Health & Medicine

Why Do We Sleep?

Meir Kryger— It is 3 a.m. You awaken sweating, your heart pounding. Your mind is racing, reminding you that you have to get up early to drop the kids off at daycare, then dash to work for an important meeting. Obsessed with your personal and work issues, you eventually fall

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Meditation and Photography

Stephen Batchelor— Taking photographs and practicing meditation might seem at first glance to be unrelated activities. For while photography looks outward at the visual world through the medium of a camera, meditation focuses inward on unmediated experience. And whereas photography is concerned with producing images of reality, meditation is about

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Whither the Zika Epidemic?

Leslie Anthony— It’s fall, and many of us are travelling south—Mexico, the Caribbean, Nicaragua. That’s not unusual. But what might be odd is that most of us have stopped talking about Zika, an emergent disease vectored by invasive mosquitos that persists in these areas, and over which we should still

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Ep. 38 – Inside the Human Organ Trade

Big ticket items like kidneys, livers, and hearts aren’t the only things that can be extracted from you after death. A look inside the cadaver trade and its shadowy history.

Ep. 16 – The Importance of a Good Night’s Sleep

Everyone could use more sleep. Global sleep expert Dr. Meir Kryger has tips for doing just that along with an explanation of what happens to a body that doesn’t get enough sleep.

Changing Technology, Changing Childhood

Patti Valkenburg— Every now and then, I hear teachers lament that today’s children have changed. And they are right. In the West, this generation of children exhibits significant developmental differences that distinguish them from generations that grew up without television, video games, and smartphones. Today’s children are more self-confident, more assertive, and

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When Healthcare Is About ‘Parts and Money’

Abraham M. Nussbaum— As you become a physician, you feel as if you are learning to see people as a compendium of parts and a source of income: parts and money. No one pulls you aside during training and tells you this plainly. Just the same, you learn, as I

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Should You Go to a Sleep Clinic?

Meir Kryger— Many millions of people throughout the world have sleeping problems. In America alone, an estimated 80 million have had problems with their sleep. The percentage of people in Europe with sleep problems varies from about 30% in Poland to about 17% of the population in Italy and Denmark,

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Stage Fright, Shyness, and Speaking to the Crowd

Joe Moran— I have been shy for as long as I can remember. For half of my life it just seemed an inconvenience, something to live with rather than be curious about. I became interested in shyness as a subject—one that might repay careful reflection—when I began to find my

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World AIDS Day: Remembering the Epidemic

Peter Selwyn— Thirty-five years ago, in the summer of 1981, the AIDS epidemic officially began. Thirty-five years can seem like a lifetime, and in many cases they were, in a sense, as young men and women died in their twenties and thirties from a disease that was relentless, devastating, and

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