There are well-known differences between the drugs you can get over the counter in the UK and the ones you can get in any US drugstore. Got period cramps in the UK? How about some Feminax – it’s got codeine! Cough? Codeine linctus. Aches? Pains? Co-codamol (codeine mixed with paracetamol, known to Americans as Tylenol). […]
This post first appeared March 27, 2015. It’s not irrelevant March 25, 2020. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A trolley carrying five school children is headed for a cliff. You happen to be standing at the switch, and you could save their lives by diverting the trolley to another track. But there he […]
Several years ago the Economist published a chart for American expats in the UK. It disambiguated what British people say from what Americans hear them say. For example, “you’re very brave” does not mean “I think you are brave” when a Brit says it. It is more likely to mean “you are insane.” I had […]
Look, nobody *likes* gluten-free food. It’s a necessary evil for some, and there’s a whole conversation about how many people actually need to be eating it. Which I am absolutely swerving here today! Instead, today I’m going to tell you about the scientists who were so desperate to create edible gluten-free baked goods that they […]
Who doesn’t love nominative determinism? The idea that your name plays a significant role in shaping your career or even your destiny is irresistible, especially with a steady supply of examples so copious you could trip over them, and even some science to support the idea. But it got me wondering – what if your […]
As we entered the third decade of the third millennium, many of the science and tech words and phrases in popular circulation had lost all meaning. “AI”, “machine learning” and their newer synonym, “cognitive technology”, for example, had joined the pantheon of synonyms for “snake oil“. Or at least they were becoming placeholders for anything […]
If there’s any animal that could use a new PR agency, it’s got to be the electric eel. I mean, think about it – what other animal doesn’t even have its own correct name? You’ve probably heard that an electric “eel” is no eel at all but rather a fish (a knifefish, to be exact). From this […]
Sometime in the 1920s, somewhere in France. A young girl from an influential middle-class French family had been found in a field, stabbed to death. There was no obvious perpetrator. The police rounded up the usual suspects – which is to say, immigrants – and found a Jewish door-to-door salesman who had been in the […]