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Health

1,016 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 5 of 17.

241. The sacred bone at the base of your spine starts out as fiveThe sacrum, the triangular bone wedged between the hip bones, begins as five separate vertebrae that fuse only between the ages of 18 and 30. Its name comes from the Latin os sacr…
242. Activists were spreading safe sex advice before HIV even had a nameA year before HIV was isolated, San Francisco's branch of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence handed out a pamphlet called Play Fair! urging condoms, testing and personal responsi…
243. Salt marshes build themselves out of mud, grass and the rising tideA salt marsh begins as bare tidal mud. Sticky mats of blue-green algae grab silt, pioneer plants such as glasswort trap more around their stems, and roots bind it into terraces th…
244. Sarcomas are cancers of the body's scaffolding: bone, muscle, fat and vesselsCarcinomas are far more common, but sarcomas grow from connective tissue such as bone, cartilage, muscle and fat. They account for only about 1% of adult cancer diagnoses yet roug…
245. SARS disappeared in 2004, beaten by isolation and quarantine rather than drugsSARS killed about one in nine of the 8,422 people recorded as infected by June 2003, yet no new case has surfaced anywhere since 2004. No drug ever proved effective against it. Wh…
246. The COVID virus's closest known relative was found in bats in LaosSARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, is the seventh coronavirus known to infect people. Its nearest known cousin, BANAL-52, was found in bats in Feuang, Laos, and shares 96.8% o…
247. Half of savants are autistic; many others gained their gifts through brain injurySavant syndrome pairs a dazzling talent, often in memory, music, art or calculation, with social or intellectual impairment. It affects around one in a million people. Roughly hal…
248. Rituximab wipes out the body's B cells so healthy ones can regrowRituximab is a lab-made antibody that latches onto CD20, a protein carried by the immune system's B cells, and marks them for destruction. Approved in 1997 for stubborn lymphomas,…
249. A root canal hollows out a tooth's living core and refills it with tree latexInside every tooth runs a hollow of nerves and blood vessels. When that pulp becomes infected, root canal treatment drills in, scrapes the channels clean with tiny files, floods t…
250. Semaglutide lingers in the blood for a week thanks to one fatty tailSemaglutide, sold as Ozempic, Rybelsus and Wegovy, mimics a gut hormone that tells the body it has eaten. Natural GLP-1 breaks down fast, but chemists swapped two amino acids and …
251. Sensory processing disorder is widely treated, yet the major diagnostic manuals leave it outFor some people a clothing label feels unbearable, ordinary light hurts, or even their own heartbeat is distracting. Occupational therapists call this sensory processing disorder.…
252. Sepsis was linked to one in five deaths worldwide in 2017Sepsis is not an infection itself but the body's runaway reaction to one, damaging its own organs. In 2017 it affected about 49 million people and was tied to 11 million deaths, o…
253. America's favourite psychiatric drug works about as well as its rivalsSertraline, best known as Zoloft, was the most prescribed psychotropic medicine in the United States in 2016, and in 2023 it filled more than 42 million American prescriptions. De…
254. The panda's thumb is not a thumb but a bone grown inside a tendonSesamoid bones sit embedded in tendons, named for their resemblance to sesame seeds. Your kneecap is the largest. In giant and red pandas an enlarged sesamoid in the wrist became …
255. Your shoulder blade keeps knitting itself together until about age 25The scapula, named from the Latin for a trowel, starts forming in the second month of fetal life, yet parts of it stay cartilage for years. It grows from seven or more separate ce…
256. Schizoaffective disorder sits awkwardly between schizophrenia and mood illnessSchizoaffective disorder combines psychosis with bipolar or depressive episodes, and its defining test is timing: psychotic symptoms must persist for at least two weeks with no pr…
257. One condition, two filing cabinets: personality disorder in America, psychotic disorder elsewhereSchizotypal personality disorder brings odd beliefs, suspicion of others and a distinctive social anxiety, affecting roughly 3% of people. The American DSM-5 files it among person…
258. Scleroderma literally means hard skin, but the damage starts in blood vesselsScleroderma is a family of autoimmune diseases in which connective tissue overgrows, leaving skin thick, hard and ivory-smooth. The leading theory places the first injury in the l…
259. The first civilian helicopter rescue plucked five men off a sinking barge in 1945On 29 November 1945 a Sikorsky R-5, flown by the company's chief pilot Dmitry Viner with an experimental hoist, lifted all five crew from an oil barge stranded on Penfield Reef be…
260. The second most common element on Earth can slowly scar a worker's lungsSilicon and oxygen make up about three quarters of the Earth's crust, so silica is everywhere: in granite, sandstone, sand and mortar. Cutting, drilling or blasting those material…
261. Most so-called sinus headaches may actually be migraines in disguiseA throbbing face and forehead feels like a blocked sinus, yet a 2005 review concluded that most sinus headaches are really migraines. The same trigeminal nerve serves both the sin…
262. Roughly one in ten adults aged 30 to 69 may stop breathing in their sleepA 2019 analysis estimated that obstructive sleep apnea affects between 936 million and a billion people aged 30 to 69 worldwide. Many never realise it; a partner often notices fir…
263. Many venomous snakebites carry no venom at all, by the snake's choiceVenom is costly to make, so snakes ration it. A bite on something far too big to eat is often a dry bite with no venom injected, a habit called venom metering. Around 80 percent o…
264. The phrase sexual harassment only entered print in a 1973 MIT reportThe behaviour is ancient, with workplace complaints traceable to at least the 1600s, but the name is barely fifty years old. Mary Rowe used it in a 1973 report at MIT, and Cornell…
265. Sheffield's knives were famous enough for Chaucer to mention themSheffield was already known for blades in the 14th century, when Chaucer name-checked them in The Canterbury Tales. Fast streams turned grinding wheels and local gritstone sharpen…
266. Shingles is childhood chickenpox waking up decades later along a single nerveThe virus behind chickenpox never fully leaves. It hides in nerve clusters beside the spine or at the base of the skull, sometimes for decades, then can travel back down one nerve…
267. One diagnostic database counted 497 separate causes of breathlessnessFeeling short of breath is a single sensation with a staggering list of possible origins. An online medical expert system tallied 497 distinct causes in 2010, spanning heart, lung…
268. A sore right shoulder can really be a message from the gallbladderMedicine draws a sharp line between what you feel and what a doctor can observe. A headache is a symptom; a high thermometer reading is a sign. The two often overlap, sometimes mi…
269. Viagra began life in a Pfizer search for a chest-pain drugIn 1989 Pfizer chemists were hunting for a treatment for angina, the chest pain of a starved heart. The compound they found, sildenafil, went on to become Viagra, approved in 1998…
270. The first US Social Security payout was just 17 centsIn January 1937 Ernest Ackerman collected a lump sum of 17 cents, the first money Social Security ever paid out. Three years later Ida May Fuller received the first monthly cheque…
271. Marco Polo did not bring spaghetti from China, despite the legendThe story that Marco Polo carried pasta home from China began with a 16th-century misreading of his travels, and a 1929 trade newsletter even invented a sailor named Spaghetti. Th…
272. Staphylococcus is named after the grape bunches its cells formUnder a microscope, staphylococci pile up in irregular clusters that reminded early scientists of grapes, and the name joins the Greek words for a bunch of grapes and a berry. Mos…
273. Nearly nine in ten American pupils attend a public schoolTaxpayer-funded schooling is close to universal worldwide, yet the words used for it shift from country to country. Americans say public school, Canadians fund Catholic separate s…
274. The refrigerator may have helped cut stomach cancer in the WestBefore the 1930s, stomach cancer was among the leading causes of cancer death in Western countries. Rates have since fallen sharply among younger Westerners, a decline often credi…
275. The same bacterial genus gives us strep throat and Swiss cheeseStreptococcus thermophilus helps turn milk into yoghurt and Emmentaler. A close relative, Streptococcus pyogenes, causes strep throat and is estimated to kill more than 500,000 pe…
276. Why saying 'blue' is hard when the word RED is printed blueAsk someone to name the ink colour of a list of words and they slow down, and slip up, whenever the word spells a different colour. Reading is so automatic that the brain cannot s…
277. Britain's House of Commons still keeps snuff by the doorSmoking has been banned in the House of Commons since 1693, so members who wanted tobacco took it up the nose. A rose-scented snuff is still offered at the entrance, from a box Wi…
278. Sweden is the only EU country where selling snus is legalAcross the European Union, tobacco pouches tucked under the lip are banned from sale, with one exception written into Sweden's accession terms. There, about 1.1 million people use…
279. America's disability insurance pays all or nothing, never partSocial Security Disability Insurance offers no partial or temporary payments. A worker either qualifies for full monthly benefits, because a condition is expected to last at least…
280. Table sugar is a molecule so stable it can sit dissolved for yearsSucrose, the stuff of white sugar, joins one glucose and one fructose through an unusual bond linking the reactive ends of both. That quirk makes it a non-reducing sugar, so a sol…
281. A Tudor plague that killed within hours, then vanished after 1551The English sweat arrived in 1485 and moved fast, with death or recovery often coming within 8 to 10 hours. It flared in five major epidemics, struck rural areas hard unlike most …
282. Why a racing heart can end up pumping less blood, not moreIn adults, a resting pulse above 100 beats per minute counts as tachycardia. A fast heart during exercise is normal, but when the rate climbs too high the heart pumps less efficie…
283. Taurine is named after the bull because it was first found in ox bileEnergy-drink cans advertise taurine, but its name is older and odder: German chemists first pulled it from ox bile in 1827, and taurus is Latin for bull. The body makes its own su…
284. Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a tied bear, and a toy was bornOn a Mississippi hunt in November 1902, Theodore Roosevelt declined to shoot a black bear his attendants had tied to a willow tree, calling it unsporting. A newspaper cartoon of t…
285. The tumour named after the Greek word for monster can grow hair and teethA teratoma is a tumour built from several kinds of tissue at once, including hair, muscle, teeth or bone. It starts in the cells that normally become eggs or sperm, or in embryoni…
286. The Lancet began as a radical sheet that pirated lectures and won every lawsuitThomas Wakley, an English surgeon angry at medical corruption, launched The Lancet in 1823 and named it after the scalpel. He printed hospital lectures for free, without permissio…
287. An asthma drug first pulled from tea leaves is a cousin of caffeineTheophylline was extracted from tea leaves around 1888, and its name joins the old genus name for tea with the Greek word for leaf. Chemically it is a close relative of caffeine a…
288. Before it meant a policy institute, think tank was slang for your skullFrom the 1890s until the 1950s, Americans used think tank to mean the braincase, often to mock someone's poor judgment. Only later did the phrase attach to organisations like the …
289. The rule that women must cover their chests is newer than many assumeAcross much of the world, bare upper bodies for both sexes were ordinary until missionaries, conquests or Victorian manners arrived. In Korea, the women's jacket called the jeogor…
290. A parasite that needs cats appears to make rats lose their fear of themToxoplasma gondii can live in almost any warm-blooded animal, but it can only reproduce sexually inside a cat. Infected rats become less repelled by cat urine and infected mice gr…
291. Toxoplasmosis infects vast numbers of people, and most never noticeEstimates suggest between a third and a half of all humans carry the parasite behind toxoplasmosis, usually without a single symptom. The trouble comes when the immune system is w…
292. The windpipe is held open by C-shaped rings, not full circlesYour trachea is a tube about 10 to 11 centimetres long, braced by 16 to 20 rings of cartilage that are deliberately left open at the back. A band of muscle closes each gap and tig…
293. A mini-stroke fades away, but it often comes before a major oneA transient ischaemic attack brings stroke symptoms such as a drooping face, lost vision or slurred words, then vanishes, sometimes within minutes. Because the brain recovers, it …
294. Why head injuries so often change personality rather than movementWhen the brain slams against the skull, the areas most often hurt sit just above the eyes and at the front of the temples, where bony ridges line the inside of the skull. Those re…
295. An antidepressant became a go-to sleep drug despite a guideline against itTrazodone was approved in 1981 to treat depression, yet much of its fame comes from a job it was never licensed for: helping people sleep. By the early 2000s it was the second mos…
296. Why a dentist can numb exactly half your jaw and nothing elseMost of the skin's nerve territories blur into one another, but the face is mapped with unusually crisp borders. Its three sensory zones, served by branches of the trigeminal nerv…
297. Your breathing muscle sits under the ribs but is wired from the neckThe diaphragm lies at the bottom of the chest, yet its nerve supply leaves the spinal cord high in the neck. The reason is embryological: the tissue that becomes its central tendo…
298. A king raised tobacco taxes 4000 percent in 1604, and smoking still spreadJames I of England loathed tobacco so much that he wrote a treatise against it and hiked the tax on it by 4000 percent. It barely mattered: London soon had around 7,000 tobacco ou…
299. An American doctor needs a first degree; a Brazilian one starts medicine straight awayUndergraduate study sounds universal, but its shape changes at every border. In the United States, law and medicine only begin after a bachelor's degree. In Brazil a would-be doct…
300. The Underground Railroad got its name from a joke about steam balloonsIn 1842 abolitionist Thomas Smallwood mocked a baffled Baltimore constable who reckoned escaping slaves must be travelling by steam balloon or underground rail-road. The quip stuc…

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