Here’s a weird hypothetical situation: let’s say that you donate an organ to someone. Perhaps you give up a kidney for a stranger, in a brave act of generosity.

But there’s a complication. Perhaps you find out that the person was lying to you, and you no longer feel the same goodwill towards them. Maybe the person passes away.

What happens to your donated organ? Can you claim it back, like if you lent someone your car?

And if you get it back, could it be put back in your body? …

It seems like the quintessential late-night drunken college dare — can you chug a whole bottle of soy sauce?

Disgusting? Yes. Harsh? Absolutely.

But is it deadly?

Soy sauce is an incredibly popular condiment, used as a staple in many different Asian dishes. It’s based on soybeans, hence the name, but it also includes roasted grain, brine, and a bit of mold culture to aid in fermentation.

These ingredients aren’t simply mixed together and bottled; soy sauce is fermented. Traditionally, it takes months to prepare a proper soy sauce, although much of the modern sauce that we consume is created…

It’s a horrible situation, and even after experiencing it dozens of times, I still dread it.

The drop in my stomach. The sudden dry mouth. Getting thrown off my stride, losing my voice and stumbling as I frantically have to figure out what I’m doing next. It’s like walking down stairs and missing a step, that moment when your foot lands on only empty air.

It’s when a demonstration of a product, service, or feature goes wrong.

Keep in mind, I’m not even in sales! I’m a project manager, which means that I mostly work on communications and hustling around…

Growing up, I always heard that petroleum products, including gasoline, plastic, rubber, and that weird petroleum jelly that you rubbed on cuts and scrapes, were all derived from the crushed remains of ancient dinosaurs.

I always thought that there was a sort of poetic justice to it, especially when I played with my plastic toy dinosaurs. Great beasts had walked the Earth millions of years ago, and were now seeing a second life, of sorts, as interpreted representations of those same shapes.

Also, I envisioned animals being pressed beneath the ground until they turned into goop. …

I’m pretty sure that we can all admit that this work-from-home situation lasted a lot longer than what we initially expected.

When my company first announced that we were switching to a full remote approach, we planned to only spend a couple of weeks at home, “until the whole pandemic thing blows over.” Now, coming up on a year later, there is still no concrete date for when we will return to the physical office.

Despite tech companies still continuing the work from home approach (for us, it’s looking like May is the absolute earliest we will be returning to…

As the internet has become so ubiquitous in our daily lives, the rush by many companies seems to be to get their hands on as much of our data as possible.

Internet-connected smart devices, from Amazon’s Echo to Google Assistant to the rare Samsung Bixby, are listening and collecting data on our requests and questions. Smart wearables collect massive troves of health information. Uber logs our trips, Doordash saves our grocery purchases. Even right-wing “alternative news” platforms, like Parler, were largely funded by billionaires like the Mercers, known for a strong interest in data collection.

It’s also especially prevalent in…

Growing up, I remember hearing a bit of unsolicited and unsourced advice when it came to staying safe in the kitchen: “Don’t put hot food into the refrigerator, or bacteria will grow and you’ll get sick!”

As a child, I took this as fact and didn’t think too much about it. But it came up again recently, and now that I’ve got a PhD focusing on the microbiome — collective populations of diverse bacteria and other microbes — it stuck with me.

Why wouldn’t we want to put hot food into the fridge? Shouldn’t we want to cool food down…

When it comes to presentations, I’ve had the privilege of making a lot of different mistakes.

Yes, that’s a privilege. You don’t get better at something by doing it once, perfectly. Unless you’re a born prodigy, you’re not going to get something perfect on the first try. You’ll be bad at it, but you’ll keep struggling and learning and, eventually, improving.

It’s painful and unpleasant, but the best way to improve your skills is to keep on failing in different ways. In the words of Thomas Edison:

“I didn’t fail. I just found 2,000 ways not to make a lightbulb.”

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