Assuming everyone has survived Halloween, here’s a question — when we get scared, what impact does that have on our bodies? The surprising answer is, depending on the type of person you are, the effects can be more good than bad. Being in or even viewing a scary situation does cause physiological changes, like an
What if you’re a freelance food writer, observing the restaurant culture of Atlanta, Georgia, and suddenly you’re stuck at home like everyone else? How do you cope? You could open a restaurant… for a chipmunk. For Angela Hansberger, this strategy started when her uncle, owner of a bowling center in Ohio that COVID-19 shut down,
Have you ever seen a problem and think “Someone should do something about that”? Dutch fashion designer Bas Timmer was starting a career as a cold weather-gear specialist in 2014 when he saw a homeless man one cold night. He could’ve given the man one of his signature fashion hoodies, but what would’ve that done
We seem to have fallen into a trap. The warmer our climate gets, the more refrigeration we need to cool both us and our perishables (already we have an estimated 3.5 billion refrigerators and air conditioners), which means generating more energy, which has always meant releasing more greenhouse gases. What if there was a way
How many unused items do you own? The city of Berlin, Germany estimates that every household has almost 250 unused items. This is a real problem considering Berlin has a goal of eventually becoming a zero-waste city. So how do you get people to reuse items when it’s so easy to find replacements? One idea
In this age of advanced medicine, and especially during a pandemic, there is one medical tool we should be using more, but are not — the autopsy. The truth is autopsies are invaluable for discovering the cause of death, but they are, pardon the expression, dying out. In the late 1960s, the autopsy rate in
How quickly the world changes! At one time, organ transplantation was just a dream. Yet, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), in calendar year 2019 there were 39,719 total transplants in the United States, up 8.7 percent from 2018 (https://unos.org/data/transplant-trends/). Of these, 3552 were heart transplants. The first heart transplant was performed
Today I was surprised to learn of a problem that really shouldn’t exist. It’s no secret that there is a shortage of organ donors. The Medscape website estimates almost 113,000 people are waiting for transplants. So you would think the shipment of donated organs would receive the highest priority. And you would be wrong. According
Have you ever had a strong urge to start over? I mean go missing and begin life again somewhere else with a new identity? For whatever reason — escape debt, a loveless marriage, maybe domestic violence? All over the world, people have been known to do that — just disappear and start over someplace else.
All of my life, I’ve read about our growing population and how it was going to strain our resources. So I was surprised to read the BBC’s “Fertility rate: ‘Jaw-dropping’ global crash in children being born” by James Gallagher. Some of the points made in this article are — — Twenty-three countries are expected to