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1,016 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 4 of 17.

181. 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…
182. 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…
183. The cervix moves, softens and changes its lining throughout a woman's lifeOnly about 4 centimetres long, the cervix links the vagina to the uterus and has been described by anatomists since Hippocrates. It is far from static: it rises and softens near o…
184. 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…
185. 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 …
186. 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…
187. 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…
188. 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 …
189. 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…
190. 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…
191. 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…
192. 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%…
193. 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…
194. 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…
195. 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. …
196. 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…
197. 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…
198. 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 …
199. 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…
200. 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…
201. 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, …
202. 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…
203. 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…
204. 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…
205. 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 …
206. The original scapegoat was a goat sent into the desert in LeviticusOnce a year, according to Leviticus, the High Priest loaded the sins of the whole people onto a goat and drove it into the wilderness towards a mysterious figure called Azazel. Ol…
207. 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…
208. 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…
209. 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…
210. 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…
211. 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…
212. 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:…
213. 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…
214. 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…
215. 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…
216. 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…
217. The German word for glasses, Brille, comes from beryl, the mineral behind emeraldsWhen 13th-century Italians made the first spectacles, ordinary glass was too cloudy, so lenses were ground from beryl or rock crystal. That is why Germans still call glasses Brill…
218. 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…
219. 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…
220. 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 …
221. 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…
222. 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…
223. Peruvians were chewing coca leaves some 8,000 years agoCoffee, a glass of wine, an antidepressant and a banned hallucinogen share one trait: they change how the brain works. Humans have sought such substances for at least 10,000 years…
224. 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,…
225. 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. …
226. 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…
227. 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 …
228. 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…
229. 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…
230. 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 …
231. 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…
232. The famous story about John Ruskin's wedding night probably isn't trueFor decades writers repeated that the art critic John Ruskin fled his marriage in horror at discovering his bride had body hair, having only seen smooth marble nudes. It makes a n…
233. 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 …
234. 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…
235. A random forest gets smarter by making each tree slightly ignorantOne decision tree trained on data tends to memorise noise and predict badly. Grow hundreds of them, show each a different random slice of the examples and hide some features from …
236. Medical residents are called that because they once lived in hospitalsIn the 19th century, young doctors in training slept in hospital dormitories, on call every second or third night, paid in little more than meals, a bed and clean laundry. The nam…
237. In Rett syndrome, brain cells go quiet rather than dieRett syndrome strikes almost only girls, usually after a normal-seeming first six months, taking away speech and purposeful hand use. For years it looked like a brain slowly wasti…
238. How a warning label nearly wiped out a deadly childhood brain diseaseIn 1980 American doctors reported 555 cases of Reye syndrome, a rare, fast-moving illness that swells the brain and damages the liver in children recovering from flu or chickenpox…
239. Rheumatoid arthritis is an immune attack that reaches far beyond jointsRheumatoid arthritis is often pictured as sore knuckles in older age. In reality it is the immune system turning on the lining of the joints, most often starting in middle age and…
240. Your shoulder is a golf ball on a tee, held by four small musclesThe shoulder's ball sits in a socket so small and shallow that anatomists compare it to a golf ball balanced on a tee. Four muscles, the rotator cuff, clamp it in place so the big…

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