Dr Shane Bergin

speaker

581 appearances 6 recordings 2 series first heard May 2026 last heard 10 Sep

Dr Shane Bergin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Today with David McCullagh · Is it science – or is it just a myth? · 8 Jul 2026 podcast

But the dock leaf, unfortunately, is a complete placebo effect.

So if it works, it's only working in your head.

There's nothing in the dock leaf, unfortunately.

There's no alkali or basic chemical in there or an antihistamine in the dock leaf that might cause the nettle sting to go away.

If you really are bothered by the nettle sting, maybe you should wear long trousers or you might stick some baking soda on it instead and look for something that might relieve it.

Same with the bee sting, a little bit of baking soda on it, remove the sting and away you go.

This is a classic and you're talking about critical thinking.

With a lot of these myth bustings, I think it's important that you don't want to kind of say all the things you thought were true are wrong and you're stupid.

That's not the objective here.

When we do this kind of thing with students in UCD,

And what I would do is this is a classic one about the sun and the earth and the distance between them.

And I would I would get a bulb and stick it in the middle of a dark room and give them all a ball and say, I want you to build a model that shows basic things like day and night, a month, these sorts of things, a year going around the sun.

Then I'd like you to now model the seasons.

And this is where things tend to fall apart.

So students will tend to make elliptical models.

So where the Earth and the Sun are closest at the summertime and furthest away during the winter.

Of course, you build that model, you run into problems because you realise that the Earth would be close to the Sun twice in any orbit.

So you'd have two summers in one year.

And also when it's summer here in the northern hemisphere, it would also be summer in the southern hemisphere.

So those things don't match with reality.

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