/oss/taxonomy/term/5326/all en /oss/article/medical-critical-thinking-history/white-lie-heart-vaccine-history <p>Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Dr. Edward Jenner invented vaccines because of an observation he and he alone made. You see, milkmaids were renowned for their beauty. At a time when smallpox was endemic and was scarring the faces of the people who survived it, Jenner noticed that milkmaids would always escape from this dermatological blight. Why was that?</p> Fri, 09 Jun 2023 13:00:00 +0000 Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. 9539 at /oss /oss/article/covid-19-general-science/do-curfews-work <p>I often recommend people set their mental compass to search for the scientific consensus on an issue. This is great in theory but this consensus is often an intangible idea. Where do you find it when it exists? How do you recognize it? You may trust that respectable media outlets will choose to interview the right scientists to give voice to this consensus. On the issue of curfews, however, those scientific voices are all over the place.</p> Fri, 23 Apr 2021 20:14:13 +0000 Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. 8713 at /oss /oss/article/covid-19-health-general-science/lets-hear-it-voices-reason <p>The COVID-19 pandemic has been a golden opportunity for schemers, contrarians and conspiracy theorists to use public distress and thirst for knowledge to widen their reach. It is easy to get lost in those weeds and forget that there are good people whose intellectual rigour and clarity have provided us all with metaphorical flashlights during these dark times. They have looked at an expanding (and sometimes contracting) body of evidence on COVID-19, delineated the border between what we knew and didn’t know, and explained to us the maddening uncertainties of science in real-time.</p> Thu, 08 Apr 2021 16:45:11 +0000 Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. 8692 at /oss