TOK situations in the natural sciences
Knowledge of the physical world produced through observation, modelling and controlled intervention. Its authority rests less on the certainty of any single result than on the community practices that expose results to being overturned.
- Africa
When a government doubted the virus
South Africa's government under Mbeki gave platform to AIDS-dissident scientists and delayed antiretroviral rollout, and later epidemiological studies…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Responsibility
- Southeast Asia
The divers evolution equipped
The Bajau of Southeast Asia free-dive to remarkable depths, and genetic studies found enlarged spleens consistent with selection for diving over generations.…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
Counting Bhopal's victims
Official, judicial and activist counts of deaths from the 1984 gas leak differ by tens of thousands, diverging on time windows, causation standards and whose…
Enduring · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Responsibility
- India
Evacuating a million people on a forecast
Before Cyclone Fani struck Odisha in 2019, forecasts triggered the evacuation of over a million people, and the death toll stayed in double digits where a…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Certainty
- Responsibility
- Africa
Two names for one ancestor
The fossil skeleton found in Ethiopia in 1974 is Lucy to the world, after a Beatles song playing in the researchers' camp, and Dinkinesh, meaning you are…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Interpretation
- Culture
- South Asia
The third umpire and the ball that never arrived
A batter is given not out. The fielding side reviews. On the big screen, a tracking system reconstructs the ball's flight, and then continues it past the point…
Enduring · The natural sciences · Mathematics
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- Certainty
- Southeast Asia
The small skeleton that split palaeoanthropology
The metre-tall skeleton found on Flores in 2003 was declared a new human species by some researchers and a diseased modern human by others, with both camps…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- Latin America
Bones as witnesses
Forensic teams exhuming mass graves in Guatemala and Argentina matched skeletal evidence to survivor accounts, converting disputed atrocities into documented…
Enduring · History · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- India
The Green Revolution's two ledgers
High-yield wheat varieties helped end famine-scale scarcity in India, and decades later the same programme is cited for depleted aquifers, soil damage and…
Enduring · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Values
- East Asia
Grams of asteroid, years of travel
Japan's Hayabusa2 spent years travelling to asteroid Ryugu to bring back a few grams of material, though telescopes and spectra had already characterised it…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Justification
- Oceania
Sailing to Tahiti without instruments
Scholars long argued Polynesian settlement was accidental drift, doubting deliberate navigation across such distances was possible. In 1976 the Hokulea sailed…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Justification
- Culture
- Africa
The appetite plant and the patent
South African researchers patented an appetite-suppressing compound from hoodia, a plant the San had long used on hunts, without initial benefit-sharing;…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- East Asia
The cloning papers that unravelled
Hwang Woo-suk's celebrated human cloning results, published in a top journal and backed by national pride, were exposed as fabricated partly through anonymous…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Responsibility
- Objectivity
- The Middle East and North Africa
Testing vision instead of theorising it
Ibn al-Haytham's eleventh-century optics rejected the reigning theory that eyes emit rays, arguing from designed experiments with dark chambers and controlled…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Justification
- Latin America
The satellite data that cost a director his job
In 2019 Brazil's space agency published satellite figures showing sharply rising Amazon deforestation; the president called the numbers lies and the agency's…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Objectivity
- India
Jantar Mantar: architecture as instrument
In the 1720s Jai Singh II built enormous masonry instruments in Jaipur and Delhi, sundials and sextants the size of buildings, to sharpen astronomical tables.…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Explanation
- Oceania
The raft, the genes, and Pacific origins
Heyerdahl's 1947 Kon-Tiki voyage showed a raft could drift from South America into Polynesia, and the spectacle carried his settlement theory for decades.…
Enduring · History · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Justification
- India
Two forecasts of the same monsoon
Farmers across India read bird behaviour, flowering patterns and wind for the monsoon's arrival, while the meteorological department runs ensemble models, and…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- South Asia
Was this flood climate change?
After Pakistan's 2022 floods displaced millions, attribution scientists estimated how much more likely warming had made the rainfall, and the numbers entered…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Certainty
- Responsibility
- South Asia
A nationwide experiment with no pilot
In 2021 Sri Lanka banned synthetic fertiliser imports almost overnight, aiming for fully organic agriculture; harvests collapsed and the decision was reversed…
Enduring · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- India
Reconstruction surgery in an ancient compendium
The Sushruta Samhita describes surgical techniques including nasal reconstruction, and European surgeons in the colonial period documented Indian practitioners…
Enduring · History · The natural sciences
- Truth
- Culture
- India
How do you count wild tigers?
India's tiger estimates moved from pugmark tracing to camera traps and stripe-pattern recognition, and the headline number rose partly because the method…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Certainty
- East Asia
A malaria cure found in a fourth-century text
Screening traditional remedies, Tu Youyou found a fourth-century Chinese text describing cold extraction of sweet wormwood, adjusted her method accordingly,…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
The turmeric patent and the grandmother's proof
In 1995 a US patent was granted for using turmeric to heal wounds, a practice Indian households had relied on for generations. India's research council…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- East Asia
The instrument that felt distant earthquakes
Zhang Heng's second-century seismoscope reportedly indicated an earthquake in a distant province before messengers arrived to confirm it, using a mechanism…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Explanation
- Latin America
Telescopes on other people's mountains
The Atacama's dry altitude makes it ideal for observatories, and the same plateaus carry deep significance for Indigenous communities who were rarely central…
Current · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- Latin America
The vine, the lab, and the elders
As clinical interest in ayahuasca-derived compounds accelerates, Amazonian communities that developed and ritually govern the brew's use are often absent from…
Current · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- India
Ayurveda meets the randomised trial
India funds research ministries for both biomedicine and traditional systems like Ayurveda, and disputes recur over whether centuries of documented clinical…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- Oceania
Fire knowledge, re-admitted
After Australia's catastrophic 2019 to 2020 bushfires, agencies expanded engagement with Aboriginal cultural burning, low-intensity fire practices refined over…
Current · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
Whose air quality number is right?
On a smoggy Delhi morning, official monitors, embassy sensors and cheap home devices can disagree by wide margins, and the choice of averaging window changes…
Current · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Objectivity
- Global
The crash test body was a man
Vehicle safety testing standardised for decades on dummies modelled on an average male body, and injury statistics show women faring worse in comparable…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Values
- Objectivity
- The Middle East and North Africa
Measuring heat where people must work
Gulf states ban outdoor work during set summer hours, defined by clock and calendar rather than by measured heat stress on given sites, while researchers argue…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- Global
Manufacturing consensus, in the good sense
IPCC reports pass through nested drafting, expert review and line-by-line governmental approval of summaries, producing calibrated language about confidence…
Current · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Objectivity
- Global
Origins, evidence and access
Investigations into COVID-19's origins produced assessments hedged at low confidence and split between agencies, with early data incomplete and access to sites…
Current · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Certainty