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Sue Gray, 59, has been sick half her life. But it took two decades to confirm why.When Gray was 30 and living with her then-husband in the middle of the woods in upstate New York, she felt a tick on her scalp one day after taking a shower. Her former husband plucked it off with tweezers, and “that was the end of that—for that day,” Gray says.Over the next few months, however, Gray’s health began to decline. She suffered frequent respiratory infections and developed a twitch in her eye. Then, a few weeks after the twitch began, she felt the sensation of ants crawling up and down her legs, even though nothing was there. That made Gray nervous enough to book an appointment with a neurologist. Remembering her recent tick bite, Gray asked to be tested for Lyme disease—but the results came back ...

New York City will host its very first National Urban Rat Summit this fall, Mayor Eric Adams announced Wednesday.The summit will invite experts like academic researchers and municipal pest control managers to come together and share strategies on rodent mitigation and “advance the science of urban rat management,” the city said in a press release. Experts from across the country—including Boston, New Orleans, and Seattle—will be invited to attend the summit, which will be held on Sept. 18 and 19.“New Yorkers may not know this about me—but I hate rats, and I’m confident most of our city’s residents do as well,” Adams said in the press release. “The best way to defeat our enemy is to know our enemy. That’s why we’re holding this inaugural summit, to bring experts and leaders from across the ...

Rare but deadly blood clots tied to Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca Plc’s Covid-19 shots were caused by an autoimmune reaction that some people are predisposed to, researchers found, a discovery that they say will shape development of future vaccines.Adenovirus-based vaccines, like the J&J and AstraZeneca shots that were later pulled from the market, contain a component that, in genetically susceptible people, can trigger the production of unusually structured antibodies against a protein involved in blood clotting, scientists said Wednesday in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers plan to identify the culprit and then try to remove it using genetic engineering.Read More: How COVID-19 Vaccines and Infections Are Tweaking Our ImmunityAn extremely similar del...

Recently, I was catching up with a friend who’d just given birth to her first baby. I thought about all of the changes I’d experienced since having my 1- and 3-year-old daughters. “I feel like I’m a completely different person,” I said. As soon as the phrase came out of my mouth, I questioned it. Nearly 2 billion people in the world are mothers. Surely they didn’t all feel completely different after giving birth. Or did they?Most people are familiar with the term “mommy brain,” a phrase that describes the brain fog and forgetfulness that many pregnant women and new moms experience. But it turns out there’s way more going on than just forgetting the name of your college professor, and it’s something called matrescence. Coined by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973, matrescence is, q...