Her scientific breakthrough could end morning sickness
By the 1960s, doctors were prescribing seemingly more effective drugs to combat the barfing. When one such drug, thalidomide, turned out to cause birth defects in the children born to parents who'd taken it, however, the scandal caused a chilling effect on the study of pregnancy nausea.
But the story of how we finally got a scientific answer to why some pregnant people get sicker than others starts with a woman in the 1990s.
After geneticist Marlena Fejzo experienced a debilitating form of pregnancy nausea, called hyperemesis gravidarum, she found very little in the scientific literature attempting to explain why. Then an early career post-doc, Fejzo decided she would set out to find the answer herself.
Pregnancy nausea was not Fejzo's professional focus at the time she set out to study it, and she didn't have funding to embark on any formal research, so she embarked on a bit of a DIY inquiry. She posted a survey online in the early days of the internet and received hundreds of replies via fax from people who'd experienced hyperemesis. Those gave her the first clues that the mechanism at play might be genetic.
On the latest episode of the Unexplainable podcast, I talk to Dr. Fejzo about her pregnancy and her path to finding a biological cause and a cure to pregnancy nausea. Listen below, or in the feed of your favorite podcast app.
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Scientific American
5 days ago
- Scientific American
Science Makes the U.S. a Great Nation
One of history's dark jokes is that the Roman Empire, for all its vaunted accomplishments, only made a single great 'contribution' to science: the killing of Archimedes. Today the U.S. risks suffering the same kind of shame. In 212 B.C.E. the Romans sacked the city of Syracuse after a prolonged siege , and a Roman soldier killed Archimedes, then the greatest living mathematician, physicist and engineer—and one of the greatest minds of all time. Exact accounts vary, but according to one, Archimedes was engrossed in sketching a problem in sand when his murderer arrived, sword drawn. Covering his work, the mathematician said, 'I beg of you, do not disturb this.' In response, the soldier struck down the 72-year-old man. American science now faces another sharpened edge. The Trump administration stands with its own sword drawn. It's choking our universities. It's stamping out the free flow of ideas. It's cutting funding to basic science. It's ready to make the killing blow, all in the name of making America great again. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Despite declines since the COVID pandemic, science remains one of the most trusted and most well regarded institutions in the U.S. And while modern science has many flaws, it is one of those few things we can point to as a society and say that this, this, is what already makes us great. Our technological and scientific prowess is the envy of the world, unmatched across the globe and indeed throughout human history. No other country, no other culture, no other civilization has matched what the U.S. has poured into fundamental research in the years since World War II. After the stunning success of the Manhattan Project, political leaders in the U.S. learned what the rulers of ancient Syracuse already knew: wise nations invest in their most brilliant minds. Last year the U.S. government funded about $90 billion of nondefense research. And for the relatively paltry sum of close to a hundred billion dollars—essentially a rounding error in total federal outlays—repeated year after year for decades, we have miracles made manifest: cures and treatments, consisting of a few milliliters of molecules, to balm the worst of our diseases; machines that breathe fire to take us to the stars; devices, held in our hands, that connect us to friends, family and strangers a world away. Chances are that all those marvels, great and small, can trace their roots to publicly supported research. It's easy enough to point to the monetary benefits of scientific research—and the immediate harms that will be done if the administration's proposed cuts go through. One dollar of National Institutes of Health research funding produces $2.56 in economic activity. Cutting annual research funding in half would save the American taxpayer $260 this year—and cost them $10,000 in future wealth. Federal funding of nondefense research has accounted for about 20 percent of our nation's business productivity growth since World War II. In addition, although the majority of trainees in science do not end up following a career as a researcher, they go on to add value to a wide variety of organizations, including businesses and government agencies. Science takes our best and brightest and throws them into the crucible, pitting them against the toughest problems known to humanity, and then sets them loose to solve the everyday challenges of our modern economy. But the true greatness of our achievements is in the intangibles—not in what we construct but in what we perceive. We have built telescopes to peer back through deep cosmic time and see the dim, faded light of the first galaxies to emerge in the heavens. We have developed electronic machines to mimic our own intelligent speech and, in doing so, allow us to wrestle with the nature of our own humanity. We have set ourselves to a great mission of conquest—not of a people or a rival nation but of the scourge of cancer. We have had the courage to look into our history, our own communities, our own social connections and ask uncomfortable questions and reveal painful truths. Is this not what great nations do? They don't just build bridges and roads and monuments of stone and steel. They erect edifices of the intellect. They place their stamp on history. They create gifts to be enjoyed by generations yet to come. They become beacons that future civilizations emulate. Americans have long held themselves to be different than people in other nations. French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, the great observer of early American life, wrote in his book Democracy in America that 'the position of the Americans is therefor quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.' Our modern institution of science is one our country's truly exceptional achievements. This is why fundamental science is worthy of public funding. No private enterprise would ever dare sacrifice profits to study the arcane corners of the universe. No single patron, no matter how wealthy, can provide the funding necessary to slake our thirst for answers. Only nations—great nations—can afford to take a slim measure of the public's treasury and devote it to science. Science is part of what makes us noble. It demonstrates our abilities to the world and to history. It is a projection of our strength. Look at us, we say to the world, so wealthy and wise that we set our sights farther, our minds deeper. It's here, in this nation, that we will produce works that will stand the test of time. The minuscule savings achieved from the proposed cuts to science research won't be felt in the average taxpayer's pocketbook. But the cuts will hurt us. They will hurt us now and for generations to come. That is the bitter reality that we are now facing: that we are deliberately making our children impoverished—materially and intellectually—in the name of insignificant savings today. The proposed budget cuts kill all of this —the learning; the advancement; the courage; the powerhouse of American ingenuity; and one of the pillars that we can stand on to rightly claim our place in history as a great nation. How will our descendants remember us and this moment? Will they view us as a people that dared mighty things—or as so much blood in the sand? Go ahead, strike down science if you will. But remember this: The name of Archimedes echoes through the centuries. The name of the solider who killed him does not. I beg of you, do not disturb this.
Vox
05-07-2025
- Vox
Heart attacks aren't as fatal as they used to be
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. A day before my 47th birthday last month, I took the subway to Manhattan's Upper East Side for a coronary artery calcium scan (CAC). For those who haven't entered the valley of middle age, a CAC is a specialized CT scan that looks for calcium deposits in the heart and its arteries. Unlike in your bones, having calcium in your coronary arteries is a bad thing, because it indicates the buildup of plaque comprised of cholesterol, fat, and other lovely things. The higher the calcium score, the more plaque that has built up — and with it, the higher the risk of heart disease and even heart attacks. A couple of hours after the test, I received a ping on my phone. My CAC score was 7, which indicated the presence of a small amount of calcified plaque, which translates to a 'low but non-zero cardiovascular risk.' Put another way, according to one calculator, it means an approximately 2.1 percent chance of a major adverse cardiovascular event over the next 10 years. 2.1 percent doesn't sound high — it's a little higher than the chance of pulling an ace of spades from a card deck — but when it comes to major adverse cardiovascular events, 2.1 percent is approximately 100 percent higher than I'd like. That's how I found myself joining the tens of millions of Americans who are currently on statin drugs, which lower levels of LDL cholesterol (aka the 'bad' cholesterol). I didn't really want to celebrate my birthday with a numerical reminder of my creeping mortality. But everything about my experience — from the high-tech calcium scan to my doctor's aggressive statin prescription — explains how the US has made amazing progress against one of our biggest health risks: heart disease, and especially, heart attacks. A dramatic drop in heart attack deaths A heart attack — which usually occurs when atherosclerotic plaque partially or fully blocks the flow of blood to the heart — used to be close to a death sentence. In 1963, the death rate from coronary heart disease, which includes heart attacks, peaked in the US, with 290 deaths per 100,000 population. As late as 1970, a man over 65 who was hospitalized with a heart attack had only a 60 percent chance of ever leaving that hospital alive. A sudden cardiac death is the disease equivalent of homicide or a car crash death. It meant someone's father or husband, wife or mother, was suddenly ripped away without warning. Heart attacks were terrifying. Yet today, that risk is much less. According to a recent study in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the proportion of all deaths attributable to heart attacks plummeted by nearly 90 percent between 1970 and 2022. Over the same period, heart disease as a cause of all adult deaths in the US fell from 41 percent to 24 percent. Today, if a man over 65 is hospitalized with a heart attack, he has a 90 percent chance of leaving the hospital alive. By my calculations, the improvements in preventing and treating heart attacks between 1970 and 2022 have likely saved tens of millions of lives. So how did we get here? How to save a life In 1964, the year after the coronary heart disease death rate peaked, the US surgeon general released a landmark report on the risks of smoking. It marked the start of a decades-long public health campaign against one of the biggest contributing factors to cardiovascular disease. That campaign has been incredibly successful. In 1970, an estimated 40 percent of Americans smoked. By 2019, that percentage had fallen to 14 percent, and it keeps declining. The reduction in smoking has helped lower the number of Americans at risk of a heart attack. So did the development and spread in the 1980s of statins like I'm on now, which make it far easier to manage cholesterol and prevent heart disease. By one estimate, statins save nearly 2 million lives globally each year. When heart attacks do occur, the widespread adoption of CPR and the development of portable defibrillators — which only began to become common in the late 1960s — ensured that more people survived long enough to make it to the hospital. Once there, the development of specialized coronary care units, balloon angioplasty and artery-opening stents made it easier for doctors to rescue a patient suffering an acute cardiac event. Our changing heart health deaths Despite this progress in stopping heart attacks, around 700,000 Americans still die of all forms of heart disease every year, equivalent to 1 in 5 deaths overall. Some of this is the unintended result of our medical success. As more patients survive acute heart attacks and life expectancy has risen as a whole, it means more people are living long enough to become vulnerable to other, more chronic forms of heart disease, like heart failure and pulmonary-related heart conditions. While the decline in smoking has reduced a major risk factor for heart disease, Americans are in many other ways much less healthy than they were 50 years ago. The increasing prevalence of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and sedentary behavior all raise the risk that more Americans will develop some form of potentially fatal heart disease down the line. Here, GLP-1 inhibitors like Ozempic hold amazing potential to reduce heart disease's toll. One study found that obese or overweight patients who took a GLP-1 inhibitor for more than three years had a 20 percent lower risk of heart attack, stroke, or death due to cardiovascular disease. Statins have saved millions of lives, yet tens of millions more Americans could likely benefit from taking the cholesterol-lowering drugs, especially women, minorities, and people in rural areas. Lastly, far more Americans could benefit from the kind of advanced screening I received. Only about 1.5 million Americans received a CAC test in 2017, but clinical guidelines indicate that more than 30 million people could benefit from such scans. Just as it is with cancer, getting ahead of heart disease is the best way to stay healthy. It's an astounding accomplishment to have reduced deaths from heart attacks by 90 percent over the past 50-plus years. But even better would be preventing more of us from ever getting to the cardiac brink at all. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Vox
28-06-2025
- Vox
How the largest digital camera ever made is revolutionizing our view of space
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. Ten areas in the sky were selected as 'deep fields' that the Dark Energy Camera imaged several times during the survey, providing a glimpse of distant galaxies and helping determine their 3D distribution in the cosmos. The image is teeming with galaxies — in fact, nearly every single object in this image is a galaxy. Last Thursday, I took my son to the Rose Center for Earth and Space at New York's Museum of Natural History. In the Hayden Planetarium, we watched a simulation of the Milky Way bloom above us, while the actor Pedro Pascal — who truly is everywhere — narrated the galactic dance unfolding on the screen. It was breathtaking. But it didn't compare to what was blasted around the world just a few days later, as the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory began broadcasting its 'first light' — its inaugural images of the cosmos. I found myself pinching-to-zoom through a picture that contains roughly 10 million galaxies in a single frame, a vista so vast it would take 400 4-K TVs to display at full resolution. I could hold the universe itself on my screen. Eye on the sky Perched 8,660 feet up Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes, where the crystal-clear nights provide an exceptionally clear window into space, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory began construction in 2015 with funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy. Named for the pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin, whose work on galaxy rotation helped prove the existence of dark matter, the observatory was built to run a single, audacious experiment: the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time. It will photograph the entire Southern Hemisphere sky every few nights to tackle four grand goals: unmask dark matter and dark energy, inventory the Solar System's asteroids and comets, chart the Milky Way's formation, and capture every transient cosmic event. What makes Rubin so special is its eye, which is a marvel. At its core is a 27-foot-wide dual mirror cast from 51,900 pounds of molten glass that is still light enough to sweep across the sky in seconds. The mirror directs a flow of light from the cosmic depths to the 3.2-gigapixel LSST Camera, a 5-by-10-feet digital jumbotron that is the largest digital camera ever made. It's like a massive magnifying glass paired with the world's sharpest DSLR: Together they capture a swath of the night sky equivalent to 45 full moons every 30 seconds. Related Astronomers spotted something perplexing near the beginning of time And those images, which will be continuously shared with the world, are jaw-dropping. The headlining shot from Rubin's debut, nicknamed 'Cosmic Treasure Chest,' stitches together 1,185 exposures of the Virgo Cluster, our nearest major collection of galaxies, some 55 million light-years away. But the Rubin Observatory is about much more than producing pretty cosmic wallpaper. Its unprecedented scale gives it the ability to search for answers to grand questions about space science. The NSF notes that Rubin will gather more optical data in its first year than all previous ground telescopes combined, turning the messy, ever-changing sky into a searchable movie. Cosmic Treasure Chest. RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA It's not just pretty pictures As I've written before, the world has made great strides in planetary defense: Our ability to detect and eventually deflect asteroids that could be on a collision course with Earth. Rubin has already begun paying dividends toward that goal. In a mere 10 hours of engineering data, its detection software identified 2,104 brand-new asteroids — including seven near-Earth objects, heavenly bodies whose orbit will bring them near-ish our planet. That haul came from just a thumbnail-sized patch of sky; once Rubin begins its nightly scan of the whole Southern Hemisphere, it's projected to catalog over 5 million asteroids and roughly 100,000 NEOs over the next decade, tripling today's inventory. That will help NASA finally reach its congressionally mandated target of identifying 90 percent of the 25,000 city-killer-class NEOs (those over 140 meters) estimated to be out there. How powerful is Rubin's eye? 'It took 225 years of astronomical observations to detect the first 1.5 million asteroids,' Jake Kurlander, a grad student astronomer at the University of Washington, told 'Rubin will double that number in less than a year.' Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae. RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA And the images that Rubin captures will go out to the entire world. Its Skyviewer app will allow anyone to zoom in and out of the corners of space that catch Rubin's eye, including celestial objects so new that most of them don't have names. Looking at the app gives you a sense of what it must have been like to be one of the first human beings, gazing up at a sky filled with wonder and mystery. Finding perspective in a pixel It might seem strange to highlight a telescope at a moment when the world feels as if it is literally on fire. But the Vera Rubin Observatory isn't just a triumph of international scientific engineering, or an unparalleled window on the universe. It is the ultimate perspective provider. If you open the Virgo image and zoom all the way out, Earth's orbit would be smaller than a single pixel. Yet that same pixel is where thousands of engineers, coders, machinists, and scientists quietly spent a decade building an eye that can watch the rest of the universe breathe, and then share those images with all of their fellow humans. Seeing Rubin's images brought to mind the lines of Walt Whitman's 'When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer.' I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars. On days when life on our little world feels chaotic, Rubin's first-light view offers a valuable reminder: We're just one tiny part in a tapestry of 10 million galaxies, looking up from our planet at the endless stars. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
