I think I’ve said this before, but I’ll try to say it more clearly this time: don’t ask me questions that you could easily answer by yourself using google. Most of the time I use google too, so if you ask something like: “What’s the scientific name of the Kermode bear?” I’m just gonna search on google and write: “Ursus americanus kermodei”. You see, that’s one of the many case in which computers are better than humans: questions like this are answered faster and more precisely by wikipedia and google.

Another kind of questions that’s pretty useless to ask me are technical ones on subjects outside my field of expertise, and I suppose most of you know that I studied psychology. Although I answer a lot of questions completely unrelated to psychology, you should know that I do it by accessing the same sources of information you could use too and using my basic scientific education to try to understand something. So asking me: “Can you explain me something about Mitochondrial sirtuins?” is a waste of time, because I can’t give you the answer you expect, and most of the time I can’t give you an answer at all. You should search on google or you should ask someone who’s competent in that field (and I think it’s better). There’are plenty of blogs run by people that are highly educated in almost any subject, ask them.

But don’t get me wrong, I’m always very very happy when I see that there’s a message in my ask box, because I know that means a real person (ok, sometimes they’re bots) took the time to write to me, and I always take the time to think about the question and to try to answer, and that’s also exactly why I’m writing this.