Why Mental Health Rates Are Changing
Global mental health rates have shifted dramatically, especially among adolescents since 2012.
September 2025
August 2025
What Is the Opioid Crisis: Causes, Waves, and the Path Forward
The opioid crisis killed over 500,000 Americans between 1999 and 2019. Understand the three waves, the neuroscience of addiction, Purdue Pharma's...
What Is the Obesity Epidemic? Biology, Environment, and Weight Science
US obesity tripled in four decades, reaching 42% by 2020. Explore the biology of why energy regulation fails, the role of the food environment,...
May 2025
What Is Public Health?
Public health is the science of protecting and improving health at the population level. From John Snow's cholera map to COVID-19 vaccines, explore...
April 2025
What Is Long COVID? Symptoms, Mechanisms, and the Ongoing Science
Long COVID affects an estimated 10-30% of COVID-infected individuals with symptoms lasting months.
March 2025
What Is Addiction: The Neuroscience, Policy, and Treatment Science
A deep look at the neuroscience of addiction, the dopamine system, how tolerance works, what the opioid crisis reveals about pharmaceutical...
August 2024
Why Sleep Deprivation Feels Fine (But Isn't)
Sleep-deprived people are the worst judges of their own impairment. The Penn chronobiology study, the glymphatic system, and the neuroscience that...
Why Loneliness Is Deadly: The Biology of Social Isolation
Loneliness is a public health crisis. Chronic social isolation increases mortality risk equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
The History of Medicine: From Humors to Molecular Biology
From Hippocratic humors to CRISPR gene editing, the history of medicine spans 2,500 years of revolution.
What Is Epidemiology?
Epidemiology is the science of how diseases spread, who gets them, and why. Learn about John Snow's cholera map, study designs, the Bradford Hill...
July 2024
How Vaccines Work: The Immune System and the Science of Immunity
Vaccines teach the immune system to recognize and fight pathogens before real infection occurs.
How Pandemics Spread: The Epidemiology of Infectious Disease
How do pandemics spread? Understand R0, transmission routes, the SIR model, how viruses evolve, and why some outbreaks become pandemics while...
June 2024
How Inequality Affects Health: The Social Determinants of Disease
How does inequality affect health? Explore the Whitehall Studies, allostatic load, the Spirit Level thesis, ACEs, and what interventions actually...
How Antibiotics Work: The Science of Fighting Bacterial Infection
How do antibiotics work? Understand the mechanisms of different antibiotic classes, why antibiotic resistance is a global health crisis, and what...
March 2024
Why Loneliness Is a Public Health Crisis: The Science of Social Connection
Loneliness now kills as surely as smoking. Explore the science of social disconnection, from Julianne Holt-Lunstad's landmark mortality research to...
July 2023
The Loneliness Epidemic Explained
A deep dive into the global loneliness crisis: what the science says, why social media makes it worse, and what actually works to rebuild human...
May 2022
What Is Addiction?
Addiction explained: from the dopamine reward system and prediction error neurons to the brain disease model controversy, Rat Park, the opioid...