Medicine
The Future of Cheating in Sports
As technology advances, so will access to ingenious—and troubling—new techniques
July 2012 |
By Christie Aschwanden
Hemingway’s Old Man Inspires Shark Oil for HIV Vaccine
Two pharma giants are teaming up to test the latest HIV vaccine, taking a hint from Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, reports Bloomberg. People on the coasts of Norway and Sweden have used shark liver oil for centuries to help heal wounds and treat respiratory and digestive illnesses, according to the American Cancer Society. In Hemingway’s book, which [...]
June 29, 2012 |
By Rachel Nuwer
Mom Keeps Kid Out of Cookie Jar, Forever
Should you raise a sugar-free baby? One mother makes a case for this radical move.
June 28, 2012 |
By Rachel Nuwer
Microparticle Elixir Can Keep Patients Alive for 30 Minutes Without Breathing
When people stop breathing, they die. Quickly. But a team at Boston Children’s Hospital has developed an elixir, filled with microparticles that carry oxygen to a person’s cells, that could keep a person alive for up to half an hour, even if they’re not breathing. Popular Science reports: The microparticle solution is different than blood [...]
June 28, 2012 |
By Sarah Laskow
A Little Perspective: Congress First Mandated Health Care in 1798
The Supreme Court handed down its decision on the Affordable Care Act this morning, and the individual mandate -- the requirement that all Americans buy health insurance, which was one of the bill's most at-risk provisions -- survived.
June 28, 2012 |
By Sarah Laskow
Not All Calories Are the Same, Says Harvard Study
A new Harvard study challenges the traditional understanding of calories, postulating that it’s all about quality and not quantity. For those looking to lose weight, the source of those calories is more influential than the sheer number. ABC News reports on the results: The kind of calories the body gets may affect how efficiently people [...]
June 27, 2012 |
By Rachel Nuwer
Finally, Male Birth Control Even Dudes Will Use
Here's a male contraceptive from the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute that a) works pretty well and b) shouldn't be too burdensome for dudes.
June 27, 2012 |
By Sarah Laskow
In 45 States, It’s Illegal to Keep Your HIV Status Secret
Should it be illegal to keep your HIV status a secret? Most states agree that it should. Forty-five states have laws against HIV-positive persons not disclosing their status during sex, acts of prostitution, needle exchanges or when donating organs, blood or semen. Some of those states also make it illegal for HIV-positive persons to bite [...]
June 26, 2012 |
By Rachel Nuwer
How to Give a Ferret a Deadly Flu
The secret to airborne bird flu is out. Dutch researchers published a controversial paper yesterday that detailed how they caused a deadly strain of H5N1 bird flu to transform from a disease transmittable only through contact to one that could be transmitted through the air. The team used ferrets as test subjects, since they respond [...]
June 22, 2012 |
By Sarah Laskow
Your Kid’s New Dermatologists: Barney and Kung Fu Panda
Next time your kid has a pesky wart to remove, it could be everybody’s favorite big purple dinosaur who assists with the procedure. A new study indicates that children are less angsty when having their warts removed if they’ve first watched their favorite movie or TV show just before going under the knife. Reuters Health [...]
June 22, 2012 |
By Rachel Nuwer
Want to Be Healthy? Manage Your Microbes Like a Wildlife Park
Our bodies are slurries of living microbial organisms, without which we’d be rendered ill or worse. Science is only now on the cusp of unraveling the roles that only a handful of our 100 trillion microbes play to keep our bodily systems running smoothly. Carl Zimmer explains the emerging field of medical ecology in the [...]
June 20, 2012 |
By Rachel Nuwer
Glasses Let Doctors, Poker Players See Your Blood
More specifically, O2Amps, a new vision filtration system, could let me see your blood in vivid detail–right through your skin. And with that power, says vision researcher and glasses developer Mark Changizi, comes the ability to, “enhance one’s perception of the emotion, mood and health signals” of those around us. “That means people wearing shades don’t [...]
June 19, 2012 |
By Colin Schultz
What the Taliban and Jenny McCarthy Have in Common
Jenny McCarthy and Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a Taliban commander in Pakistan, have at least one thing in common: they are both paranoid about vaccination. Bahadur blocked a vaccination campaign, scheduled to start in a few days, that would have reached 161,000 children in North Waziristan. Unlike McCarthy, the Taliban commander is not worried that vaccinations [...]
June 18, 2012 |
By Sarah Laskow
Edible Dictionary: Lean Cuisine Syndrome
Where do Mayor Michael Bloomberg's statistics come from? People underestimate junk food and overestimate healthy food in dietary surveys
June 11, 2012 |
By Peter Smith
Big Things Ahead… But Keep Your Shirt On
Americans in the 1940s had wondrous expectations about the post-war world. Meet one author who advised them to curb their enthusiasm
May 25, 2012 |
By Matt Novak
Tripping Through the Cold War: Drug Warfare in the Retrofuture
Was LSD the Soviet Union's secret weapon?
May 18, 2012 |
By Matt Novak
Mythology and the Raw Milk Movement
What's behind recent claims about a milky unpasteurized panacea?
May 09, 2012 |
By Peter Smith
The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine
The question was not “Should you eat human flesh?” says one historian, but, “What sort of flesh should you eat?”
May 07, 2012 |
By Maria Dolan
The Shangri-La of Health Food
The Hunza people supposedly lived to be 100 and had a practically illness-free existence. The American infatuation with their lifestyle ended in a particularly dramatic fashion
April 30, 2012 |
By Peter Smith
Telemedicine Predicted in 1925
With video screens and remote control arms, any doctor could make a virtual housecall
March 14, 2012 |
By Matt Novak
