GustoReads - Health and Science

Headlines scream about “epidemics” of shootings and stabbings – but what if we took that literally? From Chicago to Glasgow, treating violence as a public health problem has produced great results. Usually, facial trauma doesn’t kill you, but it can cause significant disfigurement. Working as a maxillofacial surgeon in Glasgow in the early 2000s, Christine Goodall treated hundreds, if not thousands, of patients with injuries to the neck, face, head and jaw. Sometimes, the injuries were caused by a baseball bat, with shattered bones and bruising as bad as that from a car accident. More often than not, it was a knife. A slash across the forehead or cheek, leaving a scar etched across the face; a machete wound to the jaw, slicing through the skin and breaking the bone underneath. image / Creative Commons Zero - CC0 One young man came into the hospital in the middle of the night, with a knife wound across his face. Goodall dreaded the morning ward round the next day, when s...

More than a century after their discovery, we still don’t really know what blood types are for. Do they really matter? Carl Zimmer investigates. When my parents informed me that my blood type was A+, I felt a strange sense of pride. If A+ was the top grade in school, then surely A+ was also the most excellent of blood types – a biological mark of distinction. It didn’t take long for me to recognise just how silly that feeling was and tamp it down. But I didn’t learn much more about what it really meant to have type A+ blood. By the time I was an adult, all I really knew was that if I should end up in a hospital in need of blood, the doctors there would need to make sure they transfused me with a suitable type. Blood type, why exactly do we have them in the first place? (Image by 200 Degrees from Pixabay ) And yet there remained some nagging questions. Why do 40 per cent of Caucasians have type A blood, while only 27 per cent of Asians do? Where do different blood types ...