It has long been known that heart attacks are more common in the dead of night, and some authorities think the nightly change in blood pressure may somehow act as a trigger.
One other enduring myth concerning water intake is the belief that caffeinated drinks are diuretics and make you pee out more than you have taken in. They may not be the most wholesome of options for liquid refreshment, but they do make a net contribution to your personal water balance.
Indeed, as he increasingly masters his native tongue, he tries to make it conform to more logical rules than the language itself may possess, saying “buyed,” “eated,” and “goed” because, even though he has never heard such words spoken, they seem more logical to him – as indeed they are, if you stopped and thinked about it.
The only really reliable way to transfer cold germs is physically by touch. A survey of subway trains in Boston found that metal poles are a fairly hostile environment for microbes. Where microbes thrive is in the fabrics on seats and on plastic handgrips. The most efficient method of transfer for germs, it seems, is a combination of folding money and nasal mucus.
Candida albicans, the fungus behind thrush, until the 1950s was found only in the mouth and genitals, but now it sometimes invades the deeper body, where it can grow on the heart and other organs, like mold on fruit.
Cancer may be a common cause of death, but it is not a common event in life.
You are the product of three billion years of evolutionary tweaks.
Ninety percent of people who lose smell through head injury never get the sense back; a smaller proportion, about 70 percent, who lose smell through infections suffer permanent loss.
Despite this, angioplasties remain extremely popular.
The very first hotel in the world to offer a bath for every bedroom was the Mount Vernon Hotel in the resort community of Cape May, New Jersey.
Thanks to this ruling, states now had the right to perform surgery on healthy citizens against their will – a liberty never before extended in any advanced country. Yet the case attracted almost no attention.
That is the most extraordinary fact about Britain. It wants to be a garden. Flowers bloom in the unlikeliest places–on railway sidings and waste grounds where there is nothing beneath them but rubble and grit. You even see clumps of flowery life growing on the sides of abandoned warehouses and old viaducts. If all the humans in the UK vanished tomorrow, Britain would still be in flower.
When you put your hand on a hot plate, your Ruffini corpuscles cry out. Merkel cells respond to constant pressure, Pacinian corpuscles to vibration. Meissner’s.
The idea of personal space, which seems so natural to us now, was a revelation. People couldn’t get enough of it. Soon it wasn’t merely sufficient to live apart from one’s inferiors; one had to have time apart from one’s equals, too.
All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.
So Whitney’s gin not only helped make many people rich on both sides of the Atlantic but also reinvigorated slavery, turned child labor into a necessity, and paved the way for the American Civil War.
What nearly everyone agrees is that we need a more targeted approach. One interesting possibility would be to disrupt bacteria’s lines of communication. Bacteria never mount an attack until they have assembled sufficient numbers – what is known as a quorum – to make it worthwhile to do so. The idea would be to produce quorum-sensing drugs that wouldn’t kill all bacteria but would just keep their numbers permanently below the threshold, the quorum, that triggers an attack.
In the autumn of 1920, he entered the University of Wisconsin, hoping to become an engineer. Charles survived in large part by having his mother write his papers for him, but ultimately even that wasn’t enough.
At last, some fourteen hundred years after the Romans withdrew, taking their hot baths, padded sofas, and central heating with them, the British were rediscovering the novel condition of being congenially situated.
It is in all that complex synaptic entanglement that our intelligence lies, not in the number of neurons, as was once thought.