Every year, as the weather warms and the calendar tips toward summer, the same slogans appear like clockwork across magazines, social media feeds, and advertising campaigns: “Get your bikini body ready.” “Torch fat fast.” “90 days to your summer abs.” It’s a drumbeat that has echoed for decades, whispering that worth is measured in inches, …
On the morning of September 28, 1928, in a modest laboratory at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, a man returned from vacation to find a small miracle growing in one of his forgotten petri dishes. Alexander Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist with a keen eye for the unusual, noticed that colonies of staphylococcus bacteria he had …
