Vital Signs

Exploring the concept of healthiness in an increasingly technological world

Dismantling the Myths of PMS

New research challenges the extent to which hormones govern perceptions, emotions, and behaviors during the menstrual cycle.
Sian Williams Page
3 min read

Body Hacking Has a Place in Hospitals

Instead of bedroom surgeons risking sepsis, medical researchers are using augmentation to make hospital wards more, not less, human.
Andrew Williams
5 min read

Is Your Fertility Data For Sale?

Could the sexual history information collected by period trackers be used by governments, corporations, or legal professionals to control or persecute women?
Sian Williams Page
4 min read

Measuring Global Health with the DALY

A better statistic would balance both death and disability, weighting factors like duration of illness, severity of disability, distribution across a population and impact on normal life. The result was the beautiful, elegant DALY.
Duncan Geere
2 min read

Your Great-Grandson’s Genetic Privacy

You might not worry about your genetic information being exposed. But are you willing to make that choice for your descendants?
Elizabeth Minkel
2 min read

Where We Live and How We Die

What a year of death looks like around the world.
Mimi Onuoha
6 min read

Pandemic Proofing the World

An epidemiologist in Nairobi on the next Zika virus.
Delia Grace
7 min read

The Many Futures of Babytech

What will quantifying newborns mean for us all down the line?
Natalie Kane
5 min read

Go On a Trip and Cure Your Depression

Psychedelics show clinical promise as a lasting treatment for major mood disorders–now the struggle is getting through regulatory red tape
Corin Faife
11 min read

A Brief Explainer of Why Everyone Seems to Hate Gluten, in GIFs

The facts and mysteries behind the health fad.
Ian Steadman
3 min read

The Unquestioned Pursuit of Weight Loss Had Us Eating Wrong for Years

Our quest for thinness is actually making us far less healthy–even killing us–and not for the reasons you’d think.
Leigh Alexander
10 min read

Street Wisdom Might Win the War on Drugs

By listening to drug users, we can overcome punitive moralism and reform drug policy to stop overdose
Abigail Hartstone
9 min read

Fixing Global Health Means Fixing Air Pollution

The biggest killer in the world today is air pollution–yet we have all the technology we need to fix it.
Duncan Geere
4 min read

What Happens When There’s Only 88 Psychiatrists in an Entire Country?

In developing nations like Kenya, where mental health care is practically nonexistent, internet-based organizations save lives.
Greg Noone
6 min read

The (Nearly) Unstoppable Success Story of Global Life Expectancy

But dig into the numbers and the picture becomes more complicated–and potentially troubling.
Duncan Geere
3 min read

Can We Learn to Live Without Death?

I have a friend, Adam, who’s convinced he’ll live forever. To the casual observer this might seem unlikely. Adam smokes and drinks and drives a bit too fast. He’s also aging, his biological clock ticking toward a date with the Grim Reaper. It’s a date he doesn’t plan to keep. In the future, Adam says, […]
Duncan Jefferies
6 min read

Vital Signs: A Reading List

A crash source in the future of human health.
How We Get To Next
4 min read

No More Week of Shame

We’re talking about menstruation and we’re doing it loudly.
Abigail Hartstone
5 min read

$75 to Walk Again: Tackling Asia’s Prosthetics Crisis

Instead of getting inappropriate secondhand prosthetics from the West, this charity is making their own bespoke ones in Laos.
Lindsey Kennedy
2 min read

How Ants Will Lead Us to New Antibiotics

You ant seen nothing yet
Alexander Sehmer
2 min read

Time’s Up for the Millennium Development Goals

What progress have we made?
Duncan Geere
2 min read

A Brief History of Prosthetics

How to create a superhuman.
Alexander Sehmer
4 min read

5 Artifacts, Animations, and Charts on the Story of Vaccination

Resistance to vaccination has existed ever since vaccination was first discovered.
Hugh Garry
1 min read

Tampon Club: No Apologies for Menstruation-Based Innovation

If your manager won’t provide sanitary products, it’s time to take matters into your own hands.
Georgina Voss
2 min read

Mapping the Unmapped for Ebola

Making maps is crucial to halting the spread of the deadly disease.
Alice Bell
2 min read

Mapping the Ebola Outbreak Outside a London Pub

The techniques used today to fight Ebola are the same used in 1858 to stop a London cholera outbreak.
Matt Locke
26 sec read

Drones Are Tracking the Spread of Malaria

Changes in land use can cause unpredictable changes to how disease spread–until now.
Azeen Ghorayshi
2 min read

Instagram and the Evolution of Surfing Prosthetics

Solving the problem of the surfing foot.
Leslie Baehr
2 min read

Returning Sight to Millions of People Around the World With One App

Around 180 million people around the world are blind or have vision impairments–making portable, cheap eye exams incredibly important.
Rachel Nuwer
2 min read

Solving Medical Mysteries Through Crowdsourcing

It’s no WebMD–it’s better.
Rachel Nuwer
2 min read

Pumping Breast Milk Sucks–But Someone Just Changed That

A hackathon for parents who want to push for wider change in maternal and family healthcare.
Georgina Voss
3 min read

Going Viral: How the Humble Text Message is Fighting Ebola

Cell phones are the most effective way of spreading awareness information in affected regions.
Ken Banks
2 min read