Literate Scientist

After reading The Hundred-Year Lie I proceeded to a more balanced book:

Is it Safe to Eat?: Enjoy Eating and Minimize Food Risks

The author advocates risk vs. benefit approach throughout the book and now I started to apply the definition of risk as “hazard * exposure” to other areas as well. Explanation about how and why GM food was developed as well as the story of BSE (mad cow disease) was very interesting because I knew very little about them. I studied chemistry in university and liked that the author included organic formulae to illustrate important chemicals and their mechanisms, for example, estrogen disrupters.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

Just finished reading the book about the emergence of forensic science in 19th and 20th centuries:

The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, the Real Forensics Behind the Great Detective’s Greatest Cases

I have never thought about how dependent the life of a suspected person was on superstitions, logic and scientific fallacies and just plain bad luck if certain personality types were testifying in a court or collecting and analyzing forensic evidence. And this was up to the middle of 20th century in developed countries like Great Britain! Realizing that we must know about forensic science and its methods in order to protect ourselves and partially considering my expertise in memory dump analysis as the part of computer forensics I ordered another book about modern forensic science and will review it later as soon as I read it.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -