This Podcast Will Kill You

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...

For all our wondrous adaptations as a species - our big brains, our capacity for language, our opposable thumbs - we humans are not well-equipped to deal with the cold. Take us out of our insulated dw...

The development of antibiotics was one of the greatest turning points in the history of medicine. Bacterial infections that were once death sentences were cured within a matter of days after administr...

Some things just go together: peanut butter and jelly, bacon and eggs, milk and cereal, London and smog. Or at least, that’s the way things used to be until the Great Smog of 1952. (Don’t worry, the f...