Americans who opened the newspaper on January 5, 1961, were greeted with an article by Associated Press science writer John Barbour. He described the futuristic world of the year 2000 and the great medical advances that would be achieved by then. And quite frankly, reading about all of the medical miracles we were…
There’s a strange gender paradox at the heart of cardiovascular disease. Men are more likely to be diagnosed with a heart condition in their lifetime than women, but diagnosed women are less likely to survive. A study out today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers a new theory for this…
August 2018 rolled in with a bang, literally, as explosions rocked Caracas, Venezuela on Saturday during a speech by President Nicolas Maduro—and government officials later said bomb-carrying drones were to blame. If the accounts of an attempted assassination using unmanned aerial vehicles is confirmed, the New York…
At the peak of summer, when just walking to and from the corner store necessitates a shower and a change of clothes, air-conditioning can seem almost too good to be true. It is one of the few staples of modernity without severe and readily apparent downsides: all it does, or all it seems to do, is make things cooler,…
Scientists have just defined a new shape called the scutoid (SCOO-toid) while studying epithelial cells, the building blocks of embryos that eventually end up forming our skin and lining our organs and blood vessels. They think the scutoid shape is extremely efficient at keeping cells tightly-packed and organized in…
With its endless parade of corporate shills, industry flacks, cronies, and quacks, it’s become clear that there are no acts of pettiness too shabby—or grifts too cheap—for Donald Trump’s administration. Still, a Sunday report in the New York Times alleging that the US threatened Ecuador and the World Health…
The Food and Drug Administration is doing a poor job of making sure the doctors who review drugs for possible approval are free of bias, alleges a new investigative report published this week in Science. Many of these reviewers, while having no clear financial conflicts of interest prior to their work for the FDA,…
E-commerce giant Amazon wiped out nearly $15 billion in value from Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid this week when it announced a nearly $1 billion deal to acquire PillPack, an online prescription service, sending the competition scrambling for cover. It’s unclear just how Amazon plans on integrating PillPack into the…
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of Epidiolex to treat two severe forms of epilepsy, making it the first cannabis-based drug to be legalized in the United States. It’s welcome news—but patients won’t have access to the medicine until the Drug Enforcement Agency changes the Schedule 1…
It was 50 years ago this month that Senator Robert F. Kennedy was killed by an assassin. In what is now the first study of its kind, a team of specialists has conducted a systematic review of the medical care he received during the critical hours following the shooting. Their findings offer unprecedented details about…
Officials with California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) have intervened to nullify a recent court ruling saying coffee sold in the state—say, like at a local Starbucks—must be accompanied by warning labels saying brewed coffee contains the carcinogen acrylamide.
The state of Massachusetts has filed a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma LP, the company that developed the semisynthetic opioid OxyContin in 1995 and aggressively marketed it while downplaying the risk of addiction. It’s part of a growing backlash to Purdue, a pharmaceutical giant the New Yorker characterized as an …
Elizabeth Holmes lost everything—and nearly $900 million of other people’s money—when her bunk blood-testing startup Theranos went into full meltdown, resulting in the layoff of nearly all staff and civil charges of “massive” fraud for Holmes and former company president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani.
Researchers from Case Western Reserve University have synthesized an artificial human prion, a scientific first that could eventually lead to treatments for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and other deadly brain-wasting disorders.
Lurking quietly in the deep dark jungles of New Guinea are a group of lizards who share a rather striking feature: green blood. It’s a rare trait for vertebrates to have, but new insights into this strange blood could lead to innovative medical treatments.
Lo and behold, President Donald Trump has appointed none other than widely ridiculed quack Dr. Mehmet Oz—yes, the Dr. Oz so infamous for his dubious TV health advice that the British Medical Journal published a thorough trashing of him—to serve as a health adviser.
Squirrels and other hibernating animals have an almost magical ability to withstand frigid temperatures. New research has uncovered the biological factors involved in keeping cellular structures intact during hibernation—a finding that could eventually be used to preserve human organs prior to transplantation.
Over the past few years, a hospital in Portland, Oregon has dramatically shifted its approach to treating patients with substance use disorders, including opioid addiction. And since then, the hospital has undergone a “sea change” in the way its medical staff think about and address addiction, according to a study…
Researchers at the University of Chicago are working on an app that they hope will be able to answer to a question many a stoner has asked themselves at one point or another: Am I actually high? The results of their latest research—presented this week at the Emerging Biology conference held in California—suggest…
A surgical team from Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore performed a total penis and scrotum transplant, the first operation of its kind anywhere in the world.
