We all want to forget about the grief and destruction caused by COVID-19. But, sadly, public health concerns such as major pandemics could be even more frequent in the future: A 2021 study analyzed data on previous disease outbreaks and found that the rate of novel pandemics breaking loose to infect humans is rising. What's more, the risk of outbreaks will increase three-fold over the coming decades. “One may erroneously presume that one can afford to wait another 100 years before experiencing ...read more
No matter how you feel about TikTok, you must admit it can get us thinking. #GirlMath (or #GirlMaths if you're Down Under or Across the Pond) went viral when it spoofed the ways women supposedly play mind games about spending. Why Did Girl Math Become a Trend? Girl Math is enough to make a feminist's blood curdle (to be clear, there's also Boy Math and even Corporate Math, although those memes don't focus so much on shopping). But Girl Math is also, well, funny. And it hit a nerve. The trend li ...read more
This story was originally published in our Jul/Aug 2023 issue as "Breaking the Interspecies Barrier." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.On a warm fall day in 2021, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) surgeon Jayme Locke peered into a sliced-open abdomen and braced for the task ahead of her: transplanting two pig kidneys into a brain-dead human recipient for the first time in history. Locke had done experimental surgeries before, even putting pig kidneys into babo ...read more
This story was originally published in our Sept/Oct 2023 issue as "Cold Comfort" Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.One year before the U.S. Civil War ended, an embargo had brought the southern ice trade to a halt, causing the region’s chefs, bartenders, nurses and doctors to lose access to the northern ice they’d come to rely on for preserving food, making drinks and healing bodies. Without ice, the South was suffering.What they didn’t know was that 20 years bef ...read more
Most people will agree — moving is a pain. It’s exhausting to find boxes, pack up possessions, and haul them into a vehicle. Given the difficulty, most people stay put in their residences for years at a time.But living in the same location is a relatively new human experience. For hundreds of thousands of years, people were nomadic. They sometimes stayed in a place for mere hours before moving on.Eventually, most people gave up the nomadic lifestyle. Scientists are still learning about ancie ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine