Is breast cancer threatening your life? This Susan G. Komen for the Cure® ad leaves no doubt about who’s to blame —you are.
Health/Medicine
Some 40 years ago, researchers at the University of Missouri were searching for an alternative to the condom — a cheap, trustworthy and reversible form of male birth control. For their first study, published in 1975, they strapped anesthetized rats, face-down, to a plexiglass platform with a cut-out cup full of water for their dangling […]
One bright day last December, certain science bloggers who had happily discovered a shared taste for classic mystery writers, all wrote synchronous posts about the science in mystery books. These books, we thought, have a surprising amount of good science in them. So we’re doing it again (for titles, see bottom of post). This post […]
In 2001, Mary Leitao noticed something odd: a fiber poking out of an irritated patch of skin on her two-year-old son’s lip. In the weeks to come, more fibers emerged. Leitao examined them under the light of her RadioShack microscope, but she couldn’t figure out what they were. So she turned to the internet. There she […]
In the spring of the year 73, thousands of Roman soldiers raided Masada, a fortress on top of a cliff in the Judean Desert. For seven years, the Jews had tried, unsuccessfully, to split from the Roman empire, and Masada was the last holdout. According to the ancient historian Josephus, when the Romans breached Masada’s walls, […]
On a hot and humid day in October, a man wandered through the city of Mirebalais, Haiti. He was naked, but his neighbors didn’t pay much attention. The man had always been crazy. In fact, townspeople called him “moun fou” — lunatic or fool. He headed toward the bank of the Latem River, where he […]
This is how it happens for me: I’m completely asleep, and then something terrible creeps across the room, reaches spindly, pincer-like fingers for my hand, and pinches. That pinch is what wakes me up in terror, gasping and whimpering and trying desperately to pull my arm under the covers. But I can’t. I can’t do […]
Britain in March 1946 was a dank, hungry, but optimistic place as people grappled with winter, rationing and the aftermath of World War 2. It was also the time that the country gave birth to something historically and scientifically remarkable. 13,687 babies born during one March week were weighed, measured and enrolled into what has, […]
