Health

Identifying the “first cell” could revolutionize the way we treat cancer.

Tumors grow when cells lose their biological identity. A promising therapeutic might restore their sense of self.

Scientists are getting closer to designing safer, more targeted pain drugs to replace opioids.

How to protect yourself from the din that surrounds you.

In the battle between scientists and COVID-19, imaging gives scientists an upper hand.

Mental health is not what you’d call an “exact science.” For example, if two highly trained mental health providers meet privately with the same patient, they will agree 90 percent of the time on diagnosing schizophrenia and 65 to 70 percent of the time on diagnosing a bipolar disorder. But this reliability drops off sharply […]

Fish that thrive in icy waters provide a key to preserving human cells.

Thanks to lab techniques like PCR, we can detect the presence of dangerous viruses with laser-sharp precision.

We can defeat superbugs by staying one step ahead of them.

Two public health experts explain how to cut through the noise about COVID-19 vaccines.

The push by AIDS activists for an effective treatment was a breakthrough in the medical industry. It showed the power of a grassroots movement to spur the government and Big Pharma to action. But it had a dangerous and lasting side effect.Photograph by Cagkan Sayin / Shutterstock Three decades ago, a small group from within […]

To beat our worst enemy, we must first let it grow.

To beat our worst enemy, we must first let it grow.

Genetic diseases that puzzle lab scientists are being solved by quantitative biologists.

What is lost when we lose in-person learning.

The surprising history of vaccinology that helped produce a COVID-19 vaccine in record time with 95% efficacy.

Science can’t be democratic, says an outspoken virologist.

Understanding How COVID-19 Spreads

Anthony Fauci discusses the battle against COVID-19 with Robert Bazell.

Mindfulness helped this ER doctor through a dark time. It can help us through these times.

  After I got my second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, a wave of euphoria infused me along with the modified messenger RNA. Many friends describe the same feeling. This is the end of the pandemic for me. Life returns to normal.  But then my usual, pessimistic view of life returned along with an examination […]

A counterintuitive approach to improving our mental health.

Step aside, Dr. House, Deep Nose will one day be the best diagnostician in medicine.

Step aside, Dr. House, Deep Nose will one day be the best diagnostician in medicine.

These scientists have a new model for identifying variants before they kill.

A computational biologist charts a fair and efficient course for vaccine distribution.

All drugs and treatments have side effects, but vaccines in general have the fewest.Illustration by eamesBot / Shutterstock In the late 1650’s, the French polymath and renowned scientist Blaise Pascal, having undergone a religious experience that transformed him into something of a zealot, suggested the following logical strategy regarding belief in God: If there is […]

Computational biology is uncovering the immune system’s tricks for identifying foreign invaders.

Why people distrust vaccines and how they can be convinced otherwise.

Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles Rice were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of the cause of a major liver disease.

An infectious disease expert brings us up to date on the science of wearing a face mask.

Studies suggest that self-disseminating vaccines could prevent the 'spillover' of animal viruses into humans as pandemic diseases.

Medical research director Eric Topol sees light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel.

The time it takes to ship COVID test samples to central labs and back is a burden—people risk infection as they wait days, sometimes weeks, for results.Photograph by MIA Studio / Shutterstock Imagine that every morning your child and her classmates take a COVID-19 test that offers results within a half hour, showing the transmission […]

Using data-mining techniques, doctors have discovered dozens of anti-tumor drugs hiding in plain sight.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog. We consider the brain the very center of who we are and what we do: ruler of our senses, master of our movements; generator of thought, keeper of memory. But the brain is also rooted in a body, and the connection between the two goes both ways. […]

The heartbeat and other bodily processes play a surprising role in shaping perception and cognition.

  The images are everywhere: People crowded face-to-face in swimming pools, shoulder-to-shoulder in indoor bars, cheering without masks at a rally held by President Trump, who often downplays the global pandemic. Now, as many public health experts predicted, waves of new COVID-19 infections and deaths are rolling across the South and West. Many, still practicing […]

To explain why men are on average taller than women, scientists theorized about competition for mates. But the effects of estrogen on bone growth may be answer enough.

The hardest part of living with the BRCA1 gene.

Community health centers, a lifeline for Americans, are in critical condition.

Battling a rare form of muscular dystrophy, a family finds an activist leader, and hope.

In the fight against viruses and other pathogens, scientists are looking beyond genes and proteins to the complex sugars, or glycans, on cell surfaces.

  We called Greg Carr the other day to talk about the spread of the coronavirus in Africa. Carr, who has been featured in Nautilus, is the founder of the Gorongosa Restoration Project, a partnership with the Mozambique government to revive Gorongosa National Park, that environmental treasure trove at the southern end of the Rift […]

Past outbreaks show the way to relief, even without a vaccine.

There are many challenges to developing a vaccine that will be successful against COVID-19.eamesBot / Shutterstock Wayne Koff is one of the world’s experts on vaccine development, the president and CEO of the Human Vaccines Project. He possesses a deep understanding of the opportunities and challenges along the road to a safe and effective vaccine […]

It seems like people who get infected with SARS-CoV-2 retain immunity, but we can’t be sure how long that immunity will last. We still lack the testing capabilities to be certain.eamesBot / Shutterstock This story was updated post-publication to include information from a study published on the preprint server medRxiv on April 17, 2020. With […]

Why SARS-CoV-2 will threaten us for months to come.

Medical testing has been a Pearl Harbor. But the war could be won.

As scientists grapple with the global pandemic, preprint servers let information be free—and fast

The wrath of the coronavirus.

We have no idea what will happen if, for example, New York runs out of ventilators or if people are sent away from hospitals too soon and infect many others.Illustration by eamesBot / Shutterstock On April 15, 2020, 2,271 people in the United States will die from COVID-19. That day, the U.S. will be short […]

An advocate of virtual exams has a second opinion.

Is there a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2? The internet is awash with articles and posts seeking to shed light on this very question. Currently, there is no approved vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. While several companies have announced vaccine candidates in development, it is still unlikely that a vaccine will play a significant role in the current outbreak. […]

An alarming warning from experts before the real outbreak.

Hospitals in the U.S. are above 90 percent capacity without any considerations for COVID-19 demands. According to the planners of Event 201, and other experts, we will soon see a surge in demand at U.S. hospitals that is almost impossible to imagine.Photo illustration by enzoalessandra / Shutterstock How many people could die from a novel […]

It is no mystery why pandemics happen. Those with the knowledge, wisdom, and resources must choose to decide to avoid these disasters that afflict everyone.Photograph by Pavel L Photo and Video / Shutterstock A new virus sweeps the world, closing borders, shutting down arts and sports, and killing thousands of people. Is this coronavirus pandemic, […]

Censorship didn’t worsen the deadly virus outbreak. Incompetence did.

“Uitwaaien” is a popular activity around Amsterdam—one believed to have important psychological benefits.Photograph by John Loo / Flickr Recently I was in San Francisco, a city known for its tech companies, steep hills, and fierce winds. Each day I’d run around the neighborhood and up through the park, ending with a spectacular view of the […]

Taking account of the drug-resistant germs turning up in rivers and soils.

The chemicals in our everyday lives are, argues immunologist Claudia Miller.

A few summers ago, Stefano Piraino was walking along the rocky shoreline on a small island off the coast of Sicily when he spotted a washed up jellyfish. Naturally, he tore a piece off and popped it into his mouth. “After a few days in that state they lose their stinging cells, and the UV […]

Rafael Campo on finding the humanity in medicine and science.

Ultimately, what matters most is that we provide our children with a sense of agency and autonomy by teaching them that tools don’t use us, we use them.Photograph by Iakov Filimonov / Shutterstock It looks like grownups can disregard the fear-mongering about the ill effects of digital media on kids. A 2017 study in Child […]

Elevated iron is at the center of a web of disease stretching from cancer to diabetes.

A new psychology of control.

James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for developing ways to unleash the immune system more effectively against cancers.

How Jim Allison saved a whole world.

From trauma to arrhythmia, and back again.

One survey of 2,000 people found that if you have only one hangover a month, it adds up to two years of total sick time over the course of a lifetime.Photograph by ShotPrime Studio / Shutterstock From freezing showers to ingesting prickly pear to smoking joints, everyone has a home remedy for alcohol’s notorious afterglow: the hangover. […]

The camera doesn’t often linger on all the severed heads in Game of Thrones. But if it did, might we see some sign of awareness—at least for a few seconds? A human head doesn’t lose consciousness until after about four seconds, post-decapitation. That’s resiliency of a kind. And the acid in your stomach? Strong enough […]

Over the ages our teeth and our tongue have become ever more crowded by the shrinking of the human jaw. Not only is this an aesthetic disaster, but it compromises our breathing, which in turn can disrupt sleep. And there, our problems really begin.Photograph by Lisa S. / Shutterstock The apotheosis of my five-year orthodontic […]

A dispatch from the front lines of the war against antibiotic resistance.

Performance metrics are supposed to financially incentivize hospitals to improve the healthcare system. And this is exactly where the trouble starts. The list of misapplied performance metrics could go on and on.Photograph by Luis Molinero / Shutterstock In 1975, the British economist Charles Goodhart pointed out that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases […]

The horsepox virus could be the basis of an improved smallpox vaccine, more effective and with fewer side effects than the currently available vaccines.Colored etching, “Edward Jenner vaccinating patients in the Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital at St. Pancras: the patients develop features of cows,” by James Gillray / Wikicommons Last year, when news broke that […]

A Stanford researcher’s new take on stem cells.

A Stanford researcher’s new take on stem cells.

Chris Perry had felt the world bobbing beneath her feet for nearly four months, suffering from a disorder rather poetically dubbed Mal de Debarquement syndrome.Photograph by Zvonimir Orec / Shutterstock A few years ago, Chris Perry went on an Alaskan cruise with her family to celebrate her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. When she boarded the […]

For a while, oncologists didn’t get it. Many were, both during and after these young patients’ treatment, often oblivious to and ill-equipped to meet their needs.Photograph by U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Peter Dean I treated an inspiring teenage girl in my clinic the other day. Although Sadie has made a complete recovery from her […]

New support groups are driving oncologists to address the psychosocial challenges.

The evolutionary tradeoff between longevity and reproduction changes with gender.

This leaky barrier in old stem cells contributes to aging.

A dividing neural stem cell asymmetrically segregates some cargoes between the two resulting daughter cells—blue shows DNA, red shows cellular cargo.Darcie Moore Darcie Moore is an expert on cargo. Not the kind you’d find on a freight train, though—it’s the cargo you’d find in stem cells, the kind that can transform into the different types […]

For one thing, you won’t like IPAs.

  Dementia is typically thought of and treated as an individual sickness. Unlike something like measles, dementia is non-transferrable, and can’t be vaccinated against. But Malaz Boustani, a professor of medicine at Indiana University, thinks that the right way to think about dementia may be through the lens of epidemiology—“the branch of medicine that deals […]

Malaz Boustani explains the current crisis.

Shutterstock An optical illusion mesmerizes us with its ability to look entirely different depending on our perspective. Our patients can challenge our perceptions, too. Many people are familiar with the famous illusion of Rubin’s vase; the picture can appear to be two faces in profile or simply a vase. With someone pointing the way, viewers […]

The need for trauma-sensitive cancer care.

The discovery of stem cells—made possible by fundamental research in microscopy—sprouted a new field of medicine.Science Philanthropy Alliance / YouTube For the last three decades, Janet Rossant has been obsessed with the puzzle of how you got here. How did a five-day old blastocyst turn into a five-fingered baby? She found part of the answer […]

Janet Rossant, a rockstar stem cell scientist, was first just curious about blastocysts.

Aging gets a bad rap. But disease, decline and discomfort is far from the whole story. Dilip Jeste, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at UC San Diego and director of the UCSD Center for Healthy Aging, is challenging us to take another look. In conversation with Nautilus, Jeste points out that some things get better […]

Science has given new life to an old thirst.

We are healthier and living longer than we ever have, and advances like personalized medicine seem to promise an ever brighter future. But as the proportion of elderly people increases, so do the complexities of age-related medical care. Nautilus caught up with Mary Tinetti, a doctor and researcher at the Yale School of Medicine, to […]

They both drive the complexity of medical care up.

If I lie or change the subject when you ask me what I do for a living, please don't be offended.

Will mental health clinicians become liable for missing your latest Facebook post?

The camera doesn’t often linger on all the severed heads in Game of Thrones. But if it did, might we see some sign of awareness—at least for a few seconds? A human head doesn’t lose consciousness until after about four seconds, post-decapitation. That’s resiliency of a kind. And the acid in your stomach? Strong enough […]

It may be impossible to make people happy when you have to say or recommend things they do not want to hear.

Why reading Kafka’s “The Trial” might comfort patients and enrich the work of oncologists.

William Ludwig was a 64-year-old retired corrections officer living in Bridgeton, New Jersey, in 2010, when he received a near-hopeless cancer prognosis. The Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania had run out of chemotherapeutic options, and Ludwig was disqualified from most clinical trials since he had three cancers at once—leukemia, lymphoma, and squamous […]

It’s not as simple as you think.

Calculated humility in a physician may be the difference between life and death.Photograph by Tonhom1009 / Shutterstock Although I have lived the majority of my life in New Jersey, Utah has always felt like home. Three of my grandparents were multigenerational Utahns, of pioneer stock, and the other grandparent grew up in nearby Idaho. Our […]

William Ludwig was almost dead when he became Patient Number One in a radical new cancer treatment, one that’s just won the endorsement of F.D.A. advisors.

Beating cancer might come from animals that evolved defenses against it.Photograph by Patrick Bouquet / Flickr In recent years, naked mole rats, elephants, and bowhead whales have caught the attention of cancer researchers. At first glance, these three don’t have much in common: naked mole rats are subterranean rodents; elephants roam above ground; and bowhead […]

The professor of surgery explains how health emerges from a healthy microbiome.

Calculated humility may be the difference between life and death.

Beating cancer might come from animals that evolved defenses against it.

A page from a Timbuktu manuscript.Photograph by Amy Maxmen Seven hundred years ago, Timbuktu was a dream destination for scholars, traders, and religious men. At the southern edge of the Sahara desert in what is now Mali, travelers from Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt, and Morocco met in the bygone metropolis to exchange gold, salt, and […]

Since there is one death for every million cigarettes sold (or smoked), a tobacco manufacturer will make about $10,000 for every death caused by their products.Illustration by Raxon Rex / Flickr If you had to put a price on your life, what cash amount do you think it would be? What about $100,000? That was […]

An interview with Eric Verdin, CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

An interview with Eric Verdin, CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

Will mental health clinicians become liable for missing your latest Facebook post?

They’re uniquely susceptible to burnout and suicide—and creative writing seems to be a promising therapy for both.

A revised law could prevent another Henrietta Lacks situation.

A year ago, Joe Biden launched his “cancer moonshot,” a major national push to improve the prevention, detection, and treatment of cancer, a plan that was widely recognized to be incremental. “I believe that we need an absolute national commitment to end cancer as we know it,” Biden said while he was on his tour to cancer […]

Evidence is stacking up on both sides of an age-old debate.

Informed consent has its limits. It isn’t always ideal to treat the patient as a consumer in the decision-making process.Photograph by Monkey Business Images / Shutterstock My family had lived in America for only a handful of years when my grandfather had a heart attack. It was the early 1980s, before statins and baby aspirins […]

The evolution of the doctor-patient relationship.

Why most of the tobacco epidemic remains in our future.

Cancer doctors are overworked, retire early, and attract fewer recruits than other specialties, leaving the rising cancer-patient population vulnerable. Here’s what must be done.Photograph by Ghislain & Marie David de Lossy / Getty Images I watched a man die today. We were “rounding” when we were summoned to his room. He was struggling to breathe, […]

A patient’s departure is a critique that can help you become a better doctor.

Sharing what meaning you take from illness can enhance your treatment and sense of well-being.Illustration by Len Small A little over a decade ago, Farr Curlin, a physician and professor of medical humanities at Duke Divinity School, became curious about the spiritual lives of his colleagues. He already knew that patients’ religious beliefs and communities […]

Sharing what meaning you take from illness can enhance your treatment and sense of well-being.

Financial distress due to cancer treatment could count as another cancer mortality risk factor, alongside smoking, diet, and exercise.Photograph by John Piekos / Flickr Add a new entry to the list of factors that can exacerbate a cancer diagnosis: money. Paying for cancer treatment is expensive, and for many patients, the financial distress can be […]

The very act of existential unburdening proves to be life prolonging.Photograph by UpperCut Images / Getty What would go through your mind if I told you that you had cancer? Perhaps you’d wonder how you got it, or how you were going to get rid of it. Maybe you’d worry about whether you could keep […]

The genomic cancer strategy shift.

It’s the testosterone, don’t you know.

The surprising, quiet nourishment of losing my internal monologue.

It’s the testosterone, don’t you know.

The lessons I learned from letting a superstar patient cloud my better judgment.

Cancer’s financial cost can be almost as toxic to patients as the disease itself.

Silicon Valley wants to solve cancer by hacking it. Here’s why its approach fails.

Here’s a curious fact: Black American women are 37 percent more likely to die from breast cancer than white women, according to a 2015 report by the American Cancer Society, yet they receive early-stage diagnoses much less frequently.  Why might that be? Biology’s role isn’t clear. The breast cancer death-rate in the U.S. is on the […]

I didn’t know how to reveal that I treat kids with cancer.

Ballooning life expectancies are upending age-old definitions of life stages.

Our physiological processes become increasingly simple as we age.

The productive, bizarre career of Nobel laureate and early aging researcher Elie Metchnikoff.

As our lifespans have increased, so too have our active years. Can that go on?

New insights into mitochondria reveal how life expends energy.

The monumental shift in oncology to have all advanced cancer patients receive palliative care.

Disrupting cancer’s diaspora may lead to new therapies.

Could our own immune systems be taught to find and destroy cancer cells?

The phone rang; a woman answered. Our awkward opening was brief. “This is my first time,” I said. “I’m not sure how this is supposed to go.” She said she’d be happy to listen. I’d just pressed a button in an app on my phone. The app’s red screen was cheerful, outdoorsy—there were smiling, hip […]

The circadian clock is in nearly every cell, and researchers have untangled many of its secrets. But sleep has been harder to pin down.

There are two very different interpretations of our dwindling grip strength.

There are two very different interpretations of our dwindling grip strength.

Wondrous talent—like that of mathematical and artistic savants or child prodigies—is exceedingly rare. It occurs so unexpectedly one may be tempted to think of the phenomena as sui generis, so unusual that no rules or commonalities could apply across cases. However, research is steadily disclosing the mechanisms responsible: not merely that their upbringing provides a crucible […]

How coral revolutionized human bone repair.

In May this year, Curtis Cetrulo, a plastic-reconstructive surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, performed the first penis transplant in the United States. Previously his patient, Thomas Manning, 64, had most of his penis amputated to stem penis cancer, a rare form of the disease. Since the transplant, Manning has received a wave of media attention, […]

When antibiotics failed a severely ill patient, it was a pond virus that saved him.

Scientists are having a difficult time finding a treatment for the Zika virus in part because so few drugs are safe for pregnant women. But one antibiotic has shown promise.

The infamous case of Typhoid Mary underscores the importance of tolerance in understanding disease.

Discover what it means to 'Think Like a Scientist' about Alzheimer's Disease.

The surprising relationship between mindset and getting old.

Scientists are trying to study biological aging without defining it, and that’s a problem.

A South American legend has it that, centuries ago, a native, suffering from high malarial fever, got lost in the Andes. Thirsty, he drank from a pool of stagnant water. The bitter taste prompted a ghastly realization: The surrounding cinchona trees, whose bark was thought to be poisonous, must have contaminated the water. He thought […]

Every time a disease spreads, it has another chance to mutate.

Only 1 in 3 people have evolved tolerance to lactose.

In The President’s Speech, a 1985 essay by the late neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, he observes a group of people with aphasia, a language disorder, as they laugh uproariously at the television. The cause of their amusement is an unnamed actor-turned United States president, presumably Ronald Reagan, addressing his audience: “There he was, the […]

If you’re a dog lover, you may have heard of Chaser, the border collie who has been called a “genius” and the “smartest dog in the world.” Retired psychology professor John Pilley, Chaser’s owner and co-author of a recent book about her, says he was able to teach her 1,000 words, the largest “vocabulary” of […]

In more ways than one, the tingles seem to be fading. Just a few years ago, autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), a puzzling and blissful sensation, became the sudden focal point for a sizable Internet community. Practitioners liken it to a current of electricity running down the scalp and spine. Audiences marveled at online videos, […]

The language of authors who suffered from dementia has a story for the rest of us.

How shrooms can spring people from fears and destructive habits.

For Frank Russell, reinterpreting his schizophrenia as shamanism helped his symptoms.

In a world where only 1 in 5 American adults meet the minimum daily exercise requirements, exercise addiction can seem like the opposite of a problem. Don’t let that fool you, says Marilyn Freimuth, a clinical psychologist at Fielding Graduate University, in Santa Barbara. “Exercise addiction can completely take over someone’s life. They’re getting injured, […]

Ever since ancient Greek Olympians downed exotic meats, “magic” potions, and animal hearts and testicles, athletes have tried to improve their performances by consuming special substances. Such behavior wasn’t considered cheating back in ancient times, and this attitude continued into the modern revival of the games. When a runner named Thomas Hicks famously won the 1904 […]

It happened in an instant: a resounding crack and the bottom half of French gymnast Samir Ait Said’s leg was dangling like a marionette’s, his face contorted in pain. At the Rio Olympics, Said had just performed a thrilling triple backflip on the vault. When he landed, his leg snapped on impact. Said’s shot at […]

In alpinism, supplemental oxygen is a matter of safety—but some say it’s doping.

Several days ago, when the Rio Olympics began hitting their stride, many athletes, including champion swimmer Michael Phelps, were sporting a unique look: Their muscled shoulders were spattered with, well, what? Giant purple chicken pox? Alien hickeys? Soon enough, however, the marks were demystified: They were evidence of cupping, a therapy that involves placing suction […]

Genetic engineering will bring us new Bolts and Shaqs.

Fifteen years ago, almost as soon as she arrived in the Cleveland suburbs, her hometown, a high-pitched ringing disturbed Katie Hellmuth Martin’s sense of peace. She was looking forward to settling into the gentle sounds of summer she’d grown up with: birdcalls during the day, the relaxing cadence of crickets at night. Instead, her respite […]

It takes a bird brain to play contact sports safely.

A Vancouver rat study is showing us how pest control can backfire.

We may complain about a defining feature of the city, but we also feed off it.

Digestive Tract Bling: A bezoar mounted in gold filigree, from late-17th century India—now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. When you get right down to it, a body like ours is basically a bony scaffold that a strange collection of organs, interconnected by a complex entanglement of piping, hangs on. In some of these pipes, […]

How your brain keeps you from falling on your face.

Sperm are the cheetahs of the microscopic world: Made of little more than molecular muscle and batteries, tipped with a payload of genetic information, they are optimized for speed. But to orient themselves before their epic, seven-inch sprint (it’s more impressive if you’re less than one three-thousandth that size), they first need to sniff out […]

The novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez struck an optimistic note about aging: “The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time,” he once wrote. On the other hand, Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, was a bit less sentimental: “It happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, […]

To humans, aging can seem to be inextricably linked with physical decline. In 1975, “on a whim,” the photographer Nicholas Nixon decided to illustrate this process. That year he took a picture of his wife and her three sisters standing together, shoulder-to-shoulder; and every year after, for four decades, they stood for a picture in […]

Ballooning life expectancies are upending age-old definitions of life stages.

Our physiological processes become increasingly simple as we age.

Despite the hyperbole, private funding is changing the science of aging for the better.

Parlez-vous francais? If you answered yes, then you’re well on your way to enjoying the many benefits of bilingualism. Speaking both English and French, for example, can enrich your cultural experiences in multilingual destinations like Belgium, Morocco, or Egypt, and broaden your access to books, music, and films. But the benefits of speaking another language […]

The productive, bizarre career of Nobel laureate and early aging researcher Elie Metchnikoff.

As our lifespans have increased, so too have our active years. Can that go on?

The high technology that could help us live through the sun’s inevitable transformation.

Our veins are swimming with immune cells of many different kinds. Some bear the memory of previous infections, in case we should encounter them again; some are actively fighting invaders; others are merely on the look-out. Counting all of the varieties of cells and what molecules they are producing gives researchers a profile of someone’s […]

How a steady diet of fertilizers has turned crops into couch potatoes.

Just last month, Carmen Blandin had a remarkable dream. In it she saw, for the first time, not her old face in the mirror—the one she had for the first 38 years of her life—but the new face she received in a transplant three years ago. “I actually saw me with my new face,” she […]

Commander Carmel Johnston gives Chief Science Officer Christiane Heinicke a hand.Photograph by Sheyna Gifford Space is no place to be alone. On Earth, it may be uncomfortable, even oppressive—but by itself, being alone isn’t life-threatening. A person alone in space, however, is definitively lost: dead, or about to be.  On simulated Mars—the slopes of a […]

When I was at the Firefly Music Festival in Delaware, in the summer of 2014, I took a 200 mg pill of ecstasy—Red Riddler—something I had done before. After the sets were over, the colors of the overhead lamps seemed more saturated against the sky. Each bulb’s top-right quadrant had a massive, prismatic aura, like […]

The Nobel laureate Baruch Blumberg once estimated that malaria has killed half of the people who have ever lived. In 2015 alone, it killed almost half a million people, 70 percent of which were children. Today, about 3.2 billion people are, according to the World Health Organization, at risk of contracting it, most of whom […]

Patrick Soon-Shiong is opening a new front in the war on the deadly disease.

A developmental disorder promises a new window onto the brain’s secrets.

A developmental disorder promises a new window onto the brain’s secrets.

The medicalization of nature turns a relationship into a dose.

  Travelling induced jet lag isn’t the only thing that causes untimely fatigue. Ignoring your biological rhythms can lead to chronic exhaustion, too, something that feels so much like jet lag that Till Roenneberg and his team, at Ludwig-Maximilian University, in Munich, Germany, coined the term “social jet lag” in 2006. It occurs when there’s […]

Welcome to sMars: Christiane Heinicke stands on a hillside southwest of the dome. The solar array that powers the habitat is to her right. To her left are the backup hydrogen fuel cells and the solar water heater.Photograph by Christiane Heinicke/Sheyna Gifford, 2015 For 6 crewmembers who have supposedly traveled 150 million miles—and were, beforehand, […]

Bill Clark/Getty Images Rick Grimes is cornered. A walker shuffles toward him, thoughtless yet eager for flesh. Sweat drips through Grimes’ thick beard, grown in the hundreds of fearful days and nights since the dead started to roam the earth. He quickly reaches for his knife—a weapon he never used in his days as a […]

PathDoc/Shutterstock There’s a New Yorker cartoon that shows a doctor telling the patient lying in bed, “I don’t think you’re getting enough stress.” The cartoon is funny because it plays on the idea that stress is bad—how absurd is it that a doctor would prescribe more of it? Why not just offer the patient poison? […]

The sheer stress of an environment contributes to obesity and diabetes.

The sheer stress of an environment contributes to obesity and diabetes.

The tragic story of the simple solution to one of the world’s most neglected diseases.

You may think twice about your diet when you follow the metabolic fate of your food.

Dementia takes a toll on caregivers, too.

An investigative reporter chronicles the progression of his own disease.

An investigative reporter chronicles the progression of his own disease.

Stress hormones in breast milk may help prepare us for a turbulent world.

Stress hormones in breast milk may help prepare us for a turbulent world.

The email from a professor offered an unusual spring break adventure: Come spend five days in complete darkness. To Morgan Williams, then a sophomore at Swarthmore College and a psychology major, it sounded like a great way to spend his vacation week. “I’m not really one for going to the beach,” he says. For those […]

Five menus for five mythical cities.

The surprising performance and physics of the fish kick.

The surprising performance and physics of the fish kick.

Drip coffee may have a more positive impact on heart health than coffee made in a French press.

Sodapix/Getty When philosopher Nicolas Malebranche peered at a fetus floating in a glass jar, in a shop of curiosities in Paris in 1672, he blamed its monstrous shape on the mother. At the time it was believed that a mother could deform her fetus simply by looking at something vivid. Malebranche had heard that this […]

Medicine’s latest cure is forgetting you’re sick.

Medicine’s latest cure is forgetting you’re sick.

Ilya Metchnikoff laid the foundation for modern probiotics.

Ilya Metchnikoff laid the foundation for modern probiotics.

For many people, 1969 felt like a year when technology could solve all of our problems, a sentiment that reached a crescendo with the Apollo 11 moon landing. But back on Earth, Michael Kaback was a faculty member in pediatrics1 at Johns Hopkins Medical Center, and he was frustrated. Kaback had helped some of his […]

A controversial disease revives the debate about the immune system and mental illness.

A controversial disease revives the debate about the immune system and mental illness.

As a rule, huge organizations move sluggishly, bogged down in democratic decision-making processes and bureaucratic policies. Ebola, on the other hand, moves fast. People become desperately sick and contagious within a few weeks of infection. By the time international agencies effectively responded to the ongoing Ebola outbreak, it had spiraled out of control in West […]

The amazing underwater athletes are rewriting the science of the body.

A survivor’s story is about to change.

Suspended animation is becoming a life-saving medical procedure.

I don’t want to surrender to a lottery. But will I regret not playing?

These identical twins led virtually identical lives—with one tragic exception.

Fighting Ebola requires lots of equipment and personnel.Morgana Wingard, USAID     In September 1854, 600 residents of London’s Golden Square died from an infamous outbreak of cholera. It was no coincidence that this occurred in one of London’s poorest neighborhoods. We now know that markers of poverty—higher population densities, decreased nutrition, lack of medical care, […]

Parkinson’s disease gave her the gift of creativity.

Engineer Joshua Pearce explains how to feed 7 billion people after a global catastrophe.

How light therapy can treat disorders from depression to Alzheimer’s disease.

  Atul Gawande sits across from me in a cafe in Berkeley, California, sipping an Izze fruit drink and trying to catch his breath. He just came from an appearance across the bay, in San Francisco, and is soon headed to a radio interview down the street, followed by a drive via the Golden Gate […]

Funding drug development for rare cancers can hurt patients.

Funding drug development for rare cancers can hurt patients.

Clay sieves used to filter cheese in Poland 7,500 years ago are remarkably similar to ones used in recent times.Salque et al. / Nature Perforated pottery shards sat alongside cattle bones at the Polish dig site. There archaeologists collected fragments from bowls, cooking pots, and flasks and brought them back to the United Kingdom. At […]

Gamers are giving scientists insights into how people react to a plague.

How a new technology is resurrecting patients from what was once certain death.

Halting a MERS pandemic may hold lessons for the Ebola crisis—until the next outbreak.

The dinosaur long ago renamed “Apatosaurus” is still often called “Brontosaurus.” stevegeer via iStock Over the past few decades, autism and Asperger syndrome have become prominent in the public consciousness, and that prominence has been reflected in popular art and entertainment. Autism, a mental illness characterized by repetitive behaviors and impaired social interactions, was brought […]

An amputation guide for surgeons from 1739The Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library For amputees, it’s adding insult to injury. They’ve already lost pieces of themselves that they thought they could always count on, limbs that they first discovered while waving the chubby things in their cribs. Yet after that life-changing loss comes a new kind of suffering: […]

Imagine looking down through a microscope and seeing a big mass of bacterial cells, writhing in sync, churning in circles. You can almost hear a buzz of activity. The micron-sized organisms migrate across a plate of agar, gobbling up the nutrient-rich media, recalling the frenetic activity of bees in a hive. What you see through […]

Genetic tests can predict when placebos may be the best medicine.

The chemicals in our everyday lives are, argues immunologist Claudia Miller.

A pill to dampen memories stirs hope and worry.

What happens to our bodies when the bonds of love are breached.

Antioxidant vitamins don’t stress us like plants do—and don’t have their beneficial effect.

Nutritional advice about eggs, naturally high in cholesterol, has been scrambled over the past 50 years.Jag_cz via Shutterstock The practice of nutritional science faces some significant problems, and they are mainly of its own making. For decades, starting in the 1950s, a consensus of experts recommended that Americans cut down on fat, cholesterol, and saturated […]

Why U.S. dermatologists won’t base recommendations on skin color.

Your heart rate speeds up, your breathing quickens. Your muscles tighten. Your stomach ties itself in knots. All of these changes are symptoms of the condition called stress. When animals, including humans, are under acute stress, their bodies respond with a powerful neurochemical chain reaction. Glucose, the fuel for our cells, is released into the […]

A study at RPI’s Lighting Research Center tested the effects of digital tablets and different colors of light on subjects’ circadian rhythms.Brittany Wood et al. / RPI In the summer of 2012, the American Medical Association (AMA) adopted a new policy stating that nighttime light exposure is hazardous to human health. “The primary human concerns […]

How light therapy can treat disorders from depression to Alzheimer’s disease.

Bill Jacobs lights the way to better tuberculosis drugs.

One evening four years ago, photographer Andrea Tese received a phone call from a home-care nurse. Could she come to her grandfather’s house to assess the situation? the nurse asked. Her grandfather had been very ill and had stipulated he did not want to die inside a hospital; he wanted to stay at home. But […]

  Seven hundred years ago, Timbuktu was a dream destination for scholars, traders, and religious men. At the southern edge of the Sahara desert in what is now Mali, travelers from Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt, and Morocco met in the bygone metropolis to exchange gold, salt, and ideas. According to a description of Timbuktu in […]

The next time you stop at the local drug store to pick up household standbys like shampoo, ibuprofen, and tissues, you might also consider picking up something rather more serious: an HIV test. Show your ID (the test is only approved for adults aged 17+), pay $40, and you can return home and learn your […]

Disrupting cancer’s diaspora may lead to new therapies.

The Elephant’s Foot could be the most dangerous piece of waste in the world.

This pig farm was devastated by an explosion due to foaming. Ross Muhlbauer, Iowa State University At first, the manure was just harmlessly foaming. Only later on did things get lethal.  Hog farms in the Midwest are great big barns sitting on top of great big pits filled with a great deal of awful-smelling manure. […]

In London’s waste system, like this stretch of the King’s Scholars Pond Sewer, concentration of urinary biomarkers for ecstasy is among the highest of any European city. Jon Doe via Flickr The sewage doesn’t lie.  People, however, are less than honest when asked about things like their illicit drug use. Each year, the National Survey […]

  Last month, a 40-year-old woman went to have her first mammogram, an unexceptional event at a time when women are encouraged to have breast-cancer screenings early and often. What was unusual about this test was that it was witnessed not just by an X-ray technician but by millions of people sitting in their living […]

Nature manages information, the currency of life, with exquisite efficiency.

Meet the mice that are changing the obesity conversation.

Why we can’t get our water supply free of drugs.

Is giving up your biological secrets too bitter a pill?

Is giving up your biological secrets too bitter a pill?

Some cancer therapies focus the attention of the immune system like a spotlight over Hollywood.Everett Collection / Shutterstock In early May, 1891, William Coley, a New York surgeon, had before him an interesting case. The patient, a 35-year-old Italian man, had sarcoma tumors in his neck and tonsils, and was slowly starving to death as […]

When talking about our health, we tend to refer breezily to “the immune system,” as if it were as simple as an electric fence keeping out invaders. And there’s certainly an electric fence component: The innate immune response is an ancient, relatively nonspecific kind of defense that triggers inflammation and the deployment of attack cells […]

How “exceptional responders” are revolutionizing treatment for the deadly disease.

If you imagine the bubonic plague, based on what you learned as a kid, you probably imagine something similar to Pieter Bruegel’s 1562 painting, The Triumph of Death. Dead bodies in piles. Helpless civilians sprawled on the ground in anguish. Panicked crowds trying to flee as the village burns and falls into disarray. Total mayhem. […]

January 1996 was, in most respects, a month like any other in Jefferson County, Colorado, the “Gateway to the Rocky Mountains.”* But one thing distinguished that particular month in that particular county in Colorado: an outbreak of salmonellosis among children, most of whom were under 13 years of age. The Colorado Department of Public Health and […]

Battling a rare form of muscular dystrophy, a family finds an activist leader, and hope.

Five unlikely breakthroughs in medical science today.

It’s no fairy tale—factory farms and air travel form a viral expressway to pandemics.

It’s no fairy tale—factory farms and air travel form a viral expressway to pandemics.

How the 2009 swine flu raced around the world.

Nanomedicine is going to battle against brain disease in Iraq veterans.

When Italian authorities confirmed Wednesday that James Gandolfini had just died in Rome of an apparent heart attack, many of the US reports fronted the fact that Gandolfini’s body would be autopsied, “as required by Italian law.” They fronted this news for understandable reasons—an autopsy on someone who died in medical care seemed unusual. In […]

It has recently become clear that each one of us is more microbe than human—at least when it comes to the number of cells in our bodies. The bacteria that swarm through our guts, across our skin, and in every orifice you have outnumber our human cells by at least 10 to 1, though their […]