Lethal injection was first proposed 40 years ago in Oklahoma as a more humane way to carry out the death penalty. Now US states have a hard time getting their hands on the drugs needed. Companies that manufacture the compounds have stopped selling those drugs because they don’t want to be associated with executions.
It’s common knowledge that repeated blows to the head can cause neurodegenerative disease. But it may be that even one mild traumatic brain injury—a category that includes concussions such as those common in sports like football and boxing—has lasting effects that can lead to dementia later in life.
Watch This is a Quartzy recommendation series that spotlights unusual or surprising television shows and films to check out. You’ll find all the entries here.
Of all the animals on Earth, humans are the best at sweating. We’ve got not one, but two sets of sweat glands: one to cool us off, and one that kicks in when we’re anxious.
Everyone in the US loves the onset of warm weather, but possibly no one more than ticks, mosquitos, and fleas. For these insects and arachnids, dormant or inactive during during the winter, warm weather means more time to be hunting for food—namely, animal and human blood as we spend more time outside.
Boston, Massachusetts
Humans may have taken over the Earth, but frankly we’ve got nothing on the abilities of others kinds of life on the planet.
Neanderthals may have survived if they evolved to look out for each other like we humans did.
Unlike modern sloths, which spend their time vegging out in trees in South and Central America, ancient giant sloths were the size of an ox and lumbered around on the ground. They died off on the continental US around 11,700 years ago and likely lived for another few thousand years on islands in the Caribbean. It’s not clear what led to their extinction, though some scientists have hypothesized that humans were in part to blame. When we coexisted with giant sloths, we probably used to eat them.
Any man will tell you that his penis is no ordinary organ, and a transplant surgeon will agree. Unlike a lung or a liver, penises are made up of multiple types of tissue: skin, muscles, nerves, and erectile chambers. Each is one more opportunity for the host’s body to reject a transplant.
On April 14, a group of NASA scientists were flying over the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska and the Canadian border, when they saw something puzzling: Three holes in the sea ice with what look like rings around them and some wavy ice to their left.
We humans are not a stagnant species.Take the Bajau (pronounced Bah-joe). They’re a group of about 5,000 people that have lived on one of Indonesia’s ‘s 17,500 islands for centuries. The Bajau they live close to the water and spend a lot of their time diving for food in the sea, a hydrophilic lifestyle that has left a genetic imprint on the population. In fact, a study published today (April 19), in the journal Cell, reports that the Bajau have evolved to have spleens that are 50% larger than those of us who spend more time on land.
Of all the questionable fads in human history, trepanation is perhaps the most perplexing.
Humans and mice: a dynamic duo as old as civilization itself. Where we thrive, they thrive. Yet the mice living near us may carry genes that contribute to the looming threat of superbugs.
Scientists have finally figured out how people of European descent have such varied hair colors.
If you’re a fan of the Olympics or professional sports, you’ve probably seen athletes wearing patterns of brightly colored tape over their skin. Skillfully plastered over muscles and joints, this “kinesiology” tape bends and puckers with movement, and gives athletes a “super elite” appearance: the crisscrosses and star patterns look like a high-tech performance enhancement too complicated for amateurs to understand.
Bill Gates thinks the future should be genetically edited.
Scientists just gave the middle finger to the idea that early humans migrated out of Africa in a single surge.
A new study shows that sleep deprivation is linked to higher levels of a protein called beta-amyloid—a notorious precursor to Alzheimer’s disease.
MIT is breaking up with Nectome, the small biotech company seeking to one day freeze and preserve brains beyond death as a way of holding onto memories permanently.
Antarctica isn’t what it used to be.
Last week the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it would no longer regulate crops that have been genetically edited.
Knuckle-cracking. Aside from worrying about whether it leads to arthritis (it doesn’t), most of us do it mindlessly to get ourselves in the mood to start a project—or while we fret about it.
Considering the fact that we’ve been writing books on anatomy for 475 years, it’s pretty remarkable that the human body is still surprising scientists.
