The statistic the CDC doesn’t include in its reports — Pregnancy is a scary time. The body is changing; it’s literally producing another tiny human being. There can be a lot of stress, as new changes induce concerns and fears. During this time, there can often be late-night online reading sessions, digging into potential risks of pregnancy. Can pregnancy be…

This is the web future that’s coming for you. — Here’s a hot take that will surely get me looooots of flack on the internet: advertisements suck. Okay, sarcasm aside, we can likely agree that ads are not a fun experience. …

Like in life, we’re just too detached — It’s a dream of science fiction that harkens back to the Jetsons, or The Fifth Element; some sort of machine that produces food from nothing. …

These memes are empowering, but also wrong — What a week it’s been for misinformation! Who would have thought that allowing anyone on Twitter to become verified for an $8 monthly payment would be such a disaster? Turns out, letting joke accounts impersonate real accounts can lead to some unintended consequences. But are those consequences quite as earth-shaking…

It’s not useless — it’s a reservoir. — The only thing that most of us know about our appendix is that it’s useless, and it may kill us. We’ve seen it in sitcoms and heard about it with friends-of-friends; someone had a burst appendix and had to be rushed to the hospital for lifesaving surgery. If you go…

Itching? Parasites? Food preparation? — No creature in nature exists in a vacuum. We humans like to believe that we are the masters of making use of nature, including other creatures, for our own benefit, but it’s not the case. There are many symbiotic interactions between different animals. Birds eat the ticks off of rhinos…

Brain bruise treatment has come a long way. — Concussions are very scary, in part because it’s direct damage to the thing that holds our thoughts and personality. It means that you’ve been whacked hard enough to bruise your brain. Being pedantic, it’s not a bruise, but it is whenever you take a hit — hard enough or sharp…

This bacterial benefit may be even bigger than the tooth toughening. — This article is going to start off with some bad news for germaphobes: your mouth is full of bacteria. Just teeming with ’em. Even if you literally just spat out your mouthful of burning mouthwash, there’s still lots of bacteria in there, and they’re rapidly breeding to replenish their numbers. …

Or: How to retire early without going crazy over it — Money: love it or hate it, most of us probably spend more time thinking (worrying) about it than we’d prefer. We either don’t have enough, or we need to spend time managing and tracking what we do have. Most of us get our money from our jobs, which are usually…