This is the June and July 2022 issue of the SubCriticalAppraisal Newsletter (archives).
The purpose of this newsletter is to be a more meaningful and summarised version of the RSS feed, complete with all my writings, site updates, interesting links, and reviews each month.
Feel free to email me with any and all suggestions or feedback.
Writings
Links
Medicine
Therapeutics:
- Evaluating the effectiveness of a universal eHealth school-based prevention programme for depression and anxiety, and the moderating role of friendship network characteristics, Andrews et al. 2022: (n=2,000) universal eHealth school-based, CBT-informed, preventive programme for depression and anxiety is no better than control
- School-based mindfulness training in early adolescence: what works, for whom and how in the MYRIAD trial?, Montero-Marin et al. 2022: (n=8,000) school-based mindfulness training vs control resulted in worse scores on depression risk and well-being in students at risk of mental health problems both at post intervention and 1-year follow-up (though not clinically relevant); higher dose and reach associated with worse function post intervention
- Efficacy of interventions for suicide and self-injury in children and adolescents: a meta-analysis, Harris et al. 2022: efficacy of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs) interventions in children and adolescents found to be consistently nonsignificant across 112 papers
- A Metascientific Review of the Evidential Value of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Depression, Williams et al. 2022: RCTs show acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) for depression is better than no treatment, but too poorly powered to detect any evidence to compare it with CBT
- Association Between Pharmacological Treatment of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Long-term Unemployment Among Working-Age Individuals in Sweden, Li et al. 2022: (n=13,000) the use of ADHD medications during the previous 2 years was associated with a 10% lower risk of long-term unemployment in the following year (adjusted RR, 0.90 [95% CI, 0.87-0.95])
- Pharmacogenetics: a general review on progress to date, Daly 2017
Diagnostics:
- Associations Between Pregnancy-Related Predisposing Factors for Offspring Neurodevelopmental Conditions and Parental Genetic Liability to Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Autism, and Schizophrenia: The Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa), Havdahl et al. 2022: (n=30k) ADHD PGS association with asthma (odds ratio [OR], 1.15 [95% CI, 1.06-1.25]), smoking (OR, 1.26 [95% CI, 1.19-1.33]), prepregnancy body mass index (β, 0.25 [95% CI, 0.18-0.31]), pregnancy weight gain (β, 0.20 [95% CI, 0.10-0.30]), taking folate (OR, 0.92 [95% CI, 0.88-0.96]), and not taking supplements (OR, 1.09 [95% CI, 1.04-1.14]); Schizophrenia PGS associated with coffee consumption (OR, 1.09 [95% CI, 1.05-1.12]), smoking (OR, 1.12 [95% CI, 1.06-1.19]), prepregnancy body mass index (β, −0.18 [95% CI, −0.25 to −0.11]), and pregnancy weight gain (β, 0.17 [95% CI, 0.07-0.27])
Meta-medicine:
- Potential fabrication in research images threatens key theory of Alzheimer’s disease: Sylvain Lesné’s work underpinning the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s (specifically “toxic oligomer” Aβ*56) is found to be based on nothing but fabricated images
- The Bias for Statistical Significance in Sport and Exercise Medicine, Borg et al. 2022:
- The significance filter, the winner’s curse and the need to shrink, Zwet et al. 2021: 968,000 confidence intervals extracted from abstracts and over 350,000 intervals extracted from the full-text of papers published in Medline (PubMed) from 1976 to 2019:
- Reflections on Alnylam, Maraganore 2022
Epidemiology/pathophysiology:
- The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence, Moncrieff et al. 2022: comprehensive review of the major strands of research on serotonin shows there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity; most studies found no evidence of reduced serotonin activity in people with depression compared to people without, and methods to reduce serotonin availability using tryptophan depletion do not consistently lower mood in volunteers
- Prospective biomarkers of major depressive disorder: a systematic review and meta-analysis, Kennis et al. 2022: no biomarkers (neuroimaging, GI, immunology, neurotrophic, neurotransmitters, hormones, and oxidative stress) except cortisol predict MDD (but effect disappears after correcting for disease state) i.e. no evidence for any causal biomarkers of depression
- Quantifying Deviations of Brain Structure and Function in Major Depressive Disorder Across Neuroimaging Modalities, Winter et al. 2022: (n=1,800) group differences in neuroimaging markers explained less than 2% variance
- An exercise-inducible metabolite that suppresses feeding and obesity, Li et al. 2022: exercise stimulates the production of N-lactoyl-phenylalanine (Lac-Phe) in CNDP2+ cells (e.g. macrophages, monocytes) that suppresses feeding and obesity
- High Intelligence is not a Risk Factor for Mental Health Disorders, Williams et al. 2022: Individuals with high g-factors had less general anxiety (OR=0.69) and PTSD (OR=0.67), were less neurotic (β=-0.12), less socially isolated (OR=0.85), and were less likely to have experienced childhood stressors and abuse, adulthood stressors, or catastrophic trauma (OR=0.69-0.90); they did not differ in any other mental health disorder or trait
- Genome-wide association study of antisocial personality disorder, Rautiainen et al. 2022: first study showing genome-wide significant (n=6,000) and replicable (n=4,000) findings on genetic variants associated with any personality disorder
- Ehlers-Danlos syndrome: prevalence and outcomes in gender affirming surgery - a single institution experience, Najafian et al. 2022: the prevalence of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome diagnosis in patients undergoing gender-affirming surgeries is 132x the highest reported prevalence in the general population
- The function of efference copy signals: Implications for symptoms of schizophrenia, Pynn 2013: it is hypothesised that when one speaks, a copy of the efferent signals is sent to the auditory cortex where sensation is suppressed only when the anticipated voice matches the actual voice (sensory reafferent); failure in this “corollary discharge” may explain schizophrenic patients’ deficits in discriminating between self generated vs externally generated auditory sensations
Covid
- Vaccine effectiveness of one, two, and three doses of BNT162b2 and CoronaVac against COVID-19 in Hong Kong: a population-based observational study, McMenamin et al. 2022: (n=21,000) in HK where no prior outbreak (hence population immunity) confounds analysis, 2-dose BioNTech’s efficacy against severe disease or death in adults aged 60+ was 89·3% [95% CI 86·6–91·6]) compared with CoronaVac’s 69·9% [64·4–74·6]; 3 doses (third being BioNTech) 97·9% [97·3–98·4]
- The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2, Pekar et al. 2022: SARS-CoV-2 emerged from at least 2 separate cross-species transmission events into humans, the first around 18 November 2019, and another within weeks of the first zoonotic transmission
- The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, Worobey et al. 2022
- Bidirectional genome-wide CRISPR screens reveal host factors regulating SARS-CoV-2, MERS-CoV and seasonal HCoVs, Rebendenne et al. 2022
- Front-Runners in the Race for Variant-Proof and All-Coronavirus Vaccines
- Comprehensive Mask Testing
Miscellaneous:
- The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia, Spyrou et al. 2022: ancient DNA data from 7 individuals exhumed from Kyrgyzstani cemeteries show _Y. pestis _involvement dated to 1338–1339
- Prospective Evaluation of Parent Distress Following Pediatric Burns and Identification of Risk Factors for Young Child and Parent Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, De Young et al. 2014: (n=120) concurrent parent PTSS was a significant predictor of child PTSS at 1 month (β=0.51, p<0.001) and 6 months (β=0.19, p<0.05); parents’ responses to a traumatic event may play a particularly important role in a young child’s psychological recovery
- Sarah Constantin: Personalized Medicine For Real: “personalised medicine” is many things — healthcare optimisation for basically healthy people (superficial personalisation on top of generic lifestyle advice), stratifying treatment based on genes (we don’t know enough about how genes affects treatment effects), preventing medical error (building a “smart hospital” that runs on checklists, statistical prediction rules, outcomes monitoring, and other evidence-based practices is epically hard), AI diagnosis (irreducible dependence on how you frame the problem), connecting patients with experimental therapies (consulting/software to match patients with clinical trials), changing clearly mismatched standard practice to match scientific evidence (hard to scale), and of course n=1 translational medicine for rare diseases (requires actual therapeutic development expertise)
- Stuart Ritchie: Everything you need to know about breastfeeding and intelligence: we really don’t know
- Anosognosia: unawareness of having a disability due to an underlying physical or psychological condition (usually damage to parietal lobe)
- Asomatognosia: loss of awareness/recognition of a body part (usually damage to ther right parietal lobe)
Biology
Molecular Biology:
- A time-resolved, multi-symbol molecular recorder via sequential genome editing, Choi et al. 2022: DNA Typewriter — a tandem array of CRISPR–Cas9 target sites as a blank in vivo molecular recording medium
- Engineering circular RNA for enhanced protein production, Chen et al. 2022: vector topology, 5′ and 3′ UTRs, IRESs, and synthetic aptamers were manipulated to increase circRNA yields by 100x
- Deep learning and CRISPR-Cas13d ortholog discovery for optimized RNA targeting, Wei et al. 2022
- CELL-E: Biological Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Synthesis for Protein Localization Prediction, Khwaja et al. 2022
Genetics:
- Open problems in human trait genetics, Brandes et al. 2022
- The sequences of 150,119 genomes in the UK Biobank, Halldorsson et al. 2022
- Cost-efficient whole genome-sequencing using novel mostly natural sequencing-by-synthesis chemistry and open fluidics platform, Almogy et al. 2022: an open flow cell design on a circular wafer with a large surface area and mostly natural nucleotides that allow optical end-point detection without reversible terminators enables sequencing billions of reads with longer read length (∼300bp) and fast runs times (<20hrs) with high base accuracy (Q30 > 85%), at a low cost of $1/G
- Recombination of repeat elements generates somatic complexity in human genomes, Pascarella et al. 2022
- Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence, Cochran et al. 2005
Neuroscience:
- Prefrontal feature representations drive memory recall, Yadav et al. 2022
- Null models in network neuroscience, Váša et al. 2022
- Acts of appetite: neural circuits governing the appetitive, consummatory, and terminating phases of feeding, Alcantara et al. 2022
Longevity:
- The relationship between epigenetic age and the hallmarks of aging in human cells, Kabacik et al. 2022: epigenetic ageing is affected by nutrient sensing, mitochondrial function, stem cell exhaustion and altered cell–cell communication, but not cellular senescence, telomere attrition and genomic instability; implies ageing is due to two types of mechanisms: deterministic (epigenetic ageing) and stochastic (wear and tear)
- Oocytes maintain ROS-free mitochondrial metabolism by suppressing complex I, Rodríguez-Nuevo et al. 2022: oocytes formed during fetal development manage to avoid reactive oxygen species (ROS) during dormancy by suppressing mitochondrial complex I
- Female reproductive life span is extended by targeted removal of fibrotic collagen from the mouse ovary, Umehara et al. 2022: fibrosis due to mitochondrial dysfunction within the ovarian stromal compartment imapir oocyte release; antifibrosis drugs (pirfenidone and BGP-15) eliminate fibrotic collagen and restore ovulation in reproductively old and obese mice
- Clonal dynamics of haematopoiesis across the human lifespan, Mitchel et al. 2022: haematopoietic stem cells or multipotent progenitors (HSC/MPPs) accumulated a mean of 17 mutations/year after birth and lost 30 base pairs/year of telomere length; the prevalence of clones at more than 1% variant allele fraction (VAF) is universal after age 70 (not 10–20% prevalent as previously estimated); the number of expanded clones per individual is 10–20 (not 1–2); the fraction of overall haematopoiesis accounted for by expanded clones is 30–60% (not 3–5%); clonal expansions have their origins in mutations that occurred decades earlier (not in old age)
- Alcohol consumption and telomere length: Mendelian randomization clarifies alcohol’s effects, Topiwala et al. 2022: (n=250k) higher genetically-predicted alcohol use disorder (inverse variance-weighted β = −0.06, 95% CI: −0.10 to −0.02, p = 0.001) was associated with shorter telomere length
- The complete cell atlas of an aging multicellular organism, Roux et al. 2022: ageing looks very different depending on cell type
- Efficient Human Germ Cell Specification from Stem Cells via Combinatorial Expression of Transcription Factors, Kramme et al. 2022
Biotechnology:
- A synthetic protein-level neural network in mammalian cells, Chen et al. 2022: protein heterodimers and viral proteases engineered to compute weighted sums of input protein concentrations through reversible binding interactions to perform winner-take-all neural network computation
- A DNA origami rotary ratchet motor, Pumm et al. 2022: DNA nanotechnology has given us pivots, hinges, crank sliders and rotary systems, and now a ratchet motor
- Spatiotemporal multiplexed immunofluorescence imaging of living cells and tissues with bioorthogonal cycling of fluorescent probes, Ko et al. 2022: comprehensive non-toxic, non-disruptive longitudinal profiling of living cells
Life, Uh, Finds A Way
- Odd dynamics of living chiral crystals, Tan et al. 2022: sea star embryos rotate chirally to self-assemble into 2D crystals that exhibit odd elastic dynamics
- Experimental studies addressing the longevity of Bacillus subtilis spores – The first data from a 500-year experiment, Ulrich et al. 2022: the experiment will end in 2514
Miscellaneous:
- How did Mendel arrive at his discoveries?, van Dijk et al. 2022
- Formal models for the study of the relationship between fluctuating asymmetry and fitness in humans, Farrera 2022
- Heat-Induced Brain Vitrification from the Vesuvius Eruption in c.e. 79, Petrone et al. 2020, and Preservation of neurons in an AD 79 vitrified human brain, Petrone et al. 2022: in the volcanic eruption that obliterated Pompei and Herculaneum in 79 AD, extreme radiant heat igniting body fat and vaporising soft tissues followed by rapid drop in temperature turned a man’s brain into glass/glaze:
Physics/Computer Science
- Relativistic Bohmian trajectories of photons via weak measurements, Foo et al. 2022
- Provably efficient variational generative modeling of quantum many-body systems via quantum-probabilistic information geometry, Sbahi et al. 2022
- Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Words, Lin et al. 2022
- Dark Matter Doesn’t Exist
Statistics/Meta-Science
- A Tutorial on Principal Component Analysis, Schlens 2022
- Bias-robust Integration of Observational and Experimental Estimators, Oberst 2022
- Global citation inequality is on the rise, Nielsen et al. 2022: top 1% most-cited scientists go from 14 to 21% of total citations(!) over 2000 to 2015
- Massive covidization of research citations and the citation elite, Ioannidis et al. 2022
- Trap of trends to statistical significance: likelihood of near significant P value becoming more significant with extra data, Wood et al. 2014: if you get p = 0.08 and then double the amount of data, your experiment will still be above p < 0.05 about 30% of the time i.e. “trends towards significance” or “on the brink of significance” are actively misleading
- Among the top 15 economics programs, 78% of new PhDs since 2010 had a parent with a graduate degree
- June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal: infohazard for the lazy
- World’s top graduates get new UK visa option (includes HKU and CUHK)
- The experiment begins: Arcadia publishing 1.0
- Matt Clancy: Science is getting harder
- CSPI: It’s Time to Review the Institutional Review Boards
Psychology
- Meta-Analyses in Psychology Often Overestimate Evidence for and Size of Effects, Bartoš et al. 2022: Robust Bayesian meta-analysis (RoBMA) based on model-averaging (instead of model-selection in Sladekova et al. 2022) found >60% of meta-analyses in psychology notably overestimate the evidence for the presence of the meta-analytic effect and >50% overestimate its magnitude
- Absence of a mere-exposure effect in older and younger adults, Chow et al. 2022
- What limitations are reported in short articles in social and personality psychology?, Clarke et al. 2022: not statistical conclusion validity
Politics/Religion
- Fading family lines- women and men without children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in 19th, 20th and 21st Century Northern Sweden, Kolk et al. 2022: (n=6,000) among Swedish men and women born between 1885 and 1899, 48% of the first generation did not have any living descendants (great-grandchildren) by 2007
- People react more positively to female- than to male-favoring sex differences: A direct replication of a counterintuitive finding, Stewart-Williams
- Poor Prospects—Not Inequality—Motivate Political Violence, Bartusevičius et al. 2022
- All models are wrong, and some are religious: Supernatural explanations as abstract and useful falsehoods about complex realities, Lightner et al. 2022
- Organizational Development as Generative Entrenchment, Moser et al. 2022
- Adrian D’Souza: On Sri Lanka’s Economic Crisis: the Majority Sinhala Buddhists (Sri Lankan Army) has been accused of widespread rape and massacring civilians vs the minority Tamils (Tamil Tigers militant group) invented suicide bombing, used child soldiers and gorilla warfare; Rajapaksa ended the 30-year civil war tried to fix the economy with massive spending (on white elephant constriction projects for populist reasons) through high interest commerical loans (only 15% was Chinese-owned debt); Islamist terroist suicide bombing in 2019 led to increased nationalism; the massively popular Rajapaska implemented populist legislation e.g. cutting income tax and VAT, discontinuing automatic fuel pricing; Rajapaska wanted to save valuable foreign currency by switching away from heavily subsidized imported fertilizer, which destroyed Sri Lanka’s primary export of tea crop and tanked domestic rice production by 20% in just the first 6 months, causing further haemorrhage of foreign currency reserve (forced to import $450 million worht of rice); since the pandemic the Rajapaskas didn’t want to to make the structural reforms that an 18th IMF bail out would entail, instead tried to print money and establish price controls on fuel and food; ultimately, the current crisis is the fault of the citizens of Sri Lanka voting for populist politicians
- Factcheck: nee, deze foto toont geen Russische generaal-majoor: the obese man reported to be a Russian general recalled from retirement by Putin to fight in Ukraine turns out to be a retired Russian border guard in Uzbekistan
- The Supreme Court’s Faux ‘Originalism’
- Big Hollywood movies are being made with Chinese audiences in mind
- The Most Senseless Environmental Crime of the 20th Century: Soviet whaling
- The Origin of ‘Two-Spirit’ & The Gay Rights Movement
Technology
- Techno-optimism: an Analysis, an Evaluation and a Modest Defence, Danaher 2022
- How Walmart Canada Uses Blockchain to Solve Supply-Chain Challenges
- Vitalik Buterin: Where to use a blockchain in non-financial applications?
- Packy McCormick: Web3 Use Cases: Today
- The endless search for a crypto use case
- China’s SMIC Is Shipping 7nm Foundry ASICs
- Anton Howes: Age of Invention: Why wasn’t the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part I: the usual story of the invention of the steam engine goes: Evangelista Torricelli demonstration in the 1640s both that vacuums are possible and that the atmosphere has a weight, leading to water-raising engines invented in the 1690s by Thomas Savery, which exploited atmospheric pressure by condensing steam; however Howes discovers that Salomon de Caus, as early as 1615, had very probably made a solar-powered version of Savery’s engine; see also Part II: the history of mechanical exploitation of condensation extends back to ancient times (along with alchemists)
Economics/Business/Finance
- No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias, Maier et al. 2022
- Business Retreats and Sanctions Are Crippling the Russian Economy, Sonnenfeld et al. 2022: imports have collapsed (widespread domestic supply shortages); domestic production has come to a complete standstill (lost companies representing 40% of its GDP); oil is selling at a steep discount; natural gas futures in Europe are up about 700% year-over-year; Russia is more dependent on its counterparties e.g. China in terms of trade share
- Machine Learning Can Predict Shooting Victimization Well Enough to Help Prevent It, Heller et al. 2022: 13% of the 500 people with the highest predicted risk are shot within 18 months (130x higher rate than the average Chicagoan)
- Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital, Brown et al. 2022: (n=1,600) math problems or non-academic games causes 22% less decline in performance over time in listening comprehension, academic problems, or IQ tests, and improves students’ school performance by 0.09 SD
- A’s from Zzzz’s? The Causal Effect of School Start Time on the Academic Achievement of Adolescents, Carrell et al. 2011: (n=6,000) starting the school day a 7:50am instead of 7:00am has a positive effect on student achievement roughly equivalent to raising teacher quality by 1 SD
- Predictably Bad Investments: Evidence from Venture Capitalists, Davenport 2022: across 16,000 startups ($9B), half were predictably bad
- Night Moves: Is the Overnight Drift the Grandmother of All Market Anomalies, Haghani et al. 2022: investors have earned 100+% of the return on a wide range of risky assets when the markets are closed, and have earned <0 returns for bearing the risk of owning those assets during the daytime when markets are open; a simple long-short portfolio that only takes exposure when the market is closed would have earned a return of 38% per annum (importantly, ignoring transactions costs)
- Risk-Free Rates and Convenience Yields Around the World, Diamond et al. 2022: there is a special demand for dollar assets broadly defined which spikes in financial crises; the demand for US gov debt in particular is not particularly high on top of this
- A Luna-tic Stablecoin Crash, Uhlig 2022
- The Effect of Incarceration on Mortality, Norris et al. 2022: mortality risk (especially murders, overdoses, and natural causes) halves during the period of incarceration and no detectable effect on post-release mortality risk i.e. incarceration increases longevity
- The Distributional Impact of the Minimum Wage in the Short and Long Run, Hurst et al. 2022: in the short run, a large increase in the minimum wage has a small effect on employment and therefore increases the labour income of the workers who were earning less than the new minimum wage; in the long run, the minimum wage has perverse distributional implications in that it reduces the employment, income, and welfare of precisely the low-income workers it is meant to help
- Why do people stay poor? Balboni et al. 2021: large-scale, randomised asset (cows) transfer and an 11-year panel on 6000 households in extreme poverty in Bangladesh shows large transfers creating jobs for the poor are effective in getting people out of poverty traps
- Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?, Clemens 2011: the potential gains of full trade liberalisation and migration
Leaving trillion dollar notes on the sidewalk.
- The stock market speaks: How Dr. Alchian learned to build the bomb, Newhard 2014: Armen Alchian at RAND determined the fissile fuel of H-bombs to be lithium using publicly available financial data (its main producer saw a return of 461% in 1954); his paper (world’s first event study) was immediately confiscated and destroyed
- Wine Economics, Storchmann 2012
- Fewer adjectives, more focus on economic growth for development
- Speculation in 1980s Taiwan: Taiwanese stocks rose 12x in a three-year period before collapsing in the early 90s
- Pradyumna Prasad: Pakistan’s Next Crisis is Guaranteed
Philosophy/EA
- Manipulating belief in free will and its downstream consequences: A meta-analysis, Genschow et al. 2022: meta-analysis of 145 experiments find that belief in free will can be decreased and belief in determinism can be increased, but there is no evidence for downstream consequences
- Only what exists can cause: An intrinsic view of free will, Tononi et al. 2022: integrated information theory
- Some proposals for reviving the philosophy of mathematics, Hersh 1979
- A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform: OpenPhil donated $200M to criminal justice reform, $100M of which came after their own estimates concluded that it wasn’t as effective as other global health and development interventions; (ineffective) worldview diversification, political preference of funders, optimistic Fermi estimates may be to blamed; forecasting or red teams could have accelerated their decision making
- Open Philanthropy Shallow Investigation: Telecommunications in LMICs, Gilbert et al. 2022
- OpenPhil: How accurate are our predictions? mean Brier score of 0.217 (slighter better than 0.25 of pure chance) ie. low resolution; no clear relationship between accuracy and time horizon; well-calibrated:
- List of Lists of Concrete Biosecurity Project Ideas
- The quest for psychological perfection
- Morphological analysis
Fiction
- Mark Twain: Eve’s Diary
- How to Recognize a Poem When You See One
Miscellaneous
- A cross-verified database of notable people, 3500BC-2018AD, Laouenan et al. 2022
- The mathematics of burger flipping, Thiffeault 2022
- John Buettner-Janusch: the chairman of the NYU anthropology department where he turned his lab into a LSD and Quaalude manufacturing operation; seeking revenge for his drug conviction he sent poisoned Valentine’s Day chocolates to the federal judge for the case
- Louis Pasteur: the French chemist and microbiologist discovered optical isomers (first demonstration of molecular chirality), invented pasteurisation of milk and wine, disproved spontaneous generation (direct evidence for germ theory), invented the first vaccines against anthrax and rabies (the first attenuated vaccines)
- Margaret Oakley Dayhoff: the mother of bioinformatics
- Felix Hoffmann: German chemist who synthesised aspirin and heroin
- Nolan Bushnell: the founder of Atari is also the founder of Chuck E. Cheese
- Brominated vegetable oil: used to emulsify citrus-flavoured soft drinks like Mountain Dew until 2020 can cause memory loss
- Gropecunt Lane: it was normal practice for a mediaeval street name to reflect the street’s function or the economic activity taking place within it
- Gods of Salt: a theory that elephants once built an ancient civilisation by enslaving apes
- Muggeseggele
- Newton’s flaming laser sword
- Temasek
- Tsundoku