When it’s all said and done, you will seek a doctor or expert, NOT an influencer
Science holds us together, and is under attack. Here's what you can do in our fight to protect it.
I have my scheduled newsletter coming later today, but this is a bonus because sometimes the urgency of the moment calls for us to pause and reflect on what science has already given us, and what is at risk if we let misinformation and ideology dismantle it.
Thank YOU for being here and continuously supporting my work as a paid subscriber or by sharing it. I appreciate a citation when you do, but more than that, I’d appreciate it even more if you run with it and MAKE IT BETTER. That’s how we win the fight against misinformation in an algorithm that favors controversy, black-and-white thinking, and falsehoods over nuance, data-driven insights, and complexity. A community of trusted messengers involves ALL of us.
The Science We No Longer Notice
On Monday night, I managed to give myself an intercostal strain while lifting up my daughter — a pulled muscle between the ribs. The pain was sharp, sometimes stabbing, and it got worse when I breathed deeply. I couldn’t immediately tell whether it was coming from my chest wall, my lungs, or even my heart. Mind you, this happened at 3 a.m. My mind immediately spiraled. Before I knew it I was having a panic attack, I entered into a freeze state. I felt like my BP was dropping (not sure as I didn’t measure it right there), so I dropped down in the middle of the hallway and my head hit the floor. I was conscious, but boy did that hurt (luckily, no concussion). And here’s the key point: I didn’t go running to an influencer for answers. I went to a doctor.
Because when you’re sitting with chest pain, you realize just how blurry the line can be between something minor and something life-threatening. The difference between a strained muscle, an inflamed lung lining, or angina isn’t always obvious — and no amount of social media wellness advice can parse that out. That’s what physicians and science are for. Today, we are fighting to defend that very science.
It is easy to take for granted the countless ways science shapes and sustains our everyday lives. We rarely pause to notice how deeply it is woven into the fabric of our routines, because its greatest triumphs are often invisible — precisely because they work so well. Yet from the moment we wake to the moment we fall asleep, our lives are enabled, lengthened, and enriched by the quiet infrastructure of science.
Clean water and food safety are among the most profound achievements. Turning on a faucet and trusting that the water is free of cholera, typhoid, and parasites is the result of decades of scientific advances in sanitation, filtration, and chlorination. The milk we drink and the eggs we cook with are pasteurized and inspected (or let’s hope) to prevent outbreaks that once killed thousands of children. Refrigeration, food preservation methods, and agricultural science make sure our supermarkets are stocked year-round, quite a modern miracle when you consider that in 1900, foodborne illness was a leading cause of childhood death.
Medicine and health care are equally transformative. From vaccines that prevent measles and polio to antibiotics that turn once-fatal infections into curable ones, science has more than doubled life expectancy since the 1850s. Even the simplest pharmacy purchase, whether it is ibuprofen for a headache, insulin for diabetes, or an asthma inhaler, is the end product of research, testing, and refinement. Our eyeglasses and contact lenses rely on optics; our hearing aids on acoustics; our dental fillings on material science; our artificial joints on biomechanics and metallurgy; and our cancer treatments on molecular biology, and more recently, AI.
Public health protections quietly guard us every day. Seatbelts and airbags engineered through biomechanics reduce deaths on the road. Smoke detectors, carbon monoxide alarms, and fire-retardant materials in our homes stand between us and disaster. Epidemiology tells us how to prevent the spread of diseases, from hand-washing campaigns to modern pandemic responses. If you survived childhood without diphtheria, or if your loved one survived a car crash, you are already a beneficiary of generations of safety research.
Even the mundane conveniences of daily living are steeped in science. The electricity that powers our lights, refrigerators, and laptops is delivered through semiconductor technologies (my beloved transistor, which I will discuss on a solo piece soon) and grids designed using physics and engineering. Like how cool is it that we use Faraday’s Law of electromagnetic induction to step up the voltage of renewables to power whole communities (that’s in my newsletter later today)? Our smartphones compress and transmit data using principles of information theory, like the Fast Fourier transform, or FFT (will discuss on it’s own too!). Wi-Fi, GPS, and digital maps are all built on technologies that began as abstract physics experiments and government research projects. What feels routine, like sending a text message, navigating with Google Maps, is a direct inheritance of scientific research that started decades earlier in university labs and national research centers.
Fitness and leisure are no less scientific. Step into a gym, and you see treadmills, resistance machines, and heart-rate monitors, each built on biomechanics, electronics, and physiology. Sports medicine teaches us how to train safely and recover from injuries. Even the sneakers we wear are engineered to absorb impact, protect joints, and maximize performance. Behind every “10,000 steps a day” tracker, there is a complex sensor design that relies on inertial navigation systems like accelerometers and gyroscopes, based on first principles (Newton’s Laws).
And in the background, environmental science continues to expand what is possible: clean air standards that reduce smog, weather forecasting that saves lives during storms, and renewable energy systems that give us alternatives to fossil fuels. If your city has breathable air, if you have time to evacuate before a hurricane, if you can install solar panels on your roof, you are standing on the shoulders of decades of atmospheric and environmental research.
The Fragility of Progress
The dramatic rise in life expectancy, from about 47 years in the early 1900s to nearly 78 today, was not the product of chance. It was achieved incrementally through public health advances: safe drinking water and pasteurized milk, the development of antibiotics, the widespread use of vaccines, and continuous progress in preventing and treating chronic disease. These improvements exist because of science, sustained effort, and institutions dedicated to safeguarding health. In fact, before the 1850s, life expectancy was quite stagnant.
But none of these gains are permanent. When science is dismissed, censored, or undermined, the very foundation of these protections begins to crack. History shows us what happens when vaccines are abandoned: once-eliminated diseases return. When environmental warnings are ignored, polluted air and water steal years from lives. When expertise is replaced with ideology, preventable deaths mount quietly in the background. The scaffolding we no longer notice can collapse far more quickly than it was built.
Why I Do This Work
This is why my mission is not only to celebrate science, but to show you how it has shaped all of our lives — through the technologies we use, the medical protections we rely on, and the patterns in data that reveal both risk and progress. Equally, my mission is to show you how data gets manipulated: how cherry-picking, false dichotomies, and misleading anecdotes distort our perception of risk and steer us toward distrust. When propaganda erodes trust in science, it erodes the very foundations of the everyday protections we no longer notice.
What We Can Do
This is also why it is so important, in this very moment, to correct misinformation wherever it spreads. To push back not just online, but locally: in our schools, at our libraries, in conversations with neighbors. You do not need to be a scientist to protect science. You can volunteer at a local school, mentor kids about critical thinking, or support community vaccination drives. You can help teach what science has already done for us, because those lessons are under attack.
The fight for science is not abstract. It is a fight for the daily protections that keep us alive and well: clean water, safe food, working hospitals, stable electricity, antibiotics, vaccines, and so much more.
Science is the invisible scaffolding of modern life. The ability to drink clean water, eat safe food, drive cars with seatbelts, walk into gyms, call a friend across the world, or receive life saving care in a hospital all flow from centuries of scientific discovery. None of it “just happened.” Each of these achievements required curiosity, persistence, testing, failure, and refinement, driven by expertise. Today, those very experts are under attack. When you get sick you will look for a doctor, not an influencer peddling misinformation online.
When people claim they “don’t trust science,” they rarely recognize how completely it already shapes their daily survival. Science is not some distant institution — it is the reason we live longer, healthier, freer lives than any generation before us. And it is precisely because it works so seamlessly that we often forget it is there.
I'm Nini. My expertise spans from sensor design to neural interfaces, with emphasis on nanofabrication, data science & statistics, process control, and risk analysis. I am also a wife and a mom to one little girl. TECHing it Apart emerged from my drive to share in-depth insights on topics I cover on Instagram (@niniandthebrain), where I dissect misinformation that skews public health policy and misleads consumers through poor methodology and data manipulation, as well as trends in health technology. Content here is free, but as an independent writer, I sure could use your support!
Thanks for this, Nini. Glad that you weren't hurt too badly, but, I can imaging the pain. Rest up (if you know how to do that) ;)