Browsing: Lens_biology

Ketamine’s remarkable effect bolsters a new theory of mental illness.

Siegfried Layda/Getty Images On a chilly day in Toronto, Michael Mesure, executive director of a local bird conservation group, leads me up several flights of stairs in City Hall. We walk down a hallway and there stands a large, white chest—a freezer—with a lid straining to close against its contents. Mesure removes a heavy Rubbermaid […]

The tragic story of the simple solution to one of the world’s most neglected diseases.

You may think twice about your diet when you follow the metabolic fate of your food.

Damara Dhanakrishna/EyeEm Earlier this fall, I traveled to central Gujarat and northern Punjab, in India, to meet with rural farmers who were trying new techniques to combat climate change. Sitting under a mango tree, I spoke with 65-year-old Raman Bhai Parmar, who told me about his solar-powered irrigation pump that was whooshing with water, deep […]

An investigative reporter chronicles the progression of his own disease.

This August, German photographer Kerstin Langenberger posted a photo to Facebook of a frail polar bear, evidently starved, adrift among the disappearing ice. In the photo’s caption, she blamed global warming for the bear’s malnutrition and for the death of many others she’d seen. Articles featuring Langenberger’s commentary and photo followed soon after, with headlines […]

A new field called paleoepigenetics is probing how evolution responds to sudden stress.

Stress hormones in breast milk may help prepare us for a turbulent world.

Can a person who is biologically male really be female? What about someone who is born white but doesn’t feel that way—can she become black? Intelligent adults can disagree passionately on these questions of identity, as evident in the back-and-forth discussion over the recent cases of Caitlyn Jenner, a transgender woman, and Rachel Dolezal, a […]