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How can a medicine work before we fully understand why?

Showing that a medicine changes an outcome and explaining every step of how it works are different research tasks. Paracetamol offers a case for exploring that distinction. Evidence from patients, laboratory experiments, and proposed biological pathways answers different questions, so an uncertain mechanism does not make every explanation equally plausible.

5–7 min

Questions you could explore

  • What evidence tests an effect, and what evidence tests a proposed mechanism?
  • How would you distinguish a laboratory finding from an established explanation in people?

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Health and the body

How does daylight set the body’s clock?

Feeling sleepy at night involves more than counting the hours since you woke up. Internal daily rhythms respond to outside cues, with light helping coordinate the body's sense of time.

3–5 min

How does daylight set the body’s clock?

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How does a vaccine give the immune system a memory?

The immune system can respond differently to something it has encountered before. Vaccines make use of recognition and memory, though different vaccine types introduce the relevant information in different ways.

4–5 min

How does a vaccine give the immune system a memory?

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Health and the body

Why won’t an antibiotic treat a viral cold?

The word infection covers illnesses caused by very different organisms. An antibiotic that helps against certain bacteria has no matching target in the viruses that cause a cold.

2–3 min

Why won’t an antibiotic treat a viral cold?

Health and the body2–3 minThe word infection covers illnesses caused by very different organisms. An antibiotic that helps against certain bacteria has no matching target in the viruses that cause a cold.

How can a medicine work before we fully understand why? | Speech Topic | speaking.app