When it comes to clothes, familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed contempt. While winter has always been high season for warmth, comfort, and outfit repetition, the pandemic’s homebody mandate has rendered our attachment to our comfort clothes even fiercer. And though you couldn’t pry me out of my house shoes and softest seal-gray half-zip right now, I…
BANGKOK — Thailand’s Parliament has voted to make abortion legal in the first trimester, while keeping penalties in place for women who undergo it later in their pregnancies. Lawmakers in the Senate voted 166 to 7 on Monday to amend a law that had imposed prison terms of up to three years for anyone having…
Before the pandemic began, the second location of The June Motel, a 24-room boutique hotel in Sauble Beach, Ontario, was set to open in late last spring. To be fully ramped up for Lake Huron’s 2020 beach season was the goal. Construction stopped in mid April, however, leaving the property’s restaurant with half-installed floor tiles…
The coronavirus can warp the body’s defenses in many ways — disarming the body’s early warning systems, for example, or causing immune cells to misfire. But a spate of new studies suggests another insidious consequence: The infection can trigger the production of antibodies that mistakenly attack the patient’s own tissues instead of the virus. The…
Lewis, the author of best-selling nonfiction like “Moneyball” and “The Big Short,” is known for coaxing compelling narratives out of mind-numbingly complex subjects — mortgage-backed securities, sovereign debt, statistics, the dull but essential mechanics of government bureaucracy. His previous books have collectively sold more than 10 million copies. With “The Premonition,” he is taking on…
Roy Healy’s first tattoo wasn’t the kind people usually regret, like a future ex’s name or a quotation in a language one can’t read. Still, he was nervous about it. He had asked the artist to ink a QR code on the inside of his wrist, directing to a website he owned, and he wasn’t…
Meyer began to feel as if he knew the people personally — the ones who described smells in terms of tea and fruit, or meat and gasoline, or blue Powerade and lollipops. The way they described their senses felt so intimate, he said later, “you could almost see the type of person they are.” He…
BOSTON — Routine screening of asymptomatic health care personnel (HCP) in the absence of confirmed exposures to COVID-19 is not a recommended strategy for preventing transmission of the coronavirus causing the current global pandemic, according to a new review co-authored by an infectious disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). The review, published in Infection…
Counties with a greater number of cannabis dispensary storefronts experience reduced numbers of opioid-related deaths relative to other locales, a recent University of California, Davis, study has found. This is the first study to examine the association between active cannabis dispensary operations — both medical and recreational — and opioid-related mortality rates at the county…
Housing instability and homelessness are widely understood to have an impact on health, and certain housing problems have been linked to specific childhood health conditions, such as mold with asthma. But it has not been clear how overall housing quality may affect children–especially those who are at risk from other social determinants of health such…