United Kingdom
I am a Senior Journalist at BBC Future, where I cover extraordinary stories across medicine, psychology, biology, space and the environment.
Alison Holman was working on a fairly ordinary study of mental health across the United States. Then tragedy struck. On 15 April 2013, as hundreds of runners streaked past the finish line at the annual Boston Marathon, two bombs exploded, ten seconds apart. Three people were killed that day, including an eight-year-old boy.
In 331 BC, something was wrong with Rome. Across the city, swathes of eminent men were succumbing to sickness, and practically all of them were dying. The losses were as baffling as they were alarming. Then one day, a slave approached a curule aedile - a kind of magistrate - and hinted that she might know why.
"My 2019 resolution is to say things on air that I say off air..." - the famous last words of Pete Hegseth last year, just before he revealed a secret that set the internet alight. At the time, Hegseth was best known as a Fox News presenter who had a sprinkling of controversial views.
It all began with a large hollow tree. Two-year-old Emile Ouamouno had been fond of playing inside the tree, which was near his home in Meliandou - a village in the heart of the Guinean jungle. But other life had also discovered its cosy confines: bats.
"Patient Five" was in his late 50s when a trip to the doctors changed his life. He had diabetes, and he had signed up for a study to see if taking a "statin" - a kind of cholesterol-lowering drug - might help. So far, so normal.
In July 2019, a bare-chested, pony-tailed man turned up at a vegan market in London, and began snacking on a raw squirrel. In video footage of the bizarre incident, the pro-meat protester can be seen clutching the animal's limp, furry body - sans head - while a stunned crowd waits for him to be arrested.
"Manly man," the narrator observes, as a groom emerges from a house, carrying his bride. "Calm," he marvels, as a man in a packed train carriage smiles tolerantly at the lady who just stepped on his foot. And on it goes...
"Mr President, I want to raise an issue that I think has been lurking out there for two or three weeks and cast it specifically in national security terms..." said the journalist Henry Trewhitt, as he locked President Ronald Reagan with a steady, serious gaze.
"You would literally be frying people," says Dan Arnold, laughing in disbelief. Arnold works for UV Light Technology, a company that provides disinfecting equipment to hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and food manufacturers across the UK. Recently, as the global anxiety about Covid-19 has reached extraordinary new heights, he's found himself fielding some unusual requests.
"Spanish Influenza - what it is and how it should be treated," read the reassuringly factual headline to an advert for Vick's VapoRub back in 1918. The text beneath included nuggets of wisdom such as "stay quiet" and "take a laxative". Oh, and to apply their ointment liberally, of course.
