The wonderful Allie Brosh is back with the second installment in her poignant illustrated account of what depression actually feels like. Pair with Bobby Baker’s visual diary of mental illness and children’s self-portraits of autism.
health
LATEST
Jarring visual timeline of America’s addiction problem. Pair with this 1951 animation on how different drugs work.
A jarring look at how quickly the U.S. got fat between 1985 and 2010. To put things in perspective, see this visual tour of how the world eats.
Body mass index around the world, visualized. Pair with What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets.
To blow your mind: MIT scientists have developed a program that makes the invisible visible by revealing colors and motions in video that are otherwise undetectable by the naked eye. The tool can prove to be a valuable non-invasive health monitoring and diagnostic tool.
Bizarre and beautiful medical Imagery of the 15th century. Complement with The Art of Medicine from the Wellcome Collection and Hidden Treasure from The National Library of Medicine.
NPR data journalist Matt Stiles maps health (un)insurance by county – darker hues denote higher uninsured percentage. Larger, interactive version here.
Note the obvious correlation.
A mouth guard is like a giant piece of tasteless gum that shields your mouth from the havoc your brain wants to wreak on it. It’s a levee for pain, a shock absorber for the soul. Wearing it, I feel safe. Instead of unconsciously gnashing my teeth together in deep-seated angst, I can finally breathe normally again. It’s not just a barrier between myself and my anxieties, it’s prosthetic Xanax.
Clenching the Night Away – an ode to the mouthguard by Leah Finnegan.
As we work, we sit more than we do anything else. We’re averaging 9.3 hours a day, compared to 7.7 hours of sleeping. Sitting is so prevalent and so pervasive that we don’t even question how much we’re doing it. And, everyone else is doing it also, so it doesn’t even occur to us that it’s not okay. In that way, I’ve come to see that sitting is the smoking of our generation.
Of course, health studies conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around. After 1 hour of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat declines by as much as 90%. Extended sitting slows the body’s metabolism affecting things like (good cholesterol) HDL levels in our bodies. Research shows that this lack of physical activity is directly tied to 6% of the impact for heart diseases, 7% for type 2 diabetes, and 10% for breast cancer, or colon cancer. You might already know that the death rate associated with obesity in the US is now 35 million. But do you know what it is in relationship to Tobacco? Just 3.5 million. The New York Times reported on another study, published last year in the journal Circulation that looked at nearly 9,000 Australians and found that for each additional hour of television a person sat and watched per day, the risk of dying rose by 11%. In that article, a doctor is quoted as saying that excessive sitting, which he defines as nine hours a day, is a lethal activity.
Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation
Do yourself a favor and follow in the footsteps of Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Fernando Pessoa and George Sand, who all worked standing.
Causes of death 1970-2006, visualized.
A brief history of the urine wheel – early infographics designed to help physicians create a sensory profile of a patient’s pee in order to diagnose different conditions.
