Recent content by Laroxe

You need to consider that humans live in a world populated by huge numbers of microorganisms, and in fact provide a home for a considerable number of them. We have large and varied populations of bacteria, particularly on the surfaces that act as a barrier between our internal environment and...

I must admit I find this whole issue very confusing, the reality is that most food crops are effectively engineered by selective breeding over time. These have been engineered to be resistant to certain herbicides to increase yields, and in an effort to maintain the profits of the supplier, have...

I still refuse to be "alarmed". Since the dawn of agriculture it was quickly realised that repeated growing of the same crops on land depleted the soil, so techniques like rotating crops and leaving ground fallow have been used for centuries. People have also experimented with all sorts of soil...

Really the amounts of various micronutrients in food has always been dependent on soil quality, its true that frequent use in agriculture can deplete certain minerals but to be honest this isn't a major problem and its easily corrected. In land used exclusively in agriculture there are age old...

Opiates generally bind to their target receptors quickly and effectively, surprisingly the nitazenes with a greater binding affinity have far less persistence in the body, morphine having a drug half life of anywhere from 1 to 7 hours while with nitrazines this is usually less than 10 minutes...

The problem here is like Scott says one of manufacture and supply, Nitazenes are not used clinically so people simply get no indication of the dose contained in what they buy, this is also the case with Fentanyl, most overdoses are from illegally produced and supplied drugs. With these synthetic...

I have to say that this left me thinking of a blunderbuss approach to testing while missing the most important details. I have to agree with Cepacia, a huge number of things can be shown to impact on bacterial growth and survival and one of the most important variables to consider is the...

It seems unlikely that we will ever be sure of the cause of this plague, though most people believe it to have been smallpox. The identification is compounded by the fact that some of the other possibilities could have been circulating at the same time, that's not uncommon. While some people...

This is a good example of a basic misunderstanding of genetics and evolution, and perhaps the main reason that ideas like the nature - nurture debate have become unfashionable in many academic disciplines. Basically, we have to consider what life is or means, when we talk about life we are...

I do wonder if this sort of article is worth the bother, it's pretty well established that the soluble fibre in oats slows the absorption of all sorts of things. It's often recommended in type 2 diabetes, as it's a useful way to reduce the rapid increase in blood sugar after meals. Some people...

I thought this was interesting and discusses a number of important issues, the main findings are discussed in the conclusion if you want to save time. Generally, it's true all the vaccines offer some protection, they all stimulate the production of a number of antibodies and so far there is no...

I was just wondering about this and was thinking about the fact that gravity itself is not distributed equally around the globe. I wonder how much this would influence the sea level.

Virtually all the evidence around diet and health is drawn from the huge body of Observational studies known as epidemiology. Unfortunately by their nature observational studies are considered to be unreliable, they are wide open to biases, confounding variables, data manipulation and financial...

I suspect that there are a number of things that have come together over time that have promoted diary free diets as in some way healthy, for many people this choice seems to be more fashion based rather than health base. Milk is an extremely important and nutritionally dense food source, so...

Of course vaccination against Covid now has a history, we now know a great deal about the vaccines and their use. At this point in time it is the mRNA vaccines which are the most popular, they induce a good antibody response after the second dose and are considered the least likely to cause...