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What you see is not what is but what your brain tells you it is, and that’s not the same thing at all.
It’s curious that we always speak of our five senses because we have way more than that. We have a sense of balance, of acceleration and deceleration, of where we are in space (what is known as proprioception), of time passing, of appetite. Altogether (and depending on how you count them) we have as many as thirty-three systems within us that let us know where we are and how we are doing.
“Cartilage is remarkable, too. It is many times smoother than glass: it has a friction coefficient five times less than ice.
Koch also believed that TB could not jump from animals to humans, and Smith showed that that was wrong, too. It was thanks to this discovery that pasteurization of milk became a standard practice. Smith was, in short, the most important American bacteriologist during what was the golden age of bacteriology and yet is almost completely forgotten now.
In Italy, the number of women who die in childbirth is 3.9 per 100,000. Sweden is 4.6, Australia 5.1, Ireland 5.7, Canada 6.6. Britain comes only twenty-third on the list with 8.2 deaths per 100,000 live births, putting it below Hungary, Poland, and Albania. But also doing surprisingly poorly are Denmark (9.4 per 100,000) and France (10.0). Among developed nations, the United States is in a league of its own, with a maternal death rate of 16.7 per 100,000, putting it thirty-ninth among nations.
California addressed preeclampsia and the other leading causes of maternal death in childbirth through a program called the Maternal Quality Care Collaborative, and in just six years reduced the rate of childbirth deaths from 17 per 100,000 to just 7.3 between 2006 and 2013. During the same period, alas, the national rate rose from 13.3 deaths to 22 deaths per 100,000.
Perversely, farming didn’t bring improved diets but almost everywhere poorer ones. Focusing on a narrower range of staple foods meant most people suffered at least some dietary deficiencies, without necessarily being aware of it. Moreover, living in proximity to domesticated animals meant that their diseases became our diseases. Leprosy, plague, tuberculosis, typhus, diphtheria, measles, influenzas—all vaulted from goats and pigs and cows and the like straight into us. By one estimate, about 60 percent of all infectious diseases are zoonotic (that is, from animals). Farming led to the rise of
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According to the British Nobel laureate Max Perutz, vaccinations might have saved more lives in the twentieth century even than antibiotics.
A U.S. teenager is twice as likely to be killed in a car accident as a young person in a comparable country abroad and is eighty-two times more likely to be killed by a gun.
