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By Zack Dumont I don’t even need to provide an example. We’ve all seen it before. I’m referring to the lofty claim that some new and/or improved soap “kills 99.9% of bacteria”. In the spirit of Scientific Literacy week, I’d like to share what goes through my mind when I see claims like this. My…
Read More “The First Rule of Soap Club: Don’t Analyze Our Claims” »
Though it seems difficult to comprehend, there are apparently still people who, in all seriousness, believe that the world is flat, and all evidence presented to the contrary is just part of a huge conspiracy. The recent documentary “Behind the Curve” follows the lives of a few prominent flat earthers (the Flat Earth Society of…
By the time Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, speculations about biological “transmutation” and the relations between various groups of organisms had already been in circulation for decades. The broad outline of the geological timetable was known by 1850, and while confident assignment of the exact numbers would have to wait…
A question posed by a parent in an antivaccine Facebook group: Measles was declared “eliminated” in Canada in 1998, and in the US in 2000. Perhaps this has caused people to become complacent, which has enabled the antivaccine movement to gain a foothold to the extent that several countries in Europe have recently lost their…
In Canada, we live in a society where we can walk into any grocery store and find an immense variety of safe, high-quality produce grown in different continents available for our consumption. We also live in a society that relies heavily on the internet for sources of information, which is plagued with a myriad of…