I love science

I love reading papers and checking claims and learning stuff. I have a background in Veterinary science and pet nutrition, so skin health and natural ingredients are in my wheelhouse. I have written a review of skin-health science (below) with a focus on cosmetic ingredients, and an analysis of the evidence around beef tallow. I added a brief discussion on eczema, because this seems to be such a common skin concern. I have a bunch of other posts planned...

But science isn't perfect

An American Nobel-winning economist (Ronald Coase) is thought to have coined the phrase "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything." He was quite right, and it happens all the time. This is why you will see newspaper headlines screaming that eggs will kill you, and then a month later declaring that a dozen a day will have you living until you are a 100 years old. There are so many ways to make data fit a pre-determined outcome. So I would counter the economist's quote with one from a Russian geneticist and biologist (Theodosius Dobzhansky) who famously said "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." When we are judging the veracity of data presented to us, an excellent place to start is with the question "Does this make sense?" And more often than not, the answer can be found by considering how our bodies evolved.

I love/hate AI

I wrote this article the old school way: pubmed search, printing out papers, highlighting, coffee, note-taking, more coffee, reference-checking, glass of wine, proof-reading. You can't leave this sort of thing to AI. It just makes stuff up (and I won't learn anything new if I outsource the hard graft). It's pretty important for people to know that AI is an unreliable resource for scientific fact-finding. It will literally invent papers and quotes and pair them with real authors and genuine high impact scientific journals. Give it six months, and the AI 'hallucination' issue may be resolved - but for now, it's better to go to the source and read it yourself. I did use AI to create some of the illustrations though - it did a pretty awesome job.

I love tests

I also have some exciting testing in the works. I want to be able to say exactly what is and is not in my moisturiser. I want to know Kacow! better than you know your own mother (I'm assuming you don't know the fatty acid profile or peroxide value of your mum - apologies if I am wrong about that). Watch this space.