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Private Notes
There's something surprising that helps determine how damaging a disease is: distance.
We mostly grow annual plants because they reliably produce energy-rich seeds, which we like to eat.
Shocking the brain has come and gone as a medical treatment, but it’s currently resurging, as it often provides the best form of relief for severe depression and advanced Parkinson’s disease.
No matter how wealthy a country is, there's a lot it can do to improve the health of its citizens.
Once it’s out of your body, your genetic information is valuable to a variety of people, but you can keep it safe(ish) with a few simple steps.
Food already in cupboards, supermarkets, & warehouses could feed humanity for 4 months, but potential food - berries, termites & krill - could extend that by another year.
The same chemistry that makes plastic tough, light and flexible also makes it nearly impossible to get rid of, because it’s hard to break those resilient chemical bonds.
Female mammals make milk, a cocktail of filtered blood, to provide their babies with vital nutrients.
Humans from different cultures anthropomorphize different animals to represent the same human traits.
Every once in a while, all the oaks or spruces or other plants in a region suddenly produce a tremendous bounty of seeds – up to 100 times more than usual. But why do they do it, and how do they all manage to sync up?
The human lifespan might be limited, in part, because natural selection just stops working late in life.
Thanks to humans, old school apex predators are struggling to hold onto their perch at the top of the food chain. And now a new class of adaptable mesopredators are remaking the ecosystems they take over.
As we try to figure out the evolutionary trees for languages and species, we sometimes get led astray by similar but unrelated words and traits.
Earth’s outer shell is made of two materials whose different densities and thicknesses give rise to two distinct “levels” on the planet’s surface.
When nutrients from the ocean depths reach the sunlit surface (like in the Galapagos), life is more productive.
Animals eat their own poop in order to gain extra access to nutrients or to microbes that help digest those nutrients.
Malaria is a global disease that we've beaten back around the world, including in some tropical places, but we’ve had the hardest time in Africa.
Honeybees are dying from parasites, pesticides, and poor nutrition, but we can help them in a number of ways, including by encouraging them to make a homemade antibiotic.
Rates of appendicitis vary around the world, likely due to the forces of modernization.
Just like the names of products and companies, animals' names can affect how we feel about them...and changing the name of a species might actually help us save it.
Bird poop was the gateway fertilizer that turned humanity onto the imported-chemical-based farming system of modern agriculture.
