Describing it as a “serious situation,” the World Health Organization has issued a grim warning about the dramatic rise of antibiotic resistant gonorrhea around the world. The agency is now calling for the quick development of drugs to treat the sexually transmitted disease.
Biologists in Japan have a developed an innovative scanning technique that makes tissues and vital organs transparent, allowing them to track cancer as it spreads throughout the bodies and brains of mice.
It’s that time of year again—the time where we American humans decide to blow things up in order to celebrate the birth of our country. But it just so happens that humans and explosions don’t get along so well—and they never have.
Who doesn’t love logging on to the good old ‘net on a Friday morning to the headline “Coconut oil ‘as unhealthy as beef fat and butter.’” It’s got everything. Ah, you might think, my favorite health product is as bad as butter! Or you might even say to yourself, those coconut oil-huffing liberals are really getting…
Fake health news can feel like an epidemic these days, but it was also rampant during the Victorian era, when bodily ailments were often a matter of life-or death. But unlike the questionable remedies you may be familiar with—vaginal steaming for your cramps, or a float tank to chill your anxiety out?—some of the…
The revolutionary gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9 is often described as “molecular scissors” for its ability to turn previously improbable feats of genetic engineering into exercises in cutting and pasting. But while over the last few years CRISPR has become so commonplace that even middle school students are now…
Imagine having the technology to help patients with physical impairments retrain their minds to recover motor skills. Now, what if I told you this could work for people with significant brain injuries—like a stroke—as well?
As you get older, colonoscopies become an important part of maintaining your health, allowing doctors to spot potentially fatal diseases like colon cancer before they progress too far. So medical researchers are hoping to make the procedure safer, and slightly less invasive, using a tiny capsule that’s remotely…
Apparently, eating cheese will not cause a heart attack or stroke, according to a new study that lots of folks are writing about. But readers, fellow science and health writers, can we please all agree to read these studies and think about them a little before we take them as the irreproachable word of some dairy…
Babies can’t tell us how much pain they’re in, which poses a problem for healthcare practitioners who are trying to manage their care. A new technique that uses non-invasive brain scans overcomes this frustrating limitation by providing what may be the first objective measure of infant pain.
Stings from a Portuguese man o’ war are as common as they are dangerous, yet there’s a lack of consensus over the best way to treat these painful pricks. New research published in the journal Toxins reveals that stings from the man o’ war (Physalia species) shouldn’t be treated any differently than stings from…
If you distill life down into its most basic parts, you’re here to do one thing: eat. Aside from a few days mandated by certain religions, every single day is a journey to consume enough food to make it to the next day. And maybe not get bored or uncomfortable along the way.
The drugs used in lethal injections were not designed to kill people, and they are on the market today because of their use in medicine. Pharma companies don’t allow them to be used for executions, but Arkansas got their hands on some anyway. Here’s what the three drugs in the state’s lethal injection cocktail…
They both look freaking hot in a nerd way, but you only respect one of them.
It’s not every day that surgeons have to remove 11 pounds of coins from the belly of a patient. It’s even more remarkable when that patient is a sea turtle.
New research from Emory University School of Medicine shows that a chemical in the mucus of South Indian frogs is capable of killing certain strains of the influenza virus. It’ll take a while for scientists to translate this finding into a useful medicine, but the discovery could lead to an entirely new source of…
Most of the time, when people talk about the cutting edge gene editing technology CRISPR, they are actually talking about CRISPR-Cas9. CRISPR, you see, is just one half of the genome editing tool, the programming that instructs where a DNA edit will actually be made. The other part consists of proteins that actually…
Following a head injury, patients typically undergo a CT scan to rule out brain bleeding. A new head worn device that scans the brain’s electrical patterns has shown tremendous promise in clinical trials, presenting an inexpensive way for physicians to make a potentially life-saving diagnosis.
Experts say it’s not a matter of if, but when a global scale pandemic will wipe out millions of people. And we are grossly unprepared for the next major outbreak. But in the event of a devastating pandemic—whether it be triggered by a mutated strain of an existing virus or a bioengineered terror weapon—there are some…
By leveraging the regenerative powers of migraine medication, researchers at Tufts University have restored the vision of blind tadpoles after grafting eyes to their tails. Sounds bizarre, but a similar technique could one day be used on humans.
