The Broad Street pump and other science things

A whole new year for science links and other things

I started the year with a roundup of things I did in 2024, and it was a lot. Two books, articles, talks and more! This year started off quite busy as well. I already interviewed seven people since the year started (for two different articles) and went to a seminar this week where I saw a replica of the Broad Street pump. More on that below.

Interesting links

• Aeon video about the community that lives near the Space X launch site.

• This small child has been playing with a dead cicada since she found one in summer. She still has him, and her mom keeps the cicada in the freezer to preserve it. The latest video of the dead cicada’s adventures was posted just yesterday,

• Coffee apparently has the best health effects if you only drink it in the morning

• Scientists reveal the tattoos of mummies from 1200 years ago

• Some music can help people with ADHD focus their attention

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Cheap cheap books!

Sometimes Amazon randomly lowers the price on some books, only to put them back up a few weeks later. It seems to be a mysterious marketing technique, but I guess it’s working because who wouldn’t want to get the paperback of Hey, There’s Science In This for only £2.13 (that’s less than I get from the sale, so they’re losing money on it, but surely that’s their problem!) It’s only this cheap in the UK store, as far as I can tell.

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Broad Street pump

I went to a seminar at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine this week. The seminar itself was really interesting, about gender equality in antibiotic prescriptions in the USA and India. But it was also my first time in the building and I learned that just outside the institute’s John Snow lecture theatre they have a case with a replica of a water pump.

The replica pump inside LSHTM

The original water pump was a pump that stood on Broad Street in Soho. In 1854, a cholera epidemic broke out in this area, which John Snow stopped by breaking the handle off the pump. This story is pretty legendary within London and among epidemiologists, so it makes sense that Snow and his pump are front and centre at the LSHTM.

Read on to learn how John Snow found which pump to break, and let me tell you about a “cholera and cake” John Snow-themed walking tour I did with friends many years ago.