Intellect Plus
Health
1,016 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 6 of 17.
- Norway was handed to Sweden as compensation for Finland, then left peacefullyAfter Sweden lost Finland to Russia in 1809, the great powers let it take Norway as a consolation prize. Norway refused, wrote its own constitution and elected its own king before…
- The University of Miami began life nicknamed Cardboard CollegeThe University of Miami opened in 1926 just as Florida's land boom collapsed and a great hurricane struck. Its first building sat half finished for over twenty years, classes met …
- Why a sneeze can defeat the bladder, and why so few people say soStaying dry depends on a pressure contest: the ring of muscle closing the urethra normally squeezes harder than the bladder pushes. Damage that ring, its supporting tissue or its …
- Critics sneered at McPaper, then newspapers everywhere copied its colour graphicsWhen USA Today launched in 1982 with short stories, bright colour and weather maps, rivals mocked it as television you could wrap fish in. Within five years it claimed the largest…
- A frog's heart revealed that the vagus nerve talks in chemicalsOtto Loewi stimulated the vagus nerve of a frog's heart and watched it slow. He then moved fluid from that heart onto a second one with no nerve attached, and it slowed too. That …
- Chickenpox never truly leaves: the virus hides in your nerves for decadesThe virus behind childhood chickenpox does not depart when the spots heal. It retreats into nerve clusters near the spine and skull and can lie quiet for decades. In roughly a thi…
- In Japan, half of all dementia comes from damaged blood vesselsVascular dementia is what happens when a string of strokes, some too small to notice, starves patches of brain of oxygen and glucose. It is the second most common dementia in olde…
- Butter, olive oil and your body fat share one simple molecular shapeAlmost every fat you eat or store is a triglyceride: one glycerol backbone with three fatty acid tails attached. Whether it sits as a solid block of lard or pours as olive oil dep…
- Vertigo is a false sense of motion, and its timing hints at the causeVertigo is the conviction that you or the room is spinning or swaying when nothing is moving at all. It is the commonest kind of dizziness, and how long an attack lasts, under a m…
- A pronghorn antelope may use oxygen three times faster than the fittest humanVO2 max measures how much oxygen your body can burn per minute at full effort. The highest human figure ever tested, 101.1 millilitres per kilogram per minute, belongs to the Norw…
- When you vomit, your stomach barely squeezes; your diaphragm and belly do the workThrowing up feels like the stomach heaving, but it hardly contracts at all. Instead the brain coordinates a deep breath, a wave running backwards from the small intestine, and cru…
- Somerset Maugham was born inside the British embassy to dodge French conscriptionFrance was about to make every boy born on its soil to foreign parents a citizen liable for military service. So the British ambassador set up a maternity ward inside the embassy,…
- Around 130 papillomavirus types exist, and each wart shape tends to have its own culpritsWarts are harmless growths caused by the human papillomavirus, which slips in through small breaks in the skin. Most people catch one at some point, and most warts vanish on their…
- Water is among the least toxic substances, yet too much too fast can killRats tolerate more than 90 grams of water per kilogram of body weight, making it one of the least poisonous compounds known. Even so, a person has died after drinking six litres i…
- The WHO's essential medicines list has grown from 208 drugs to 523Since 1977 the World Health Organization has published a list of the medicines a health system most needs: effective, safe and good value. More than 155 countries have based their…
- Britain's workhouses grew from a law passed after the Black DeathThe workhouse, where the destitute got a bed only in exchange for labour, has roots in a 1388 statute written to stop plague survivors chasing better wages. Over five centuries it…
- Vasculitis is sorted by vessel size, from the aorta to the tiniest capillariesVasculitis is not one disease but a family of conditions in which inflammation attacks and damages blood vessels, arteries and veins alike. Doctors classify them largely by how bi…
- In ventricular fibrillation the heart quivers instead of pumping, and blood stops movingWhen the heart's lower chambers lose their electrical order, the muscle twitches at random rather than squeezing from the tip upward. No blood leaves the heart, the person collaps…
- Bare feet have marked both saints and slavesIn medieval Europe a barefoot friar signalled holiness, while a barefoot peasant signalled poverty. Roman slaves had to go without shoes, and colonial slave codes in Suriname and …
- Eczema rates have jumped up to sixfold since 1970, and industry may explain whySince 1970, atopic dermatitis has become three to six times more common in the United States and Britain. Children who move from developing countries to industrialised ones before…
- Atrial fibrillation often goes unnoticed until a stroke reveals itMore than 33 million people worldwide have atrial fibrillation, the most common serious heart rhythm disorder. Many feel nothing at all. Some only learn they have it from a routin…
- Deadly nightshade is named after a Fate and a beautiful womanWhen Linnaeus named deadly nightshade, he combined death and vanity. Atropa comes from Atropos, the Greek Fate who cuts the thread of life. Bella-donna is Italian for beautiful wo…
- Avon began as a door-to-door book business and was sold for one poundIn 1886 a New York book salesman called David McConnell decided perfume would sell better than books. His California Perfume Company became Avon, with millions of representatives …
- A Croatian antibiotic that lingers in tissue for daysAzithromycin was discovered in Croatia in 1980 by the drug firm Pliva. Its trick is staying power: tissue levels can run more than 50 times higher than levels in the blood, and on…
- Why British doctors hold bachelor's degrees and American doctors hold doctoratesA British-trained doctor usually graduates with two bachelor's degrees, in medicine and surgery, yet is still called Dr. An American doctor gets an MD. The qualifications count as…
- Apartheid tried to make black South Africans foreigners in their own countryThe homelands policy aimed to redraw who counted as South African, not just where people lived. A 1970 law turned every black South African into a citizen of an ethnic homeland an…
- Truth serum doesn't make anyone tell the truthSodium amytal, the barbiturate behind the truth serum legend, cannot force honesty. It loosens inhibitions and slows inventive thinking, so a sedated person may blurt things out. …
- Athlete's foot, ringworm and jock itch can be one fungus in different placesThe mould behind athlete's foot does not care where it lives. Scratched onto the hands, torso or groin, the same infection simply changes name: ringworm on the body, jock itch in …
- An ADHD drug with no known misuse potential, and a slow startMost ADHD medicines are stimulants, with the misuse worries that come with them. Atomoxetine, sold as Strattera, is not one. Reviews find it works about as well as methylphenidate…
- Astigmatism means your cornea is shaped less like a football and more like a rugby ballA healthy cornea curves evenly, like part of a sphere. In astigmatism it bulges more in one direction than another, so light focuses unevenly and vision blurs at every distance. S…
- Artery-clogging plaque often starts in childhood and stays silent for decadesAutopsies of 300 American soldiers killed in Korea, average age just 22, found visible coronary artery disease in more than three quarters of them. Atherosclerosis begins young, h…
- The Stoics prized not caring; modern neurology treats extreme indifference as a symptomAncient Stoics aimed for apatheia, a calm detachment from whatever lay beyond their control, and Orthodox monks counted it a virtue. The English word apathy, first recorded in 159…
- Swallow enough silver for long enough and your skin permanently turns blue-greyA US Senate candidate dosed himself with colloidal silver in case the millennium bug cut off antibiotics. The shortage never came, but his skin turned grey-blue for good. Argyria …
- An antipsychotic that turns dopamine up when it's low and down when highMost older antipsychotics simply block dopamine. Aripiprazole, sold as Abilify, behaves more like a thermostat: as a partial agonist it boosts dopamine signalling where levels run…
- The Cambridge firm behind nearly every smartphone chip began with twelve engineers and Apple cashArm makes no chips of its own. It designs processor cores and licenses them, and those designs sit inside virtually every modern smartphone and even the world's fastest supercompu…
- Ascites takes its name from the leather wineskin a swollen belly resemblesDoctors can detect fluid pooling in the abdomen by tapping one flank and feeling a ripple arrive on the other side. That build-up, called ascites after the Greek word for a wine o…
- Milkweed flowers rival orchids in complexity and can trap insects too small to escapeMilkweed doesn't scatter loose pollen. It packs it into paired sacs that clip onto a visiting insect's leg when it slips into a slit in the flower. A strong bee pulls them free an…
- Why fewer people now call themselves Asperger's, a diagnosis retired in 2013For about two decades Asperger syndrome was an official diagnosis. Then psychiatry folded it into autism spectrum disorder, and a 2018 book showed that Hans Asperger, whose name i…
- Anna Sui got fired for a Macy's ad, then built a label on $300In August 1979 a full-page Macy's advert in The New York Times showed clothes Anna Sui had designed on the side. Her day-job boss saw it and fired her immediately. With $300 in sa…
- Anne of Austria was Spanish, waited 23 years for an heir, then ruled FranceShe was born in Valladolid, called Austrian because of her Habsburg dynasty, and married to Louis XIII at fourteen. After five miscarriages and more than two decades without child…
- In anorexia, the problem is not seeing your body wronglyThe familiar story says people with anorexia look in the mirror and see a bigger body than they have. Recent research points elsewhere: they can judge their size accurately, but r…
- Before AIDS, Anthony Fauci turned a nearly always fatal disease into a curable oneLong before he became a household name, Anthony Fauci worked out how to re-dose cancer drugs against vasculitis, turning a condition that killed 98 percent of patients into one wi…
- An illness that looks like sudden psychosis can be the immune system attacking the brainIt often starts like flu, then turns into hallucinations, paranoia and confusion, so doctors frequently mistake it for a psychiatric disorder. Only named in 2007, anti-NMDA recept…
- Antioxidants protect tyres, fuel and frozen food; the supplements have not proven usefulThe word antioxidant sells pills, but its biggest jobs are industrial: keeping rubber supple, fuel from gumming up engines and cooking oils from turning rancid. In the body, cells…
- The first recorded aortic dissection was found in a dead king in 1760When George II of Great Britain died in 1760, his post-mortem revealed the first described case of aortic dissection: a tear that lets blood force apart the layers of the body's m…
- Angina's pain level is a poor guide to how endangered the heart isThe name means a strangling feeling in the chest, and it usually signals that heart muscle is short of blood. Yet how much it hurts can mislead: some people have fierce pain with …
- Wanting and liking are separate, and anhedonia can break one without the otherAnhedonia was first described in 1896 as a lost capacity for pleasure. Researchers now split pleasure into parts: the anticipation that drives you toward a reward, and the enjoyme…
- A back pain that eases with exercise and worsens with restMost sore backs want rest. Ankylosing spondylitis does the opposite: the pain is often worst when still, wakes people in the early morning, and can ease with movement. This inflam…
- Why the blood pressure pill amlodipine can make ankles swellAmlodipine was the fifth most prescribed medicine in the United States in 2023, with more than 68 million prescriptions. It lowers blood pressure by relaxing arteries, but it open…
- Amoxicillin is a staple for children, yet many ear infections don't need itAmoxicillin is among the antibiotics most often given to children, with over 23 million US prescriptions in 2023. Yet most children older than two with a middle ear infection gain…
- Most anal cancers trace back to a virus that a vaccine targetsAnal cancer is uncommon, about half a percent of new US cancers, but one estimate attributes roughly 90 percent of cases to human papillomavirus, the same virus behind most cervic…
- ANOVA grew out of crop plots, and a dog show explains it bestAnalysis of variance asks one clever question: is the spread between groups much bigger than the spread inside them? If so, the groups probably really differ. Ronald Fisher built …
- The first intensive care unit was born from anaesthesia and a polio epidemicIn 1953 a polio outbreak in Copenhagen left many patients unable to breathe for weeks. Anaesthetist Bjorn Aage Ibsen took ventilation, a technique used briefly during operations, …
- A painting in Verona gave Angelman syndrome its first nameIn the mid-1960s an English paediatrician suspected three children on his ward shared one condition but could not prove it. On holiday in Italy he saw a painting of a laughing boy…
- Aloe vera may not exist in the wild at allAloe vera sits on countless windowsills and in shelves of skin gels, yet botanists struggle to find clearly natural populations of it. Some suspect it began as a hybrid. And for a…
- In alopecia areata, the immune system breaks a hair follicle's special protectionHair follicles normally enjoy a kind of diplomatic immunity: the body's defences leave them alone. In alopecia areata that shield fails, immune cells swarm the follicles, and coin…
- A lazy eye is usually healthy: the brain is what stops listeningIn amblyopia the weaker eye often looks perfectly normal. The problem sits behind it: during early childhood the brain learns to favour one eye and tunes out the other. Fixing the…
- An old antidepressant, amitriptyline found a second career treating painMerck scientists found amitriptyline in the late 1950s, and US regulators approved it in 1961 for depression. Because of its side effects it is rarely a first choice for low mood …
- A single gram of activated carbon can hide 3,000 square metres of surfaceOrdinary charcoal offers just a few square metres of surface per gram. Activation riddles it with microscopic pores, a bit like popping corn, until one gram exposes more than 3,00…
- Adderall blends four amphetamine salts, and the dose changes everythingAt prescribed doses, the ADHD drug Adderall sharpens focus, speeds reactions and fends off fatigue. Push far beyond those doses and the same chemistry can scramble thinking, trigg…