Welcome to the cyborg fair
Frieda Klotz visited the ‘world’s first cyborg fair’ with one question: are cyborgs a real thing, or are these people just kidding themselves?
This week’s podcast: The extreme athlete who built his own knee
Brian Bartlett lost his leg at 24. Rose Eveleth hears how a man who just wanted to ski again invented a new kind of knee.
Follow us
Republish our stories for free
Making sense of a miscarriage
Holly Cave wants to know why her pregnancy ended at nine weeks. There are no easy answers, but talking about miscarriage could help us change the way we think about it.
The 96th Street divide: why there’s so much diabetes in Harlem (audio)
In East Harlem, four times as many people have diabetes as in the neighbouring Upper East Side. Meera Senthilingam meets the New Yorkers stopping poverty from being a death sentence.
Coming up on Mosaic: Hard to swallow
One morning, completely unexpectedly, Samantha Anderson woke to find that she could no longer swallow. Three-and-a-half years on, she’s finally beginning to eat normally again. Bryn Nelson finds out more.
The animals that sniff out TB, cancer and landmines
Rats can smell tuberculosis. Dogs can smell cancer. Now they’re being trained to save your life. Emma Young reports.
South Africa’s obesity crisis: the shape of things to come?
Lifestyle and economic changes are bringing an obesity crisis to South Africa and other low-income countries. Meet the people fighting to turn the tide.
The cost of pure water
Ghana has plenty of water. So why do its people buy plastic pouches from street vendors?
Brazil’s billion-dollar gym experiment
Can a grand vision of 4,000 free public gyms overcome inequality and fight Brazil’s health crisis?
You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine
Jo Marchant asks if we can harness the mind to reduce side-effects and slash drug costs.
Why do we have blood types?
More than a century after their discovery, we still don’t really know what blood types are for.
Hacking the nervous system
One nerve connects your vital organs, sensing and shaping your health. If we learn to control it, the future of medicine will be electric.
Why do we have allergies?
Exploring what we don’t know about allergies.
What’s wrong with Craig Venter?
Craig Venter, multi-millionaire maverick, says he can help you live a better, longer life. Roger Highfield asks how.
This is what happens after you die
Exploring how the breakdown of our bodies after death gives birth to new life.
The male suicides
Why, in every country in the world, do male suicides outnumber female?
DIY prosthetics: the extreme athlete who built a new knee
Brian Bartlett lost his leg at 24. Rose Eveleth hears how a man who just wanted to ski again invented a new kind of knee.
Why the calorie is broken
Calories consumed minus calories burned: it’s the simple formula for weight loss or gain. But dieters often find that it doesn’t work. Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley of Gastropod investigate.
The end of the calorie (audio)
In this episode of the Gastropod podcast, Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley explore the calorie.
Suicide of the Ceasefire Babies
In Northern Ireland, more people took their own lives in the 16 years after the Troubles than died during them. Why? Lyra McKee finds out.
Psychedelic therapy
Notoriously illegal and synonymous with hedonism, LSD and ecstasy started life as aids to psychotherapy. Sam Wong meets the band of psychiatrists who are looking to reclaim them for medicine again.
LSD’s medical comeback
In a town in Switzerland, people with cancer are taking LSD.
On menopause
There are a few things science doesn’t know about the menopause: what it’s for, how it works and how best to treat it. Approaching her second – yes, second – menopause, Rose George finds herself with more questions than answers.
Unspoken: the forgotten prisoners of war (audio)
They were the forgotten army. Taken captive during World War II, they lived lives of desperation and disease, internment and ingenuity. Long unspoken, their tale is now told through the voices of those who survived.
Cholera: the icy clutch of death (audio)
For the prisoners of World War II, the monsoon season brought with it one horrendous and feared disease.
Fighting malaria with a bamboo whisk
Malaria was among the biggest killers faced by prisoners of war. They fought it with a high-stakes gamble and a bamboo whisk.
The ingenuity of Gordon Vaughan (audio)
The post office engineer who fashioned medical instruments from tin cans and saved lives in a prison camp.
Hard labour: the case for testing drugs on pregnant women
Traditionally, expectant mothers have been excluded from clinical trials, but could this practice be doing more harm than good? Emily Anthes investigates.
Knowledge is power
How can you get advice on which drugs are safe in pregnancy?
The end of letter-based labels
New US drug labels are trying to reduce confusion around safety in pregnancy.
