Health & Medicine

Used since the 1940s, 'forever chemicals' include thousands of different types of substances routinely integrated into industry and consumer products, yet research suggests they can accumulate in the body over time.

Scientists have created a cell from scratch—called a SpudCell—proof-of-concept work that a lab-made cell can feed, grow, and replicate like a natural cell.

The earliest evidence of cancer was found in a 1.7-million-year-old fossil—discovered in the toe of an ancestor of modern-day humans.

Based on its varied symptoms, scientists think that long COVID-19 is not a single disease, but rather a group of different conditions triggered by COVID-19 infection.

Marburg virus, related to Ebola, is also extremely deadly, and has no available vaccine.

Biohacking to boost personal health has become a concept that encompasses everything from vitamin regimens and cryochambers to brain implants and red light therapy.

Depression changes the brain, causing distinct structural alterations visible on brain scans, but effective treatment can eventually make a depressed brain resemble a healthy one.

Multiple sugar substitutes were accidental discoveries when lab workers didn't wash their hands.

Early 20th-century ID cards protected trans people in Germany using hormone therapy.

Humans can get tuberculosis from drinking raw milk, but milk pasteurization kills pathogens, including the bacteria that cause tuberculosis.

Fruit fly sperm are gigantic—about 40 times larger than human sperm, according to scientific research published in June 2026.

Powassan virus, a rare tick-borne disease named after the Canadian town where it was discovered in 1958, is on the rise in the northeastern United States, and it kills roughly 10% to 15% of patients with symptomatic disease.

No one is tracking the total number of animals used for research across US labs, though partial data without any rodents puts the 2024 count above 775,000 animals, including some 40,000 dogs and 100,000 primates.

mRNA vaccines teach the immune system how to respond to a threat, using a molecule called messenger RNA.

A remote Scottish island is awash in forever chemicals even though there are no obvious industrial sources nearby, and scientists suspect the toxic substances are accumulating via seaspray.

A 40-something science journalist was getting more winded during workouts, and experiencing night sweats, forgetfulness and tiredness—she thought it was perimenopause, but these common symptoms turned out to be signs of her blood cancer.

In 2026, University of Cambridge researchers reported that a group of gut bacteria called CAG-170 may be a key marker of good health, occurring far more often in healthy individuals and less commonly in people with chronic diseases.

Farts are tiny status reports from our gut microbiome, with American adults typically passing gas more than 30 times daily.

Supertoxic rat poisons are wreaking havoc on unintended targets, including predator birds, mammals, amphibians, crustaceans, and insects.

Healthcare fraud may cost the US more than $100B annually—see this dashboard tracking healthcare fraud cases nationwide.

Six pigeons were trained to detect cancer from looking at CT scans—now that work is the basis for training new AI medical tools.

Paul Broca, a French brain researcher in the 19th century, hypothesized that humans evolved to trade in our "bestial sense" of smell for higher brain capacity.

Olfactory training, a widely recommended treatment for people with long-term loss of smell after a viral infection like COVID, can be performed at home using bottles of essential oils—often lemon, rose, clove, and eucalyptus—to help reorganize neural connections in the brain.

GLP-1 drugs, first used to manage diabetes, were derived from Gila monster saliva.

Ebola virus, with an average fatality rate above 50%, has been responsible for at least 250 confirmed deaths during the 2026 outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda.

Read the main paper criticizing the concept of blue zones, which argues recordkeeping errors, pension fraud, and natural disasters likely explain the high numbers of purported healthy centenarians in certain locations.

Daniel Coleman, the real-life star of the popular kids' show Danny Go!, is grieving the recent death of his own 14-year-old son while he makes upbeat children's content.

Supplement sales soared during the pandemic, alongside growing distrust of the health establishment, amplifying a trend that endures—even when some of the products don't even work.

Some research suggests that the gut microbiome influences our risk of heatstroke, with elevated exercise levels raising body temperature to unsafe levels and increasing gut permeability—causing a "leaky" gut.

Some animals, including certain tropical ants, have little or no bacterial populations in their gut, upending the idea that all animals rely on such microbes to help maintain their health and proper functioning.

Fecal transplants can help treat infections by transplanting healthy gut bacteria from a donor into a patient's gastrointestinal tract using samples of human waste, which are turned into a liquid mixture and often delivered via a colonoscopy procedure.

Scientists suspect that Alexander the Great and Rudyard Kipling are among the public figures that may have died from food poisoning.

Normal body temperature varies from one person to another; it's not uniformly 98.6 F, as physician Carl Wunderlich determined in the 1800s.

Too little stress can be as problematic for our health as too much stress, because mild or moderate stress—followed by recovery—helps make us resilient.

Birds, rodents, monkeys, lizards, bats, apes, and livestock can all get malaria—just like humans.

Mosquitoes top the ranking of the world's deadliest animals.

Q-tips were invented in the 1920s, and originally marketed for cleaning babies.

Mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, does not come from monkeys but it was first identified in laboratory monkeys in 1958.

Unlike food allergens, encountering inhaled allergens—like pollen—rarely causes life-threatening illness.

World records are often broken later in the day—and scientists wonder if muscle clocks explain the difference.

The first major norovirus outbreak, in 1968, sickened half an elementary school.

Measles evolved from an ancient cattle disease, perhaps as recently as 3,000 years ago.

In 1982, around 20% of the people who ate some of the roughly 7,400 bags of cashews sold as part of a Little League fundraiser in Pennsylvania broke out in rashes because of natural urushiol residue on the nuts that hadn't been removed and fully cooked off—the same allergy-inducing substance found in poison ivy.

The study of dreams, formally called oneirology, has evolved over the centuries, from anecdotal interpretations to advanced brain imaging.

See how a novel gene editing technique called base editing can create precise changes in a single DNA base, using a more precise targeting approach than CRISPR-Cas9.

Most penicillin allergy diagnoses are wrong, leading to costlier, less effective treatments and contributing to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance.

Explore 3D models of some of the most dangerous viruses, allowing us to understand these and other pathogens in new ways.

Black patients are losing their limbs at a rate triple that of other groups due in large part to inequities in diabetes care and management.

Even non-amputees can be tricked into thinking they have phantom limbs, a phenomenon some estimates suggest is experienced by as many as 80% of amputees.

Read the 1866 story in The Atlantic that put phantom limbs on the map, a fictional story by a Civil War surgeon that was mistaken for being a true account by many readers.