Abstracts: Vaccines, Penguins, Pregnancies, and More
The Senate's proposed health care bill would get rid of funding established by the Affordable Care Act that helps Americans cover the costs of vaccines. Threatened by climate change, emperor penguins...
View ArticleThe Curious Case of Motherhood and Longevity
A recent study in PLOS One reported that the more children a woman gave birth to, the faster she aged. But wait: Maybe having children revitalizes you, keeps you young. Just a week earlier, the same...
View ArticleA Little Less Science for EPA’s Science Advisory Boards
The Environmental Protection Agency in particular has been culling its roster of scientific advisers. This has many in the scientific community worried that the Trump administration intends to replace...
View ArticleTrump’s Incoming CDC Chief Brings a Mixed Record on Public Health
The new director of the Centers for Disease Control, Brenda Fitzgerald, served as Georgia’s public health commissioner until her federal appointment last week. Annual health rankings on all U.S. states...
View ArticleAbstracts: Environmental Killings, Space Exploration, and More
An iceberg the size of Delaware — one of the largest ever recorded — broke off from the Antarctic continent sometime earlier this week. Scientists have successfully stored a film clip in bacterial DNA...
View ArticleWhen Doctors Succumb to Malignant Relativism
Whenever I criticize alternative medicine, I get hundreds of messages pointing out that conventional medicine has the same flaws. True enough: Lackluster evidence and premature hype can also cause harm...
View ArticleOf Politics, Science, and Gender Identity
For all of his critics, McHugh’s status as a Johns Hopkins professor and a former chief psychiatrist at one of the country’s most prestigious teaching hospitals has made him difficult to ignore. And...
View ArticleAbstracts: Fake News, Habitat Loss, and More
Maryam Mirzakhani, the only female mathematician ever to win the prestigious Fields Medal, died on Saturday. Exposure to too much information and online content makes encountering fake news inevitable,...
View ArticleMost People Say They Don’t Trust Others. So What?
Less trust usually has two effects on people’s livelihoods, according to researchers who analyzed global survey data. “If you tend not to trust your fellow man, it’s not good for your health," one of...
View ArticleWhat City Ants Can Teach Us About Species Evolution And Climate Change
Researchers compared how ants of the same species adapted to temperature conditions depending on the location of their colonies. In virtually all circumstances, urban ants had higher heat tolerance,...
View ArticleWhen Undark Was Lethal: A New Look at the ‘Radium Girls’
To paint watch dials with radium, young women were taught to tease their brushes to a point by moistening them in their mouths. Many worried that the paint could harm them, but over and over their...
View ArticleFor Low-Income and Minority Americans, Oral Care Continues to Suffer
A Surgeon General’s report that came out near the end of the Clinton Administration brought attention to the ailing condition of America’s oral health, particularly among ethnic and racial minorities...
View ArticleAs Temperatures Rise, Poor Americans Are Thrust Into the Thick of It
Americans who walk, work, and sleep outside have always been more frequently exposed to the elements and the dangers that can come with that. But as heat waves increase in frequency and duration,...
View ArticleAbstracts: USDA Nominee, AIDS Updates, and More
President Trump has nominated a climate change denier without a science degree to serve as secretary of agriculture for the USDA. Half of all people who are HIV-positive are receiving treatment for the...
View ArticleThe Curse of a ‘None of the Above’ Disease
Some of these maladies have names — chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and others — but each is essentially a collection of unexplained symptoms lumped together into a sort of diagnostic checklist, often...
View ArticleAbstracts: Robots, Floating Turbines, and More
An underwater robot has captured what appear to be the first images of melted nuclear fuel in Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant. A company has developed the world's first floating wind turbines off the...
View ArticleCDC Removes Reference to Disputed ME/CFS Therapies From Website
British doctors developed the therapies decades ago. According to their theory, these patients suffer from severe deconditioning and a misconception that they are medically sick; to get better they...
View ArticleInescapable, Influential, Misused: The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment
As studies of large-scale health care outcomes go, the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment was always slated to be a blockbuster. But in the years since its results were first published, the study has...
View ArticleIn Kenya, a Transformation in Shades of REDD
By most accounts, what changed was the arrival of REDD, a carbon credit system formalized at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2007. REDD, short for “reducing emissions from...
View ArticleAbstracts: Milky Way, Medicine, and More
China and India are vying for formal recognition from UNESCO of their cultural ties to ancient Tibetan medicine. Almost half of the matter present in the Milky Way might have originated in other...
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