Once upon a time in Asia Minor, people started to tell the tale of The Smith and the Devil. The plot was simple: A craftsman trades his soul for supernatural power, then uses his magic to trap the diabolical creature with whom he made the deal.
Folklorists, including the Brothers Grimm, have long assumed the story, as well as other tales such as Rumpelstiltskin and Beauty and the Beast, is ancient. Now, there’s firm evidence for that from Durham University anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani an ...read more
While Mark Post, physiology chair at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, shares Mironov’s optimism about in vitro meat’s potential, he says the future isn’t in at-home devices.“Quite frankly, I don’t see that as a very pragmatic solution,” says Post, whose name has become synonymous with the movement. He debuted his lab-produced meat (cost: $325,000 per burger) in a highly publicized taste test in London in 2013.Instead, the focus now is on ramping up ef ...read more
In 1842, English anatomist Richard Owen proposed the term dinosauria for the strange animal fossils he and colleagues had begun to study. Owen drew from ancient Greek to create the word: deinos, meaning “terrible” in the awesome-to-behold sense, and sauros, “reptile” or “lizard.”
The truth is, those early paleontologists — and generations of their successors — got those terrible lizards, well, terribly wrong: T. rex as a tail-dragging lunk, tank-li ...read more
A marathoner completes a race through the Borneo rainforest, then pays the price with a deadly ailment.
The Borneo wetlands teem with darting birds, slithering snakes and dangling orangutans. Blood-sucking leeches and slim, coiled microbes also abound. Some folks find out about these guys the hard way. Mary, 46, was a longtime marathon runner from Southern California. She was in my office at UCLA Medical Center for a checkup because she was training for a competition in Borneo, a rugged rai ...read more
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Pancreatic cancer is notoriously difficult to treat, but researchers’ latest immunotherapy tactics may give them the upper hand.
Most people don’t even know they have a pancreas, let alone what it does. One of my patients, Richard, was no exception. He came to see me after experiencing several months of weight loss and fatigue. A CT scan revealed a concerning spot on his pancreas as well as other spots on his liver, and a biopsy confirmed our worst fears: He had pancreatic cancer ...read more
