Science & Medicine

Ever wondered why you can’t get a commercial jingle out of your head or why some songs are easier on your ears than others? Now you’ve got your answers. We opened the floor to our Hippo readers and in this, our second Ask Me Anything installment, a researcher on music, mind, and brain, Georgia Floridou, takes on your most pressing questions.

Ancient Greeks worshiped Helios, the “Sun God.” It’s not hard to see why they worshiped the personification of the great ball of fire in the sky. The sun provides warmth, heat, and now—energy. Here, science writer Kristen Pope provides 15 facts about solar energy you likely didn’t know.

“How do we get patients in need of care to the people who best know how to take care of them? The logistical operations required, especially in large urban settings, make the answer to this question complex.” In this curation, medical student Laura Christianson addresses hospital workflows and how treatment timelines can impact diagnoses.

Ever wondered why you can’t get “Gangnam Style” out of your head or why you find yourself singing along to pop songs you dislike? Hippo’s latest Ask Me Anything is your chance to put questions of music and mind in front of a recognized expert in this exciting field of study.

Media portrayals of Ebola paint a stark picture—hazmat suits, mass graves, evacuations. But what do past worldwide epidemics have to teach us? Medical student Mark Wien examines epidemiology’s history lessons.

From the first of a series investigating Freud’s legacy: “A lot of psychoanalysis is about imagining. And the implications of imagination, what happens as people imagine things? Real things happen as a result of people imagining things. Real things happen as a result of people dreaming things. And even more fundamentally, dreams and imaginings and fantasies and inner experiences are a real part of the world.”

In the US, health care accounts for 17.9 percent of GDP spending, the highest of anywhere in the world. Who are some of the frugal medicine innovators and why are their technologies critically improving healthcare around the world? This slideshow provides a few examples of frugal medicine.