The heat—miserable and oppressive—is not abating. Today, a third of Americans are under a heat alert as temperatures keep breaking records: Phoenix has hit 110 degrees Fahrenheit for two weeks straight, while this weekend Death Valley in California could surpass the all-time high of 130 degrees.

Even less extreme heat than that can be dangerous. Recently, in Texas, Louisiana, part of Arizona, and Florida, there have been reports of deaths from heat, and many more hospitalizations. The toll of a heat wave is not always clear in the moment: A new report suggests that last summer’s historic heat wave in Europe killed more than 60,000 people.

Ideally, you’d stay in the air-conditioned indoors as much as possible. That’s not an option for everyone. The other thing to do is stay hydrated. The importance of getting enough fluid is hard to overstate—and often underappreciated: Last month, the Texas state legislature banned local governments from mandating water breaks for construction workers. In the heat, hydration “impacts everything,” Stavros Kavouras, the director of the Hydration Science Lab at Arizona State University, in Phoenix, told me. And with temperatures continuing to rise, it’s essential to get it right.

Serious dehydration is really, really bad for you. Your blood volume decreases, which makes your heart work less effectively. “Your ability to thermoregulate declines,” Kavouras told me, “so your body temperature is getting higher and higher.” You might feel weak or dizzy. Your heart rate rises; it gets harder to focus. The worst-case scenario is heatstroke, when your body stops being able to cool itself—a  potentially fatal medical emergency.

In extreme temperatures, heat injuries can happen quicker than you might think. Given that the human body is mostly water, you might assume that there is some to spare, but inconveniently, this is not the case. “If you lose even 10 percent of [the water] your body has, you are entering the…

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The FDA announced yesterday that it had for the first time approved a daily birth-control pill for over-the-counter sales. That’s a big change; once the product, called Opill, is on the market—which may be as soon as early 2024—Americans will be able to buy daily hormonal birth control without a prescription. That’s historic news, but hidden underneath it is another set of firsts: In the coming months, Americans will also be able to grab an over-the-counter treatment for their heavy periods, cramps, headaches, and even migraines; they’ll have prescription-free access to a drug for endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome; and they’ll be able to buy a medication that can mitigate the symptoms of menopause. It’s all in the same, progestin-based pill.

The FDA’s approval only covers Opill’s use as a form of birth control, but doctors have been prescribing pills that contain progestin for noncontraceptive needs for years. For the most part, the intervention works much better when the pills include both progestin and estrogen. Adding that second hormone to the mix amplifies all of progestin’s beneficial effects, plus helps control hormonal acne. It also leaves more wiggle room in terms of timing: Progestin-only pills—sometimes called a minipill—have a much shorter half-life in the body, so if you don’t take them during the same three-hour window each day, they’re much less reliable at preventing pregnancy, says Anne-Marie Amies Oelschlager, the chief of pediatric and adolescent gynecology at Seattle Children’s. (Some women are prescribed progestin-only pills because they are particularly susceptible to certain risks associated with estrogen.)

As a result, an over-the-counter progestin-only pill is far from the best way of treating these conditions, experts told me. “While I suppose that it could be used off-label, I would be hesitant to do that if someone was otherwise able to obtain a prescription for a combined oral contraceptive,”…

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For more than three hours yesterday, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic grilled a pair of virologists about their participation in an alleged “cover-up” of the pandemic’s origins. Republican lawmakers zeroed in on evidence that the witnesses, Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry, and other researchers had initially suspected that the coronavirus spread from a Chinese lab. “Accidental escape is in fact highly likely—it’s not some fringe theory,” Andersen wrote in a Slack message to a colleague on February 2, 2020. When he laid out the same concern to Anthony Fauci in late January, that some features of the viral genome looked like they might be engineered, Fauci told him to consider going to the FBI.

But days later, Andersen, Garry, and the other scientists were starting to coalesce around a different point of view: Those features were more likely to have developed via natural evolution. The scientists wrote up this revised assessment in an influential paper, published in the journal Nature Medicine in March 2020, called “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” The virus is clearly “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the paper said; in fact, the experts now “did not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” and that the pandemic almost certainly started with a “zoonotic event”—which is to say, the spillover of an animal virus into human populations. That analysis would be cited repeatedly by scientists and media outlets in the months that followed, in support of the idea that the lab-leak theory had been thoroughly debunked.

The researchers’ rapid and consequential change of heart, as revealed through emails, witness interviews, and Slack exchanges, is now a wellspring for Republicans’ suspicions. “All of a sudden, you did a 180,” Representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York said yesterday morning. “What happened?”

Based on the available facts, the…

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A heat dome in Texas. Wildfire smoke polluting the air in the East and Midwest. The signs are everywhere that our children’s summers will look nothing like our own. In this episode, we talk with the climate writer Emma Pattee about how hot is too hot to go outside. The research is thin and the misconceptions are many—but experts are quickly looking into nuances of how and why children suffer in the heat, so we can prepare for a future that’s already here.

Pattee grew up partly in a tent in the woods with the trees as her friends. And she expected her kids would do the same. But as a climate writer, she is realizing more quickly than the rest of us that we already need to let go of what we imagined summer might look like for our children.

“What climate change does is: It makes us realize that our blueprint is fantasy. It is no longer reality. And our children will not live the lives that we have lived. Our children are gonna live drastically different lives than we have lived.”

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Emma Pattee: In the 30 minutes between when the bus drops off all the kids and the parent picks up their kid, they’re just pouring water consistently over these kids to stop them from getting heat illness.

Do I want that for my kid? These become the difficult questions.

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. We have a lot of romantic ideas about childhood, and especially about what childhood should look like in the summer. Kids mucking around in ponds, finding tadpoles. Nature camp. City kids learning outdoor skills so they won’t be totally useless in the apocalypse.

But then, like a lot of romantic ideas, they sometimes run up against … reality. Which these days means it’s too hot to muck around in ponds, or even go outside sometimes. This summer: 107 in Texas. 105 in Louisiana. And a couple of summers ago, a freak heat wave so…

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In 2016, I gave up Diet Coke. This was no small adjustment. I was born and raised in suburban Atlanta, home to the Coca-Cola Company’s global headquarters, and I had never lived in a home without Diet Coke stocked in the refrigerator at all times. Every morning in high school, I’d slam one with breakfast, and then I’d make sure to shove some quarters (a simpler time) in my back pocket to use in the school’s vending machines. When I moved into my freshman college dorm, the first thing I did was stock my mini fridge with cans. A few years later, my then-boyfriend swathed two 12-packs in wrapping paper and put them under his Christmas tree. It was a joke, but it wasn’t.

You’d think quitting would have been agonizing. To my surprise, it was easy. For years, I’d heard anecdotes about people who forsook diet drinks and felt their health improve seemingly overnight—better sleep, better skin, better energy. I’d also heard whispers about the larger suspected dangers of fake sweeteners. Yet I’d loved my DCs too much to be swayed. Then I tried my first can of unsweetened seltzer at a friend’s apartment. After years of turning my nose up at the thought of LaCroix, I realized that much of what I enjoyed about Diet Coke was its frigidity and fizz. That was enough. I switched to seltzer on the spot, prepared to join the smug converted and receive whatever health benefits were sure to accrue to me for my good behavior.

Except they never came. Seven years later, I feel no better than I ever did drinking four or five cans of the stuff a day. I still stick to seltzer anyway—because, you know, who knows?—and I’ve mostly forgotten that Diet Coke exists. But the diet sodas had not, as it turns out, been preventing me from getting great sleep or calming my rosacea or feeling, I don’t know, zesty. Besides the caffeine, they appeared to make no difference in how good or bad I felt at all.

Yesterday, Reuters reported that the WHO’s International Agency for…

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Statins, one of the most extensively studied drugs on the planet, taken by tens of millions of Americans alone, have long had a perplexing side effect. Many patients—some 5 percent in clinical trials, and up to 30 percent in observational studies—experience sore and achy muscles, especially in the upper arms and legs. A much smaller proportion, less than 1 percent, develop muscle weakness or myopathy severe enough that they find it hard to “climb stairs, get up from a sofa, get up from the toilet,” says Robert Rosenson, a cardiologist at Mount Sinai. He’s had patients fall on the street because they couldn’t lift their leg over a curb.

But why should an anticholesterol drug weaken muscles in the arms and legs? Recently, two groups of scientists stumbled upon an answer. They didn’t set out to study statins. They weren’t studying cholesterol at all. They were hunting for genes behind a rare disease called limb girdle muscle dystrophy, in which muscles of the upper arms and legs—sound familiar?—become weak and waste away. After both teams tracked the disease through a handful of families in the U.S. and a Bedouin family in Israel, their suspicions separately landed on mutations in a gene encoding a particularly intriguing enzyme.

The enzyme is known as HMG-CoA reductase, and to doctors, it is not obscure. It is, in fact, the very enzyme that statins block in the process of halting cholesterol production. And so, the answers to two mysteries suddenly became clear at once: Dysfunction in this enzyme causes muscle weakness from both limb girdle muscular dystrophy and statins.

This connection between a rare disease and a common drug stunned the researchers. “It seemed too good to be true,” says Joel Morales-Rosado, a pathologist who worked on one of the studies as a postdoctoral researcher at the Mayo Clinic. “One of the first things you learn in medical school is association between statins and myopathy.” Now the answer as to why— along with…

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Earlier this year, my colleague Yasmin Tayag wrote that Ozempic—the diabetes drug that has become a cultural phenomenon in its off-label use for weight-loss—was about to be old news. She was right.

Over the past few days, presentations at the American Diabetes Association meeting in San Diego have delivered a slew of findings that suggest the Age of Ozempic is already over. Taking its place: a parade of better treatments for obesity. A new, oral form of semaglutide works about as well as Ozempic or Wegovy, which are injectable versions of the same; so does another pill containing a drug called orforglipron. New data also hint that shots containing tirzepatide or survodutide may end up working better than semaglutide, and that a compound called retatrutide is perhaps the best of all, with effects approaching those of bariatric surgery. I won’t even bore you with the news about pemvidutide, lotiglipron, and danuglipron!

Read: We’ve had a cheaper, more potent Ozempic alternative for decades

In other words, Ozempic is old news, and sooner than we thought. The drug will still be widely-used, but a bewildering array of medications for obesity is advancing through development, and in the coming years, they will become a bewildering array of options for patients: Some drugs may be cheaper or more convenient than the others; some may be stronger; some may eventually have fewer nasty side effects or more consistent benefits across the population. That only makes it more disturbing that, even as the drug Ozempic is becoming obsolete, the name Ozempic, as the shorthand for a class of drugs, seems destined to live on.

For months now, the word has been used as a generic term, along the lines of Band-Aid, escalator, and thermos: a specific brand that gets reshaped through common use into a type. Consider all the headlines about the new “Ozempic pills,” the coming of “Ozempic-like drugs,” or the spreading hype for “Nature’s Ozempic.” See reporting on the…

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“Let’s travel now to moonlit valleys blanketed with heather,” Harry Styles says to me. The pop star’s voice—just shy of songful, velvet-dry—makes it seem as if we’re at a sleepaway camp for lonely grown-ups, where he is my fetching counselor, and now it’s time for lights out.

Styles’s iambic beckoning lies within a “sleep story” in the mindfulness app Calm. Like many of its competitors, Calm has become a catchall destination for emotional well-being. In recent years, I’ve cycled through several of these platforms. Using them turns the amorphous, slightly unaccountable act of meditation into something I can accomplish, and cross off the list. That’s the forte of the modern mobile app, after all: easing the completion of a discrete task. Send an email, watch a show, order Kleenex, run at a moderate pace for 30 minutes, doomscroll yourself to sleep. There’s an app for it, and you’ll know when you’re done.

The most popular mindfulness apps have roots in this model, outcome-oriented and timebound. Traditional meditation disciplines can be open-ended, fuzzy, and noncommittal in their benefits, which might take months or years to accrue. Plus, they are disciplines, anchored in study and practice and receiving instruction, and, quite often, traversing periods of frustration. Calm, Headspace, Insight Timer, and Ten Percent Happier all offer neat repackagings of the underlying product. Don’t have half an hour to sit around in witness of your inner being’s birthright quietude? No problem: Here’s a three-minute guided option for the bus. Maybe you’re going through a bout of insomnia and heard that a mindfulness practice could help? To put you to bed, here’s a spoken lullaby from Matthew McConaughey.

There is obvious good in this—in anything that dials down the temperature, that provides some relief from the ever-present human thrum of animus and danger. Headspace—the thing, not the brand—is something 100 percent of us could use…

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If an alien life form landed on Earth tomorrow and called up some of the planet’s foremost experts on lactation, it would have a heck of time figuring out what, exactly, humans and other mammals are feeding their kids.

The trouble is, no one can really describe what milk is—least of all the people who think most often about it. They can describe, mostly, who makes it: mammals (though arguably also some other animals that feed their young secretions from their throat or their skin). They can describe, mostly, where it comes from: mammary glands via, usually, nipples (though please note the existence of monotremes, which ooze milk into abdominal grooves). They can even describe, mostly, what milk does: nourish, protect, and exchange chemical signals with infants to support development and growth.

But few of these answers get at what milk, materially, compositionally, is actually like. Bridget Young, an infant-nutrition researcher at the University of Rochester, told me milk was an “ecological system”; Alan S. Ryan, a clinical-research consultant, called it a “nutritional instrument.” Bruce German, a food scientist at UC Davis, told me milk was “the result of the evolutionary selective pressure on a unique feeding strategy,” adding, by way of clarification, that it was “a biological process.” A few researchers defaulted to using milk to explain something else. “It’s the defining feature of mammals,” says Melanie Martin, an anthropologist at the University of Washington. None of these characterizations were bad. But had I been that alien, I would have no idea what these people were talking about.

Read: We’ve never been good at feeding babies

What these experts were trying to avoid was categorizing milk as a “food”—the way that most people on Earth might, especially in industrialized countries where dairy products command entire supermarket aisles. “Overwhelmingly, when we think about milk, when we talk about milk, we think of…

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Across the internet, a biological scapegoat has emerged for almost any mysterious medical symptom affecting women. Struggling with chronic fatigue, hair loss, brain fog, or dwindling sex drive? When no obvious explanation is at hand, an out-of-whack endocrine system must be to blame. Women have too much cortisol, vloggers and influencers say; or not enough thyroxine, or the wrong ratio of progesterone to estradiol. Social media is brimming with advice from self-proclaimed hormone “gurus” and health coaches; the tag #hormoneimbalance has racked up a staggering 950 million views on TikTok alone.

Now dozens of start-ups promise to diagnose these imbalances from the comfort of your home. All it takes is the prick of a finger, a urine sample, or a vial of spit. You mail your sample out to a lab or run the test right in your kitchen, no co-pay or doctor visit required. A few days later, you receive a slick lab report and in some cases, a customized treatment plan to alleviate the depression, the insomnia, the feeling of just being off.

Hormone imbalances can indeed contribute to an array of mental and physical symptoms, and hormone testing overseen by providers is a routine practice in medicine. Doing so remotely could theoretically improve women’s health and access to care. But despite their growing popularity and Amazon-like convenience, at-home hormone tests might cause more problems than they solve. Several women’s-health and hormone specialists told me that remote testing has long been useful for detecting pregnancy and tracking ovulation, but that few, if any, products now for sale have been consistently and rigorously proven to work for broader, newly advertised purposes. Testing kits are marketed as a way of helping women decipher puzzling symptoms or assess their fertility. But experts said that the technology—at least as it stands right now—is unreliable and could have the opposite effect, causing anxiety and confusion instead.

Mindy Christianson,…

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