In the dark, early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Michael Toce noticed a surprising trend. As a pediatric-emergency-medicine doctor at Boston Children’s Hospital, he was seeing lots of kids who had taken too much medication. The problem wasn’t that they’d overdosed on opioids or painkillers or marijuana. Instead, they’d swallowed too much melatonin, an over-the-counter […]
In 1856, an amateur chemist named William Henry Perkin mixed a batch of chemicals that he hoped, in vain, would yield the malaria drug quinine. When Perkin’s failed experiment turned purple, a hue so vivid that it could stain silks without fading, he realized he’d stumbled upon a different marvel of modernity: a commercially viable […]
Updated at 1:45 p.m. ET on May 17, 2023 In March, the World Health Organization issued a dire warning that was also completely obvious: Nearly everyone on the planet consumes too much salt. And not just a sprinkle too much; on average, people consume more than double what is advisable every single day, raising the […]
Elizabeth Holmes isn’t fooling anyone. Well, almost anyone. The convicted fraudster and founder of the defunct medical start-up Theranos, is waiting to begin an 11-year sentence in federal prison. She received this punishment for misleading investors about her lab-in-a-box technology, which she claimed could run hundreds of tests on a few drops of blood. In […]
For as long as I can remember, I have been that friend—the one who, from May to November, gets invited to every outdoor soiree. It’s not because I make the best desserts, even though I do. It’s because, with me around, the shoes can come off and the DEET can stay sheathed: No one else […]
More than three years ago, the coronavirus pandemic officially became an emergency, and much of the world froze in place while politicians and public-health advisers tried to figure out what on Earth to do. Now the emergency is officially over—the World Health Organization declared so on Friday, and the Biden administration will do the same […]
Emergency responses—being, well, emergency responses—aren’t designed to last forever, and this morning, the World Health Organization declared the one that’s been in place for the COVID-19 pandemic since January 2020 officially done. “This virus is here to stay. It is still killing, and it’s still changing,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the WHO, […]
In October of 1858, John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet, were traveling near Avignon, France. She developed a cough, which seemed like just a minor inconvenience, until it got worse. Soon Harriet was racked with pain, not able to sleep or even lie down. Mill frantically wrote to a doctor in Nice, begging him […]
At Christmas dinner, Jenny Burriss remembers eating exactly one bite of beef before feeling full. She had just upped her dose of semaglutide—the diabetes and obesity drug better known by the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy—and her appetite had plummeted. She had also lost her taste for alcohol, a side effect of the drug. So […]
Most likely, the person’s skin color will change. An ashy tone might creep in, or they could turn a shade of blue. If too much fluid pools in their mouth or lungs and mixes with air, foam will appear at their lips. There might be a sound, too—that of light snoring. These are some of […]
