Health & Disease

Articles

Sex in the Brain

Powerful new antibiotics discovered using artificial intelligence. Sitting in a restaurant, staring at a piece of fish. Is it really that expensive kind? Pull out your DNA barcode reader, and find out. And, sex and the brain; women’s and men’s are wired differently; men’s brains are sexualized before they’re born.


Mobile Petri Dishes

Mobile phones — smart, incredibly useful. Life support systems. They’re also mobile Petri dishes! The GPM speaks with a microbiologist who knows. And the roots of the US anti-abortion movement; misogyny, racism, hatred toward immigrants. A conversation with American academic Lauren MacIvor Thompson.


Killing the Future

Killing the future in Gaza. Reducing it to rubble. Forcibly transferring its people into filthy tent camps, or onto the street. Starving them. Hunger and disease go hand in hand. The GPM speaks with Alex de Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation and authority on human-engineered food crises, and with Margaret Harris, global spokesperson for the World Health Organization.


Beautiful Resistance

For those who’ve never visited a Palestinian refugee camp, these are not dense tent or tin shacks encampments. They’re more like barrios; densely packed, tightly knit, fully functioning communities. On a very recent trip, the GPM visited one of Palestine’s largest refugee camps – Aida – in the southern West Bank town of Bethlehem.


Dear Mr. Trudeau

Starvation and famine in Gaza. A UN expert speaks out. And, a group of Canadian lawyers demand that the Trudeau government stop supporting Israeli genocide.


Day of Two Suns

The Day of Two Suns: 70 years ago, the Pentagon conducted its biggest-ever atmospheric H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, in the central Pacific. The 15-megaton Bravo shot spewed radioactive fallout on thousands of Marshallese, and long-lived radioisotopes all around the planet. Nearby Rongelap Atoll suffered the worst. Seventy years later, the people of Rongelap and Bikini have yet to go home.


Geology Futures

The geology of cities — built out of stuff mined from the ground. That’s where all cities will end up, broken down and fossilized. The GPM speaks with a geologist who gazes into the future. Some human-made molecules won’t break down either. Forever chemicals, they’re called, and they’re everywhere. In non-stick cookware, cosmetics and clothing. They last forever, and they’re toxic. On a happier note — the human microbiome. All those bacteria living on us and in us, delivering crucial services. Nothing more amazing than the bacteria in the gut of a pregnant woman, steering healthy fetal development.


Punishing the Amalekites

The dreadful events of October 7 didn’t happen in a vacuum. As Israel retaliates, reducing little Gaza to rubble, in the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers and settlers work hand in hand, driving Palestinians from their land. Gazing on Israeli super-violence, genocide comes to mind.


Henrietta Lacks’ Immortal Cells

One of medical science’s greatest paradoxes: The cancer cells that killed Henrietta Lacks revolutionized medicine — medical care her own family couldn’t afford. Narrow profit margins for Canadian uranium companies operating in Niger. Big health risks for Nigerien miners.


Poisonous Legacies

Uranium mining in Niger: a filthy, toxic business. Fifty years after the end of America’s war on Vietnam, traces of US chemical weapons linger. And, the Anthropocene. A geologist talks about humanity’s transformation of Planet Earth.



Green Planet Monitor Podcast

Artificial Intelligence: existential threat to humanity, or just to basic civil rights? Personal DNA testing – you never know what you’ll find. And, Forever Chemicals in the blood of pregnant mums and their babies.


Green Planet Monitor Podcast

Powerful new antibiotics discovered using artificial intelligence. Sitting in a restaurant, staring at a piece of fish — Is it really that expensive kind? Pull out your DNA barcode reader, and find out! And, sex and the brain; women’s and men’s are wired differently; men’s brains are sexualized before they’re born.






Covid Apartheid

The A-word seems apt. How better to describe Israel’s national Covid vaccination campaign? Since December 20, Israeli health authorities have administered jabs of the Pfizer vaccine to an astonishing quarter of Israel’s ‘official’ population, while reportedly denying the vaccine to the five million Palestinians living under military rule in the occupied/colonized West Bank and Gaza.


Shit Doesn’t Just Happen

Shit doesn’t just happen. Stock market crashes, multi-vehicle pileups, the collapse of tall buildings, wildfires, viral pandemics … None of these phenomena have a single, simple explanation. Rather, they all result from a multitude of events, factors and situations — proximal, distal and invariably complex. Thomas Homer-Dixon is a complexity theorist. Listen to our conversation.


Covid-19 in Tanzania

As Covid-19 sweeps around the planet, news has focused on places where death tolls have been high: Italy, Mexico, Brazil, the US and — of course — China, where the pandemic began. Early predictions about the potential for outbreaks in Africa have yet to materialize. Whether swift lock downs or non-reporting is the reason is unclear. I spoke with GPM correspondent Josephat Mwanzi, in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam.