Pandemics Cause Misery and Death, But Th...

When the First Crusade arrived at the walls of Antioch in 1097, the two most powerful Muslim rulers in Syria were not preparing a joint defense. They were trying to destroy each other. Ridwan of Aleppo and his brother Duqaq of Damascus had been locked in a fratricidal war over th ... Show More

On the morning of January 24, 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall climbed into a ditch beside a half-finished sawmill in the Sierra Nevada foothills, stooped down, and found gold. He crawled out clutching his hat to his chest like a hurt child, showed the men a teaspoon of yel ... Show More

Early America’s most important invention wasn’t Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod, or the cotton gin. It was the world's first fully automated flour mill, built by Oliver Evans in the 1780s. Evans's mill used a conveyor-belt grain elevator, leather straps, wheels, and Archimedean ... Show More

As recent history has shown us, human societies can prove surprisingly frail in the face of a tiny, yet powerful force: the microbes that cause infectious disease. Speaking with Matt Elton, Jonathan Kennedy explores the myriad ways in which pandemics have shaped the course of hum ... Show More

From when our ancestors first mastered fire to the rise of modern cities, humanity’s progress has been accompanied by a revolving door of parasites, bacteria and viruses, wreaking havoc on our health. Kyle Harper, author of Plagues Upon the Earth, discusses the sprawling history ... Show More

The way we die has been utterly transformed. There have been around 10,000 generations of human beings, but only in the last 3 or 4 have infectious diseases not been an expected and accepted cause of death. What drove the most deadly infectious diseases? Was technological progr ... Show More

Since humanity’s earliest days, we’ve been plagued by countless disease-causing pathogens. Invisible and persistent, these microorganisms and the illnesses they incur have killed more humans than anything else in history. But which disease has been the deadliest? Dan Kwartler dig ... Show More

<p>From a plague in Athens during the Peloponnesian War in 430 BCE, to another in 540 that wiped out half the population of the Roman empire, down through the Black Death in the Middle Ages and on through the 1918 flu epidemic (which killed between 50 and 100 million people) and ... Show More

As soon as the Coronavirus became a pandemic, people began making parallels to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918, and reaching even further back to the black death of the middle ages. It makes sense--past pandemics may be our only reference point for whole populations being strick ... Show More

Can the world come together to beat diseases with pandemic potential? We've spoken to four expert witnesses, including a doctor who helped to eradicate one of the world's oldest diseases and a man who discovered one of the world's newest ones. 

COVID-19 exposed the flaws in our society and the human species. Do we leave old ways behind and build our defenses for the pandemics to come and what will our economic fortunes look like? Does human behaviour really change in the long run? Hear from Dr Mei Ling Doery, Global Aff ... Show More

The intersection of human societies, agricultural and wild animals ensures that new diseases — sometimes devastatingly infectious — spring up again and again.