/oss/taxonomy/term/297/all en /oss/article/covid-19-critical-thinking/anti-vaccine-documentary-died-suddenly-wants-you-feel-not-think <p>People want to feel like their concerns are heard. Being dismissed can lead to loss of trust, which can send people looking for empathy in the wrong places.</p> Fri, 25 Nov 2022 11:00:00 +0000 Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. 9306 at /oss /oss/article/pseudoscience/netflixs-afterlife-show-dead-arrival <p>It was the psychomanteum that broke me. In episode 5 of Netflix’s <i>Life After Death with Tyler Henry</i>, the self-professed California medium asks his dad to build him a “psychomanteum.” He explains it’s a practice that dates back to Ancient Greece. What it ends up being is a room in Henry’s house, painted the colour of <i>Doctor Who’s </i>TARDIS, with the pencil scribbles he does to meditate hung up in black frames and acting like windows. Inside the dark room, Henry spends an hour looking into a mirror that’s angled away from him, trying to get impressions from the afterlife.</p> Sat, 19 Mar 2022 08:00:00 +0000 Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. 9052 at /oss /oss/article/health-and-nutrition-general-science/every-day-our-body-needs-demolish-billions-houses <p>Imagine waking up one day to a constant racket. You walk out of your house and see that your neighbour’s townhouse is being deconstructed. A crew is disassembling that house item by item, some of which will be reused somewhere else. You think to yourself, “At least they didn’t use a wrecking ball or my own house might not have been spared.”</p> <p>Every day, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nrc2663">tens of billions of our cells</a>—the cells that make up our brain, our heart, our skin—die in a very similar process of deconstruction.</p> Sat, 19 Feb 2022 09:00:00 +0000 Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. 9032 at /oss /oss/article/critical-thinking-health/medical-error-not-third-leading-cause-death <p>In the first episode of the television show <i>The Resident</i>, a nurse tells the young protagonist that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States after cancer and heart disease. “They don’t want us talking about that,” she adds.</p> Fri, 27 Aug 2021 16:54:50 +0000 Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. 8822 at /oss /oss/article/general-science/death-our-body-feasts-itself <p>A pretty morbid question perhaps, but why is it that our body does not decompose while we are alive? Most of<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118953358"> </a><a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118953358">the post-mortem changes that affect our body</a> are the result of things we already carry inside of us, so how is it that these potent destructors are kept in check before we die?</p> Thu, 20 May 2021 20:05:34 +0000 Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. 8740 at /oss /oss/article/pseudoscience/i-spy-back-my-eye-murderer-or-not <p>Promising nuggets in early scientific research can quickly take hold of the public imagination and continue to spread well past their sell-by date, a lesson we are all learning the hard way during this pandemic. But this phenomenon is not new. Let me ask you this: do you believe the last thing someone sees before they die gets imprinted on their retinas? It turns out this idea is a myth... mostly.</p> Fri, 23 Oct 2020 14:00:00 +0000 Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. 8460 at /oss /oss/article/covid-19/troubling-uptick-covid-19-young-people <p> </p> <hr /> <p><em>This article was first published in</em><span> </span><a href="https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/christopher-labos-a-troubling-uptick-of-covid-19-in-young-people/wcm/7d9364d6-62fb-458e-b5ba-33ef18da4254/">The Montreal Gazette<span>.</span></a></p> Fri, 11 Sep 2020 17:41:48 +0000 Christopher Labos MD, MSc 8403 at /oss /oss/article/health-history/gin-mania <p>Between 1715 and 1750 there were more deaths than births in London, with the greatest mortality among children. Many of these deaths were due to fetal alcohol syndrome as unhappy mothers-to-be sought solace in gin. And unhappiness was the rule, not the exception, and it wasn’t limited to pregnant women.</p> Wed, 15 Jan 2020 21:26:05 +0000 Joe Schwarcz PhD 8078 at /oss /oss/article/infographics/2019-year-review <p>Scroll to the bottom for links to the articles.</p> <p><img height="4448" width="1200" style="width: 600px; height: 2224px;" class="file-original " src="/oss/files/oss/2019_year_in_review-recovered_0.jpg" alt="" /></p> Tue, 31 Dec 2019 16:29:54 +0000 Ada McVean B.Sc. 8059 at /oss /oss/article/videos-history/right-chemistry-what-do-jane-austen-and-us-president-have-common <p></p><div class="media-youtube-video media-element file-default media-youtube-1"></div> Thu, 19 Dec 2019 23:07:35 +0000 Joe Schwarcz PhD 8056 at /oss /oss/article/did-you-know-general-science/story-behind-21-grams <p>The April 1907 issue of American Medicine featured a paper by Dr. Duncan Macdougall describing his experiment whereby the beds of dying patients were placed on a sensitive balance. Believe it or not, he was trying to weigh the human soul! The paper was titled “Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of The Existence of Such Substance.” Macdougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts placed six dying patients on the specially constructed balance and concluded that at the moment of death there was a loss in weight of about three quarters of an ounce, or 21 grams.</p> Wed, 19 Jun 2019 15:45:37 +0000 Joe Schwarcz PhD 7802 at /oss /oss/article/health-history/its-time-let-five-stages-grief-die <p>Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.</p> <p>This group of terms has become so ingrained in our cultural consciousness that almost anyone could tell you what they are: the five stages of grief.</p> <p>Introduced to the world in the 1969 book <i>On Death and Dying </i>by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the Kübler-Ross model (sometimes called the DABDA model) surmises that there are sequential stages of various emotions that a patient goes through when diagnosed with a terminal illness, starting with denial and ending with acceptance.</p> Fri, 31 May 2019 15:54:47 +0000 Ada McVean B.Sc. 7786 at /oss /oss/article/health/sleepy-science-there-best-position-sleep <p>One thing is very clear. If you are a baby, you should be <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/health-promotion/childhood-adolescence/stages-childhood/infancy-birth-two-years/safe-sleep/safe-sleep-your-baby-brochure.html#back-to-sleep">sleeping on your back</a>. Infants who sleep on their back, as opposed to their stomachs, have a reduced risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).</p> Wed, 27 Feb 2019 17:06:37 +0000 Christopher Labos MD, MSc 7613 at /oss /oss/article/health/how-do-veterinarians-die <p><span>I wouldn’t blame you for thinking something along the lines of “just like everyone else,” but I’m here to tell you otherwise.</span></p> <p><span>Being a veterinarian is a lot like being a human doctor. Besides the fact that both professions practice medicine, albeit on different subjects, they both require top grades and many years of school. They usually necessitate one to go into debt, to work long hours, to have extreme empathy and to be on call for days at a time.</span></p> Mon, 06 Aug 2018 14:20:37 +0000 Ada McVean B.Sc. 7218 at /oss /oss/article/general-science/number-four-kills-again-or-does-it <p>Do superstitions kill? You may have heard the one about Chinese people dying in larger numbers on the fourth of every month because, in both Cantonese and Mandarin (and also in Japanese), the words for “four” and “death” sound the same. Imagine making a medical appointment on January “Death Day”. Might this not create enough stress to push your frail body over the edge?</p> Thu, 04 Jan 2018 18:19:15 +0000 Jonathan Jarry, MSc 6859 at /oss