This is your brain on art Beauty is in the brain of the beholder. Sure, the eye may appreciate lush colors and graceful lines, but the chain of command goes like this: The optic nerve delivers hues and shapes to the mind. Specific clusters of neurons fire off. And we experience pleasure, or some other […]

A life worth living? John Freeman wants Americans to think differently about death. It is not a discussion that most people will like because what the Johns Hopkins clinical bioethicist and professor emeritus of neurology and pediatrics wants is for Americans to think about death not as a failure but as an answer. “I want […]

Autobiographical details and inspiration from family stories form the core of Leithauser’s dense and emotional work, which follows Bianca, a young art school student based on Leithauser’s mother-in-law, as she matures in a city that is changing in unexpected ways.

Globally, more than 1.6 billion adults and 20 million children under the age of 5 are overweight. In the United States, 66 percent of adults and 16 percent of American children weigh too much, and by 2015, that figure could reach 75 percent of all Americans.

Melanoma is relatively rare, accounting for only 3 percent of skin cancer cases nationwide. But it leads to 75 percent of all skin cancer deaths. Each year 70,000 Americans are diagnosed with the disease, and though curable if found early, it kills one in eight patients, many within six to nine months of diagnosis. Physicians […]

As the Arctic warms meteorologically, it has begun to warm politically. Norway and Russia have sparred over claims to the Barents Sea and economic exploitation of Svalbard. Canada and United States disagree over the Beaufort Sea. Canada and Denmark have traded barbs over a disputed speck of land off the Greenland coast called Hans Island.

Relief at last for sinusitis sufferers People who suffer from the repeated headaches, facial swelling, and blocked breathing passages of chronic rhino­-sinusitis know that the pain isn’t limited to the physical. Adding to their suffering is the knowledge that there are no treatments that could forestall the endless cycle of symptoms. Many who fall victim […]

Campus Kitchen turns leftovers into meals Once a week, Anna Helena Denis helps turn an abundance of bagels—not three or four but dozens—into an abundance of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Denis, who goes by Lena, is a junior dual major in anthropology and art history at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. She is also the […]

Quote, unquote Under Mr. Obama, we have pulled back from the foreign world. We’re smaller for accepting that false choice between burdens at home and burdens abroad, and the world beyond our shores is more hazardous and cynical for our retrenchment and our self-flagellation. —Fouad Ajami, writing in The Wall Street Journal, 12.30.09 [Patients] die […]

753: Average number of aviation-related deaths each year in the United States. Susan P. Baker, a professor at the Bloomberg School’s Center for Injury Research and Policy, recently published the first-ever study of U.S. aviation injuries and mortality in Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine. Her research also found an average of 1,013 injuries requiring hospital […]