• Uni student diets: saving the planet, your money or your conscience?

    Most teenagers tend to adopt the same diet as their parents when living at home due to convenience and upbringing. However, when these teenagers head off to university they are confronted with a new mix of housemates and differing diets. This, along with their discovery of the price of...
  • Post-Truth and Cognitive Bias Part II: Fact vs Fiction in public opinion

    Fact vs. Fiction During the EU referendum and US Presidential election, fact-checking services became near-ubiquitous. It was believed that if the electorate had access to factually correct information then they would make a rational and informed decision. However, when a cause triumphs in the face of repeatedly debunked statements,...
  • Post-Truth and Cognitive Bias Part I: Bias, Bias Everywhere

    ‘May you live in interesting times’ is a Chinese curse condemning the recipient to live through times of turmoil – a phrase that members of the political class have recently taken to heart. A phrase that, on further research, isn’t a Chinese curse at all but one that still...
  • The Fallacy of the Scientific Fact

    The term scientific fact has been coined throughout history to stamp a sure-fire statement as a hard-nosed fact. This fact describes a truth that has evolved out of meticulously collected evidence, to support a well-grounded theory. Today, scientific evidence is deemed so reliable that it largely dictates how we...
  • The Unanswered Case of Arsenic Poisoning

    The World Health Organisation declared the arsenic poisoning of Bangladesh as ‘the largest mass poisoning of a population in history’, so why does no one know about it? With 30.1% of the earth’s freshwater stored within groundwater, the susceptibility of groundwater becoming contaminated by both external pollutants and endogenous...
  • E-Cigarettes: The Latest In A Wealth Of Conflicting Advice

    E-cigarettes are used by people who smoke, either as an aide to quit or as a direct replacement for traditional cigarettes. It is a long held belief by those who use e-cigarettes that, since they do not have the tar and many other harmful substances held in them present in...
  • Completely Paralysed Patients Able to Communicate Again

    Motor Neurone disease (MND) was catapulted into the public eye some years ago by revolutionary physicist Prof. Stephen Hawking who suffers from the most common type of MND, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). ALS causes a progressive loss of the patient’s motor control; that is, they are unable to control the...