Television loves its medical dramas and every TV medical drama loves its AED, or automated external defibrillator. Aside from nurses yelling “Stat!” the most common exclamation on ER or Grey’s Anatomy or House is the command to “Clear,” as a doctor uses those two metal paddles to shock a patient back to life. But, as with … Read more
It’s a long-perpetuated stereotype: women are bad drivers. In popular culture they are seen as erratic, nervous, and distracted, and they just plain can’t handle a large piece of machinery like a car. But statistics show otherwise. According to a large 2007 study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, women are actually much safer drivers … Read more
How exasperating sleep can be. Home in your comfortable bed, you may toss and turn, unable to find slumber. But on the road driving, when you need to be alert to survive, staying awake can be a brutal struggle. It’s depressingly common for drowsy drivers to lose this battle: According to the National Sleep Foundation’s … Read more
These teenagers, they think they’re invincible. Youth is wasted on the young. These adages are ubiquitous in both national forums and family dinner conversations, but the truth about teens and risk may lie somewhere outside of proverbs. There is certainly an amount of recklessness that comes with the onslaught of hormones and independence otherwise known as … Read more
The odds a person will die from an accident in a year (1 in 2,462) are roughly the same odds a female younger than 50 will be diagnosed with breast cancer in a year (1 in 2,337). It’s inevitable to ask, what are the odds that may happen to me? In what follows, Book of Odds … Read more
On June 19th, 2008, 49-year-old Esmin Elizabeth Green collapsed onto the floor of the psychiatric emergency room of Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn. She had been waiting for more than 24 hours for an inpatient bed. For 20 minutes she writhed on the linoleum floor, and then stopped moving. Forty minutes later, a nurse nudged … Read more
From satellite parts to hail, the skies teem with hard objects, and every now and then those objects fall to Earth. Then again, the sky is a big place, as is the surface of the earth, and a human being is relatively tiny. So just how likely is it to be hurt by something from … Read more
“I think I am becoming uncommonly tolerant of substandard coffee.” My Platoon Sergeant is sitting at the wooden picnic table across from me sipping from a Styrofoam cup. He fixes me with a dull gaze and puts his cup down and chuckles. “Sir, why you gotta use all them big words? Nobody here is impressed. … Read more
When a 21-year-old Yale student jumped to his death from the Empire State Building on March 30, 2010, he joined a rather small, sad club: the iconic skyscraper has seen only about 30 such suicides since it went up in 1931. About 3.5 million people visit the Empire State Building’s observation deck each year, which means the … Read more
Of all the travelers’ tales, stories about being sick can be the most frightening. From stomach ailments like Delhi Belly, to burrowing Brazilian worms, to respiratory illnesses like SARS, no experience of being sick abroad is ever pleasant. To make matters more complicated, even simple ailments can be more difficult to handle in countries where sanitation … Read more