balloon you see at birthday parties: Any object, totally or partially immersed in a fluid or liquid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object. Helium is lighter than air, so a balloon filled with this gas weighs less than the air it displaces and will therefore be subjected to an upward force. In 1868, French astronomer Pierr...e Jules César Janssen, while observing a solar eclipse with a device known as a spectroscope, noticed a line in the spectrum of sunlight that could not be matched to that of any known element at the time. A couple of months later, the English astronomer Joseph Norman Lockyer, also noticed this line, and named the new element helium after the Greek god of the sun, Helios. In 1882, Italian physicist Luigi Palmieri was analyzing lava from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and noticed this same spectral line, which indicated that helium was not only present in the sun’s atmosphere, but also on Earth. The presence of helium on Earth was further confirmed in 1895, when Scottish chemist William Ramsey treated a naturally occurring ore of uranium, cleveite, with an acid and noted the evolution of a gas whose spectrum matched that of helium. The helium used nowadays comes mostly from the radioactive decay of elements such as uranium and thorium, and is extracted from underground deposits. It has countless uses besides being used to fill party balloons! Helium is used in the production of fiber optic cables, which are used to provide internet and TV access, and in semiconductor chips that are found in most electronic devices. It is also used to cool the superconducting magnets that are an integral part of MRI imagers. The large hadron collider in Switzerland also relies on huge amounts of liquid helium to cool its superconducting magnets. Blimps and scientific research balloons are also buoyed by helium and the gas is combined with oxygen to form a mixture known as heliox, which reduces airflow resistance and is used in the treatment of upper airway obstruction. Recently magician David Blaine soared up to 24,900 feet in the Arizona desert holding onto fifty-two helium-filled balloons before skydiving back to earth. Obviously a fan of Archimedes. mcgill.ca/x/4K2