Throughout its lifetime, tuberculosis (or TB) has gone by many names. The ancient Greeks called it “phthisis”. In the 1700s, it was “the white plague”. And in the 1800s, it was “consumption” –...
What comes to mind when you think of biotechnology? Maybe it’s Dolly the cloned sheep, or GMOs, or stem cell therapy, or DNA profiling, or mRNA vaccines. Rightly so. These are indeed examples of...
Monster stories, like roller coasters, allow us to safely experience one of our most intense emotions: fear. The existence of vampires can alleviate our dread at the thought of dying, while...
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Dr. Edward Jenner invented vaccines because of an observation he and he alone made. You see, milkmaids were renowned for their beauty. At a time when...
Have you ever heard that you should tilt your head backwards during a nosebleed? Or that you should urinate on a jellyfish sting? Or that in case of a seizure you should put a spoon into the victim...
It may seem hard to believe, but as late as 1942, male patients in some mental hospitals were castrated to quiet them. This extreme treatment did have some scientific basis, since testosterone, the...
Pathologists study the causes and effects of disease mostly through laboratory examination of samples taken from body tissues. But what does a paleopathologist do? Given that “paleo” comes from...
There are a number of common words that have different meanings for scientists; ‘cultures’ are in Petri dishes, ‘medium’ isn’t just the size of a T-shirt, and ‘cleavage’ is the process of cell...
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