Health & the body
Medicine, nutrition, sleep, longevity, and everything in between. The evidence, minus the wellness noise.
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In the 1920s, young women painting watch dials were told to lick their brushes to a fine point, ingesting radium with every stroke. Their fight to prove the substance was killing them reshaped worker safety and our understanding of internal radiation poisoning.
In 1984 an Australian physician swallowed a flask of Helicobacter pylori to prove that ulcers were caused by bacteria, not stress — and got violently ill on schedule. This is the story of how one man's stomach overturned a century of medical dogma and eventually won a Nobel Prize.
Discover how a pioneering physician proved low-level radiation kills, only to be blacklisted by the nuclear establishment.
Beyond the classic five senses lies interoception — your perception of your internal state, from heartbeat to hunger. Explore how it works and its surprising links to emotion, anxiety, and the way we make decisions.
During pregnancy, cells pass from fetus to mother and can persist for decades, turning up in her blood, organs, and even her brain. Explore this astonishing biological blurring of self and other, and what science is learning about its effects.
Exercise, heat, cold, and fasting are all forms of stress that strengthen the body in small doses and harm it in large ones. Explore the dose-response science of hormesis and what it really says about the popular idea of 'what doesn't kill you.'
Only discovered in 2012, the brain's waste-clearance network flushes out toxins — including proteins tied to Alzheimer's — most actively during deep sleep. Explore this newly understood plumbing and what it means for why we sleep.
The immune system is biased toward the first version of a virus it ever met, which can help or badly mislead its response to later strains. Explore this quirk of immune memory and why it complicates flu shots and pandemic response.
Medicine and the body, minus the wellness noise. Episodes dig into the glymphatic system that washes your brain during sleep, interoception — the sense that reads your own body — why a little stress makes you stronger, and how the first flu you ever caught shapes a lifetime of immunity. Each episode is sized for a walk or a commute, from new findings to the fundamentals your biology class skipped.
Fylom episodes are researched, written, and voiced by AI. Automated checks help catch inaccuracies, but episodes aren't reviewed by a human and AI can still get things wrong. Treat them as a starting point, not a source of record — more in our accuracy disclaimer.