W. Harry Fortuna

Current technology used to image a person’s brain, or knee, or that kink you’ve had in your shoulder for five years now, requires a multi-million-dollar, room-sized behemoth of a machine, an absence of fear of tight spaces, and a near infinite amount of patience. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines are loud, claustrophobic, and prohibitively expensive, both to buy and to operate.

The value of water as a liquid is obvious. We can drink it, use it to clean ourselves and our things, swim in it to cool off and to play, and build dams across it to harvest its energy. Water as clouds are also essential: they are key for the way they deliver precipitation to cropland and forests. But scientists now say we may have been overlooking the most useful stage of the water cycle.

Fear is the great motivator and money is fear’s greedy little brother. Fear of not having enough money can make a person do the unthinkable, like rob, cheat, and steal. But a question that’s haunted criminologists for decades is what amount of money will make a person take that leap.

A cancer diagnosis is a drawn out process. Weeks can pass between when the offending lump, blurry x-ray, or discolored skin is first identified, and when doctors are finally able to say categorically whether or not what came out in the initial scans is indeed a bout of the Big C.

Earlier this week, doctors at the Mayo Clinic and the Scripps Research Institute published a review article in the Journal of American Geriatrics calling and outlining designs for human clinical trials on the first class of drugs developed specifically to treat aging.

When I was in my mid-20s, I left a corporate nine-to-five job to move to San Francisco and work on a movie called Darwin Awards. I spent the next decade bouncing from project to project, deep in the trenches of Hollywood—America’s dream factory.

Current treatment for migraines is eclectic by necessity of the mystery of the disease, and includes everything from antidepressants to beta blockers to highly potent painkillers. None of it is entirely effective. It’s hard to treat a disease you don’t understand and current theories as to the elusive cause of this disease fall way short of comprehensive.

Climate change may be responsible for an increase in Indian suicides in numbers equal to the entire population of Santa Cruz, California.

Anyone with kids, or those of us who never quite stopped being kids ourselves, know that toys aren’t cheap. Last year the toy industry raked in $26 billion in the U.S. alone. High prices are harder to swallow when kids tend to lose interest in that Pikachu figurine within a week, and complex boardgames are totally useless after the inevitable loss of even a few pieces. The solution? Skip the toy store and buy yourself a 3D printer.