Discover

in his own words …

Here I am, an expert, going off to these exotic tropical locations to find new species. And I live in this suburban house in Salt Lake City near the University of Utah, with a little garden in the back. I went out one evening and got down on my hands and knees looking for springtails [small arthropods] that come out at night. I was looking at the soil, and I saw these ants walking by. I couldn’t tell what species they were — for that sort of detail you have to put them under the microscope — but I knew they belonged to a group of ants that shouldn’t have been there. The group occurs either in the tropics or deciduous forests of the eastern U.S. — not in Utah.…

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Fireline Montana Public Radio Wherever there are humans, there is fire; it’s a relationship we can’t escape. And with historic fire seasons sweeping the American West in recent years, I’ve been craving a podcast that puts this relationship in perspective. Fireline host and University of Montana professor Justin Angle unravels the layered story of how fire has transformed our lives, from the moment our ancestors first discovered how to cook to the future of blaze management in an era of global warming. The result is an immersive, people-centric look into the lives of those battling and researching this inescapable element.…

see the locations →

CLINICAL SITES ▪ Bethesda, MD (NIH Undiagnosed Diseases Program) ▪ Boston, MA (UDN Clinical Site at Harvard Medical School) ▪ Durham, NC (Duke University and Columbia University) ▪ Houston, TX (Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children’s Hospital, and Baylor CHI St. Luke’s Medical Center) ▪ Los Angeles, CA (UCLA Undiagnosed Diseases Clinic) ▪ Miami, FL (University of Miami School of Medicine) ▪ Nashville, TN (Vanderbilt Center for Undiagnosed Diseases) ▪ Philadelphia, PA (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania) ▪ Salt Lake City, UT (University of Utah – Intermountain West) ▪ Seattle, WA (Pacific Northwest Undiagnosed Diseases Clinical Site at University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital) ▪ Stanford, CA (Center for Undiagnosed Diseases at Stanford) ▪ St. Louis, MO (Washington University in St. Louis) CENTRAL BIOREPOSITORY ▪ Nashville, TN (Vanderbilt University Medical Center) COORDINATING CENTER ▪ Boston, MA (Harvard Medical School and University of…

angela moon / age: 46

For decades, Angela Moon dealt with her baffling condition in silence. Some people didn’t even realize she had a disability, she says, because she hid it so well. But in reality, Angela was often in pain, the result of thousands of hard, purplish lesions called angiokeratomas that grew on her skin and which could burst open bloodily. Her legs were especially painful, as they were constantly swollen with fluid, a condition known as lymphedema. Though Angela had been evaluated by doctors for her symptoms since birth, there were no real explanations and little respite from the discomfort. In 2017, everything came to a head. Angela “basically [had] a mental breakdown,” she says, the result of years of coping with stress and physical pain, compounded by the absence of any sort of…

vaccine production speed

In early 2020, before most people had even heard of an N95 mask, scientists were working around the clock to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Large-scale trials of several vaccines were underway by fall, and months later, providers were injecting them into arms by the millions. It was a vaccine development land-speed record for a virus that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives within months — especially considering that, pre-COVID, typical vaccine timelines ran closer to a decade. There’s every reason to think we can pull off such feats in the future, says Sharon Nachman, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and director of the Office of Clinical Trials at Stony Brook University. The bottom line, in Nachman’s view, is that after COVID-19 popped up, the system worked exactly the way it was…

addressing racial disparity

It’s a reality the pandemic has brought into stark relief: Systemic racism is endemic in U.S. health care. COVID-19 has disproportionately hit communities of color — a June 2020 analysis by health professions found that in one region of Louisiana, 3 in 4 patients hospitalized for the virus were Black, even though only 1 in 3 residents of that region were Black. Infection and death rates have also been two to four times as high among Black, Latino and Asian peoples as among white people, according to an analysis of 300 hospitals in 21 states. Behind these numbing statistics are the stories of thousands who might have been saved with better care. In one viral video, Susan Moore, a Black doctor with COVID-19, described how hospital doctors were dismissing her breathing…