Thanks to many awareness-raising campaigns operated over the past 30 years, people are now more and more interested in what is in their plate. However, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish facts from fiction, truth from wishful thinking, and while it is tempting to go all-out organic (provided that you can afford it), one should ask oneself if doing so would really be that beneficial.

There is quite a bit of confusion among the general public regarding what homeopathic remedies are. Even if a precise definition is given, there are some strong opinions expressed on both sides of the argument as to whether these remedies are actually working or if they are no more than fancy (and expensive) placebos. What does science have to say about this? Do homeopathic remedies actually work? Let's try to find out!

Far from being the outcome of a perfect design, our bodies are in reality more like a collection of quirks, flaws, and sometimes malfunctioning parts. All were added through time on top of each other, as a result from random mutations that were differentially screened by environmental pressures. Why do we have an appendix that can threaten our life when it gets inflamed? Why do we have a blind spot in our eyes and why does our retina gets detached? Why are we using the same pipe for eating and breathing, hence risking to choke to death whenever we eat mochi? The reason for all these imperfection is that of course, our bodies were not designed, but that they evolved as a result of random mutations through time. Let's have a look at some examples of "unintelligent design".

Perhaps one of the most difficult concepts to understand in biology is that of emergent properties in multicellular organisms. As a teacher, I've often been guilty of explaining this idea early on in the IB by saying, "it means an organism is greater than the sum of its parts." And I can further burrow under this blanket statement that magically explains without explaining by segueing into an example that usually engenders some awe and at the least an appreciation for the massively wide scale in which biologists operate: we spend thousands of hours in the world of a neurons microns to understand the very basic mechanism of neural communication.