Tag: simple fact
The Most Mysterious Cells in Our Bodies Don’t Belong to Us
Some 24 years ago, Diana Bianchi peered into a microscope at a piece of human thyroid and saw something that instantly gave her goosebumps. The sample had come from a woman who was chromosomally XX. But through the lens, Bianchi saw the unmistakable glimmer of Y chromosomes—dozens and dozens of them. “Clearly,” Bianchi told me, “part of her thyroid was entirely male.”
The reason, Bianchi suspected, was pregnancy. Years ago, the patient had carried a male embryo, whose cells had
The Enigma of ‘Heat-Related’ Deaths
The autopsy should have been a piece of cake. My patient had a history of widely metastatic cancer, which was pretty straightforward as far as causes of death go. Entering the various body cavities, my colleague and I found what we anticipated: Nearly every organ was riddled with tumors. But after we had completed the work, I realized that I knew why the patient had died, but not why he’d died that day. We found no evidence of a
COVID Science Is Moving Backwards
Paul Sax is an infectious-disease physician and professor at Harvard Medical School. Even so, when Sax’s kids asked him whether they should get the updated COVID vaccine this fall, he wasn’t really sure what to tell them. His two children are in their 20s, healthy, and at no special risk of complications from disease. Each had recovered from COVID, and thus, he reasoned, had extra immunity on top of what they’d gotten from their prior shots. Another injection would
Dobbs Is No Brown v. Board of Education
Homer Plessy is being recognized more and more. In 1896, the light-skinned, French-speaking Louisianan gen de coleur was memorialized in what is considered one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history, Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld Jim Crow segregation laws. The decision is second in infamy only to the Dred Scott decision, which upheld slavery and declared that Black men had no rights that white men were bound to respect.
As one of the worst Supreme Court
Stop Waiting for Trump to Get Convicted
Attorney General Merrick Garland is not going to save democracy. Nor is the attorney general of New York, Letitia James; the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg; nor the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis. As the apparent collapse of the New York district attorney’s investigation makes clear, criminal cases are hard to make. Donald Trump, despite his many seemingly criminal acts, is unlikely to ever spend a day in jail.
Observers of the Trump malignancy have an unfortunate habit of