Author: paige laevy

A computer science student named Thomas Marwitz has been teaching a machine to read the unreadable somewhere in a quiet lab at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Scientific papers, not novels or legal briefs. Millions of them. It turns out that the machine has been picking up on details that even seasoned researchers often overlook. The scope of the issue is nearly absurd. Over 30,000 journals publish about 2.5 million new scientific papers annually, a deluge so intense that scientists have all but stopped monitoring their own disciplines. Among the worst offenders is materials science, with its vast intersections of…

When a surgeon first told me that an algorithm had identified a patient as high-risk before he had even scrubbed in, I thought it sounded like science fiction. It wasn’t. Quietly circulating through research networks and teaching hospitals, the tool has been reporting accuracy rates above 91%. To be honest, most seasoned clinicians would be reluctant to make such claims for themselves. The whole thing is a little unsettling. On a Tuesday morning, a machine that has been trained on millions of electronic health records, ECG traces, and old surgical videos is pointing at a patient and whispering, “Watch this…

Imagine a hospital hallway in a large American city, complete with fluorescent lights that hum a little too loudly, residents carrying tablets loaded with decision-support software, and nurses moving quickly. A Black patient who is having trouble breathing is brought in. Their blood oxygen levels are measured by a sensor that is attached to their finger. The figure seems reasonable. No emergency is flagged by the algorithm. The patient is not escalated, but they are observed. The device’s infrared light reads differently through darker skin, which is something it was never intended to account for. The number was incorrect. Additionally,…

Growing up as the only boy among three siblings, Al Barrus is a 43-year-old veteran and communications specialist from New Mexico. After years of witnessing his sisters struggle with painful periods, hormonal turmoil, and skin issues, one of them was eventually diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome. He recognized it as a condition specific to women. Anatomical and structural, a female issue confined to a branch of biology he didn’t understand. Then, in silence, he started to wonder if his own body was experiencing something similar. When he was a teenager, he went bald. He has very little body hair. He…

When someone in their mid-fifties mentions they’ve started running, the person next to them will noticeably wince. This is a specific type of conversation that takes place in orthopedic waiting rooms, the ones with the slightly out-of-date magazines and the faint antiseptic smell. They say, “Oh, your knees,” with the seriousness of someone breaking bad news. The warning has a sense of authority. It is transmitted like inherited knowledge. And an increasing amount of research indicates that it is virtually completely incorrect. For many years, the idea that running wears down your knee cartilage like sandpaper on soft wood has…

Imagine a government medical facility in a remote area of Zimbabwe in the early months of 2021. A delegation who wanted their picture taken has arrived with a shipment of vaccines, which came from a Chinese state-owned manufacturer rather than the multilateral system established especially to stop this kind of inequality. The vaccines were delivered in boxes bearing the Sinopharm logo. The fact that there were doses at all relieved the nurses. Someone else was responsible for the politics surrounding the source of those doses. And that is the vaccine diplomacy story in miniature. Even the phrase itself seems harmless.…

A Marine veteran once lay on a couch wearing an eye mask, listening to music, and had what he later described as the most significant eight hours of his life in a room somewhere inside a Johns Hopkins research building. It was carpeted, softly lit, and had nothing clinical about it. It had been years since he had felt anything near normal. There had been three antidepressants that came and went. One made him dizzy, and another made him lose his appetite. After six weeks, he stopped taking the third because he claimed it made him feel like a ghost.…

You’ll notice it if you stroll through the corridors of nearly every American secondary school: the subtle cup of a hand around a tiny gadget, the persistent cough that parents believe is caused by allergies, and the subtle, sweet chemical odor that lingers near bathroom doors. Adolescents’ use of e-cigarettes spread so swiftly and covertly that the culture changed before the medication did. The industry made them small enough to fit in a shirt pocket, marketed them as a healthier substitute for tobacco, and watched as a whole generation picked them up without realizing—and frequently without being informed—what they were…

This story has an easy-to-tell version that is incorrect. The simple version is as follows: a young NBA player publicly collapsed on social media after making offensive remarks and being waived. There is enough surface truth in that version for it to spread widely, and it has. However, it ignores the most important part, which took place prior to any controversy, when a 24-year-old was sitting by himself with prescription pills in his hand and the only thing holding him back was his wife’s voice. On January 1, 2025, while playing for the Detroit Pistons, Jaden Ivey broke his fibula.…

When asked which blood markers their doctor monitors the most, most people would say cholesterol. Perhaps blood pressure. Maybe blood sugar, if there is a family history of diabetes. These are the numbers that show up on regular lab reports, that spark follow-up discussions, that motivate prescriptions, referrals, and lifestyle talks in exam rooms all over the nation. They are unquestionably genuinely significant. However, a growing body of research indicates that there is another number that sits quietly on many of those same lab reports; it is frequently mentioned, seldom discussed, and nearly never explained, and it deserves far more…