Today's Science Times

Every Tuesday brings the Science Times section of the New York Times. This morning, there are two articles of interest for our readers:

• There's an article on bedbugs which explains the reasons why they have become so common in recent years.
• There's an essay on isolation by Abigail Zuger, an infectious diseases physician, which focuses on the human dimensions of a practice that can be rather cruel to patients. She writes of an elderly woman placed in isolation for C. difficile who sobbed continuously: "Increasingly, modern medicine forces us to specialize in the invisible. Here we had invisible germs with an inviolable mandate, and an all too visible patient pleading with us to ignore it. It was quite a struggle to try to see the one, to try not to see the other."