Intellect PlusHealth, medicine and disease
991 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 10 of 17.
A crocus remedy for swollen joints from 1500 BC now protects heartsExtracts of the autumn crocus were eased onto aching joints some 3,500 years ago. Their active compound, colchicine, is still a mainstay for gout, and in 2023 American regulators …
Ciprofloxacin treats anthrax and plague, yet guidelines often keep it in reserveBayer's ciprofloxacin can tackle infections from anthrax and bubonic plague to hospital-acquired urinary infections, and the World Health Organization calls it critically importan…
The word cisgender borrows the same Latin prefix Romans used for GaulRomans called northern Italy Cisalpine Gaul, meaning Gaul on their side of the Alps. That same Latin prefix, cis, now sits in chemistry, cell biology and the word cisgender, first…
Mocked by his own family, Claudius survived the purges and became emperorA limp, a stammer and a tremor left Claudius shunned by his relatives and kept out of public life. Rivals saw no threat in him, so he outlived the bloodletting under Tiberius and …
Stopping a bleed takes three overlapping stages, not one simple clotWithin moments of a vessel being cut, blood begins turning from liquid to gel. Platelets pile into a temporary plug while a cascade of clotting factors spins fibrin threads to rei…
Coats of arms began as battle clothing and ended up as legal propertyThe phrase coat of arms once meant a literal garment: the decorated surcoat a knight wore over his mail, in Old French a cote a armer. By the mid-1300s English speakers had transf…
A parasite in raw fish helps explain where bile duct cancer clustersBile duct cancer is rare in Western countries, at roughly 0.5 to 2 cases per 100,000 people a year. In parts of Thailand the rate reaches 60. Much of that gap traces to liver fluk…
Vitamin D3 is really a hormone precursor your skin makes from sunlightCholecalciferol, better known as vitamin D3, is manufactured in your skin when sunlight hits it. The liver and kidneys then convert it, in two steps, into calcitriol, the active f…
Choline is essential to eat, yet officially it is not a vitaminYour liver makes choline, just not enough of it. The shortfall has to come from eggs, meat, fish, beans and similar foods, because the body needs choline to build cell membranes a…
A misfolded protein is spreading through deer herds across North AmericaChronic wasting disease was first spotted in captive mule deer in Colorado in 1967. It is caused by prions, rogue proteins that force healthy ones to misfold, and it is always fat…
Columbus's scouts found Cubans smoking rolled leaves, and Europe soon followedWhen Christopher Columbus sent scouts inland in Cuba in 1492, they met Taino people inhaling smoke from dried herbs wrapped in a leaf. Within four decades tobacco was on sale in L…
Some of the world's centenarians may exist only on pension paperworkUnited Nations estimates of people aged 100 or more have soared, from 23,000 in 1950 to 935,000 in 2024. But research that won a 2024 Ig Nobel Prize argues the figures are inflate…
A headache that vanishes when you lie down can signal leaking brain fluidThe brain floats in cerebrospinal fluid held inside a tough membrane called the dura. When that membrane springs a hole, fluid drains away and the brain sags. The telltale sign is…
Chikungunya's name comes from a Makonde word meaning to become contortedFirst identified in Tanzania in 1952, chikungunya takes its name from the bent posture of people wracked by its joint pain. Spread by the same daytime-biting mosquitoes that carry…
Chloroform eased Queen Victoria's labour and sparked a bitter fight over creditIn 1847 Edinburgh obstetrician James Young Simpson announced that chloroform could put patients under. A rival, Robert Mortimer Glover, had described its anaesthetic effects five …
Extreme stress can stun the heart muscle in what doctors call broken heart syndromeCardiomyopathy is not one illness but a family of diseases of the heart muscle itself. The muscle may thicken, balloon and weaken, or stiffen. One variety, Takotsubo, is triggered…
CPR rarely restarts a heart; its real job is buying the brain timeTelevision makes chest compressions look like a reset button. In reality CPR alone seldom gets a heart beating again. Its purpose is to push some oxygen-rich blood to the brain an…
Catatonia can freeze a person for days, yet many remember everything afterwardsSomeone with catatonia may hold a strange posture against gravity, stay silent for days, or instead move frantically without purpose. Long tied to schizophrenia, it turns up more …
Cefalexin works by impersonating a building block of bacterial cell wallsFirst sold as Keflex in 1969, cefalexin is still among the most prescribed antibiotics, with over 7 million American prescriptions in 2023. Its trick is molecular mimicry: it rese…- Up to 30 percent of suspected leg cellulitis cases turn out to be something elseCellulitis, a bacterial infection of the deeper skin layers, is one of the commonest reasons for hospital admission. Yet it is surprisingly easy to get wrong. In the United States…
The word Canadian once meant only French colonists along the St LawrenceIn the 16th to 18th centuries, Canadien referred to French settlers in what are now Quebec and Ontario. The first known use covering English settlers too came in June 1792, when P…
Most women self-treating a yeast infection in one study didn't have oneCandida yeasts live harmlessly on most of us, held in check by the immune system and by competing bacteria. When that balance tips, they cause thrush. Yet in a 2002 study only 33%…
Cardiff's college charter was the first in Wales to admit womenWhen the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire received its royal charter in 1884, it became the first in Wales to allow women to enrol and to ban religious tests fo…
An enlarged heart can signal disease, or simply years of endurance trainingCardiomegaly, the medical name for an enlarged heart, usually means the organ has been forced to work too hard by high blood pressure, valve disease or blocked arteries. Yet endur…
A composer performed music with his brainwaves in 1965, before brain-computer interfaces had a nameIn Alvin Lucier's Music for Solo Performer, the performer produces alpha waves, and amplified EEG signals set percussion instruments rattling through loudspeakers. That was 1965. …
Breast milk changes its recipe during a single feed, and between day and nightHuman milk is not one fixed fluid. Its fat content climbs steadily as a baby feeds, some of its nucleotides are made mostly at night and others by day, and its antibodies are tail…
The antidepressant that behaves differently from most others, including helping smokers quitBupropion, sold as Wellbutrin, works on norepinephrine and dopamine rather than serotonin. Unlike most antidepressants it usually does not cause sexual side effects, weight gain o…
A waved arm in a window sparked New York's 1788 riot over stolen bodiesMedical schools once got their bodies from the gallows and from grave robbers. In 1788 a New York doctor waved a dissected arm at a boy peering through a window, the boy's father …
Julius Caesar almost certainly was not born by caesarean sectionThe popular story says the operation is named after Julius Caesar's birth. But until modern times the surgery seems always to have killed the mother, and Caesar's mother Aurelia l…- Mad cow disease spread through cattle feed made from other cattleBritain's mad cow epidemic was driven by a misfolded protein that survives normal cooking and was recycled back into cattle through meat-and-bone meal. More than 184,000 British c…
Biofilms are microbial cities that can resist antibiotics thousands of times betterDental plaque is a biofilm: a crowd of microbes glued together in a slime they manufacture themselves. Inside that matrix, bacteria share food, trade genes and shrug off threats, …
Bipolar II is not a milder bipolar, despite its gentler highsBipolar II swaps full mania for hypomania, a lift in mood and energy that can pass for a productive streak. That subtlety is the trap: people usually seek help only when depressed…
Most people carry a minor birth anomaly without ever knowing itA curved little finger, a tiny pit near the ear, a dimple at the base of the spine: careful examination finds at least one minor anomaly in many, perhaps most, people. Birth defec…
The bob haircut was once a shocking act of female independenceWhen young women queued outside barbers in the early 1920s to lose hair they had grown for years, older onlookers saw rebellion. A Polish stylist credited with making the short bo…
Body dysmorphic disorder is a quest to look normal, not vainPeople with body dysmorphic disorder may spend hours each day fixated on a flaw that others barely notice or cannot see at all. Unlike vanity, the goal is not to look exceptional …
Borderline personality disorder's name comes from an outdated ideaThe word borderline once meant a patient hovering between neurosis and psychosis, a notion clinicians now consider imprecise. The label stuck to a condition defined by unstable re…
Botox is diluted from the deadliest natural substance ever recordedThe protein that smooths frown lines is the same one that causes botulism, and chemists rank it as the most lethal natural substance on record. Injected at a lethal dose, type A t…
The Big Five personality traits were distilled from dictionariesPsychologists did not invent openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism from theory. They mined the words people use to describe one another, trimmin…- At Bhopal, three safety systems that could have stopped the gas were all out of actionShortly after midnight on 3 December 1984, a storage tank at a pesticide plant in Bhopal began venting methyl isocyanate over a sleeping city. Refrigeration, a scrubber and a flar…
- The world's most common cancer rarely spreads, and a third appear where sun never reachesBasal-cell carcinoma makes up at least 32% of all cancers worldwide, yet it grows slowly and seldom travels beyond its starting point. Sunlight is behind about two-thirds of cases…
A century-old tuberculosis vaccine protects well in Britain and barely at all near the equatorBCG, first used in 1921, is still the only licensed vaccine against tuberculosis, and around 100 million children a year were receiving it by 2004. Yet its protection is a puzzle:…
In Bell's palsy the forehead usually freezes too, a clue that separates it from strokeWithin a day or two, one side of the face can suddenly stop obeying: the eyebrow droops, the smile goes lopsided, taste changes and ordinary sounds may seem painfully loud. Bell's…
America's oldest public hospital began as a two-storey almshouse in 1736Bellevue grew from New York's first permanent almshouse and a farm used to quarantine yellow fever victims. Along the way it racked up a startling list of American firsts, from nu…
Ben Chaplin was born Benedict Greenwood and borrowed his mother's maiden name for the stageBefore Hollywood cast him opposite Uma Thurman and Nicole Kidman, Ben Chaplin was juggling office work and a stint crunching numbers as a statistician for London's transport autho…- A benign tumour is not cancer, but it is not always harmless eitherBenign sounds reassuring, and in medicine it mainly means one thing: the growth does not invade nearby tissue or spread around the body. Moles and fibroids fit the label. Yet a ha…
- By 1987 over a quarter of US symphony players had used heart pills against stage frightBeta blockers were built to protect hearts, blunting the effect of adrenaline on the body. Musicians soon found they also steadied trembling hands, and a 1987 survey of the 51 lar…
Weight-loss surgery works mainly by resetting hunger hormones, not just shrinking stomachsBariatric surgery is often pictured as simply making the stomach smaller. The main procedures actually shift the gut hormones that govern hunger and fullness, establishing a new s…- The milky anaesthetic behind most surgery was invented by a vetPropofol looks like milk because it is suspended in soybean oil and lecithin. John B. Glen, a British veterinary anaesthesiologist at ICI, first made it in 1973. It now dominates …
- The prostate is a gland that also works as a muscular switchWalnut-sized and weighing about 11 grams, the prostate does two jobs. It makes a slightly alkaline fluid that helps sperm survive, and its internal muscles flip the urethra betwee…
Dutch psychiatrists must sit through 50 sessions of their own therapyA psychiatrist is a medical doctor first, which is why the job can involve brain scans, blood tests and prescriptions as well as talking. In the Netherlands, trainees need at leas…
Traffic jams may stress you more than getting marriedWeddings, divorces and house moves feel like the big stressors, but because they are rare, researchers find they matter less than the small stuff. Daily hassles such as deadlines,…- A drooping eyelid can be the first clue to a hidden aneurysmPtosis, a sagging upper eyelid, is often just a sign of ageing muscles. But it can also flag diabetes, a tumour pressing on a nerve, a silent brain aneurysm or myasthenia gravis. …
The brown surgical antiseptic works by rationing its iodine very slowlyPlain iodine kills germs well but stings, stains and poisons tissue. In 1955 two Philadelphia researchers bound it to a polymer called povidone, so only a trickle of free iodine e…
The playground was invented by a nineteenth-century London schoolmasterEarly schools admitted only children who could already read, which shut out orphans and factory workers' kids. Reformers answered with infant schools: Robert Owen's in New Lanark …- Each extra week in the womb transforms a premature baby's oddsA baby born at 22 weeks has roughly a 6 percent chance of surviving. By 25 weeks that climbs to about 72 percent. Preterm birth, any delivery before 37 weeks, is the leading cause…
- In this rare brain disease, trouble looking down causes the fallsProgressive supranuclear palsy often begins with unexplained falls in people in their sixties. One reason is striking: patients gradually lose the ability to move their eyes volun…
- Rheumatology swapped the scalpel for the pill around the year 2000Rheumatologists handle more than a hundred inflammatory conditions, from gout to lupus, many now understood as the immune system misfiring. In 1970 a Norwegian estimate held that …
- Richard Dawkins coined the word meme in a 1976 biology bookLong before memes meant internet jokes, a young Oxford zoologist invented the term in The Selfish Gene, a book arguing that evolution is best seen from the gene's point of view. R…
- Fluid in the lungs is usually a heart problem wearing a disguisePulmonary edema means the tiny air sacs of the lungs are filling with fluid, so oxygen struggles to cross into the blood. It looks like a lung disease on an X-ray, but very often …
Why the biggest lung clots are often the ones that don't hurtA pulmonary embolism is usually a clot that breaks off in a leg vein and lodges in a lung artery. You might expect bigger clots to cause worse pain. Often the reverse holds: large…