A science writer friend gave me these great nerdy baby flash cards when my older son was born. I’ve been hoarding them for myself until they got discovered last week—hoarding them both because they’re charming (and for the moment, unsullied) and because once they were spotted, I would have to start explaining what each one […]
Health/Medicine
I’m not in the habit of feeling sorry for members of the British royal family. But last month, when the press reported that a pregnant Kate Middleton had been hospitalized with hyperemesis gravidarum, my stomach lurched in sympathy. Pregnancy-related hyperemesis is usually described as “severe morning sickness,” but that doesn’t capture the suffering it involves. […]
Last summer, I spent nearly a whole day sitting by the river in my hometown with an old friend from grade school. For most of it, we didn’t talk. It was not an easy task for me at first. Although I like quiet, the river I usually swim in is made of words: writing, talking, […]
Here’s a mystery story. Characters include: monkeys, a genius-cum-child molester, an obsessive virologist, and a lot of really scary diseases. Oh and animal models. In the mid-1980s, monkeys at the New England Primate Research Center began to die. The disease struck only a handful of rhesus macaques – monkeys from Asia that have bald, pink […]
Anna Sumner’s craving for sleep began when she was an 18-year-old high school senior. She thought nothing of it. When it followed her to college, she blamed it on stress. She was working so hard, she told herself, her body just needed the extra rest. But it was more than that. She would choose naps […]
In 2009 science writer Laurie McClellen’s husband, Pat, fell ill. The exhaustion came first. He grew too tired to exercise. Even the office left him fatigued. “He was so tired that he needed a two-hour nap every night after work,” McClellan wrote in her account of the ordeal. Then came other symptoms. One night Pat forgot […]
Most scientists are reluctant to talk about “curing” mental illness, and rightly so. The mountain is too steep: These disorders have a range of genetic and environmental causes, and symptoms vary widely from person to person. But for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — in which people are haunted for months or years by memories of […]
Back in February, a scandal broke out at Susan G. Komen for the Cure®, the breast cancer advocacy group with the trademarked pink ribbon. That scandal centered around the group’s decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood’s cancer screening efforts. But the flap over Planned Parenthood obscured an even more scandalous problem at Komen — the group’s […]