When most people think of science they think of test tubes and electron microscopes and double blind studies. The Petri Project posts a lot about this sort of science—about scientists doing big important studies to advance human knowledge about fancy sounding details like oxytocin, blood flow to the hippocampus, minor statistical correlations in social networks, etc.
On the other hand, there’s the scientific method. The scientific method is not something you need a lab for. We can all do science—examine a problem, come up with a hypothesis, design an experiment, collect data, and analyse the results—on ourselves. When we do experiments on ourselves, This isn’t the kind of science that the NIH is going to fund—a sample size of 1 doesn’t mean much for human knowledge. But I’d hypothesize that it can have a lot more applicability for our everyday lives than “real” scientific research.
