Heroin overdose deaths in the Unites States more than tripled from 2010 to 2014, reaching almost 11,000 per year. Despite the use of the term “overdose,” many of these victims died after self-administering an amount of opiate that would not be expected to be fatal for these drug-experienced, and drug-tolerant, individuals. Various explanations of this overdose mystery have been proposed. I desc...

B efore the advent of HIV, which led to an increased awareness of Mycobacterium avium complex disease, followed by the first prospective comparison studies on treatment regimens [1, 2], the topic of nontuberculous mycobacterial disease was a true example of Aristotelian science. Previously, only a few experts worldwide had compiled empirical data and disseminated knowledge on the subject, which...

After outlining some of the issues surrounding the flavor problem, I present three speculative ideas on the origin of families. In turn, families are conjectured to arise from an underlying preon dynamics; from random dynamics at very short distances; or as a result of compactification in higher dimensional theories. Examples and limitations of each of these speculative scenarios are discussed....

For nearly 15 years, it has been widely believed that many introns were recently acquired by the genes of multicellular organisms. However, the mechanism of acquisition has yet to be described for a single animal intron. Here, we report a large-scale computational analysis of the human, Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans, and Arabidopsis thaliana genomes. We divided 147,796 human i...

On examination he was sweaty and looked ill. The blood pressure was 140/90 mm Hg, heart rate 95 beats/ min, axillary temperature 38 ° C and respiratory rate 25/ min. The left hemithorax was dull to percussion and there were decreased breath sounds. The abdomen was found to be soft but tender with normal bowel sounds. Routine full blood counts and serum chemistry were normal, except for a raised...

Colony collapse disorder (CCD) has puzzled beekeepers and entomologists alike since it first emerged in the US in the autumn of 2006. Its hallmark is that colonies are apparently abandoned without significant numbers of dead bees being found. Similar problems were then also found in the UK and other European countries (Curr. Biol. 18, R1073). The British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) has now re...

June 30, 1908, 7:14 a.m., central Siberia—Semen Semenov, a local farmer, saw “the sky split in two. Fire appeared high and wide over the forest. . . . From . . . where the fire was, came strong heat. . . . Then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few yards.... After that such noise came, as if . . . cannons were firing, the earth shook .. .” Such is the harrowing...

From the Clinical Pathological Conference Series, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston (J.M.C., J.T.K., B.D.L., J.L.); and the Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology/ Oncology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (A.C.). Address reprint requests to Dr. Loscalzo at the Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medic...

The economic opportunity hypothesis states that perceived shrinkage of opportunity discourages women or couples from embarking on marriage or reproduction. On the contrary, the sense that opportunity is expanding encourages couples to raise their family-size target. The hypothesis assumes that humans are genetically programmed to maximize successful reproduction by having more offspring when en...