This Podcast Will Kill You

If you were asked to describe necrotizing fasciitis in three words, you might choose: rapid, deadly, and rare. The third of those adjectives may provide some comfort, but the first two are the clear i...

It’s the stuff nightmares are made of. A fly lands on an open wound and lays hundreds of eggs, from which hatch countless ravenous maggots. There they writhe, devouring flesh, insatiable and relentles...

Science doesn’t always get it right the first time (or the second, or the third, or even the ninety-ninth!). And while we may chuckle at the outlandish things people believed or the goofy experiments ...

As we learned last week, starvation extends far beyond hunger and what a lack of food does to the human body. Similarly, famine is much more than a food shortage and starvation on a population-level s...

Deprived of food, our bodies do the best they can to keep us alive and functioning as long as possible. As the days pass, the rhythms of our lives change: our metabolism, our heartbeats, our hormones,...

The United States is in the midst of a monumental mental health crisis, with one in four people predicted to experience mental illness at some point in their lives. Adequate mental health care remains...

Every year, millions of babies around the world are screened for dozens of treatable conditions within the first day or two of life. What it takes is a few drops of blood on some filter paper, and wha...

None of us are ever truly alone. Our bodies are home to untold numbers of microbes, chilling on our skin, in our guts, throughout our respiratory tract, inside our bellybuttons, under our fingernails,...

When your car breaks down or your fridge goes on the fritz, you can order a replacement part and get things back up and running in no time. The same cannot always be said for another intricate machine...

Last week, we took you through all the ways that cold can harm us and the harrowing history of humans perishing at its icy hands. Ending the story there would be skipping over the parts where cold get...