Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Innovation / Health & Medicine

Building a Bionic Pancreas

A device that tracks blood sugar and automatically administers insulin and glucagon could take some pressure off Type 1 diabetes patients and their parents

A digital scan of a human kidney and pelvis.

Medical Holograms Are Now Part of the Surgeon’s Toolkit

Technology hitting the market will help doctors examine heart conditions or check for colon cancer without breaking the skin

Palazzo Italia

Smog-Eating Buildings Battle Air Pollution

Sunlight triggers chemical reactions in the façades of buildings in Mexico City and Milan to improve air quality

The patient, in a rare moment of calm.

Cats Get Breast Cancer Too, and There’s a Lot We Can Learn From It

Understanding aggressive tumors in pets may lead to better treatments for the nastiest forms of the disease in people

Marijuana buds are often two to three times as potent as they were 30 years ago.

New Research

Modern Marijuana Is Often Laced With Heavy Metals and Fungus

Medical and recreational marijuana use is increasingly legal—but do consumers know what they’re smoking?

Members of the Xhosa tribe, like the young initiates seen here in Khayelitsha, are among the South African groups that practice ritual circumcision. The affiliation of the young man who received a transplant is not known.

Trending Today

The Trickiest Part of a Penis Transplant? Finding a Donor

The doctors who announced the first successful procedure last week had a particularly difficult time finding willing organ donors

The iTBra by Cyrcadia Health aims to screen for breast cancer in a new way, but still requires much testing.

Could a Bra Actually Detect Breast Cancer?

Using thermodynamic sensors, the iTBra could one day screen for breast cancer, but experts are wary

Roberts' wheelchair sports a reclining seat, a headlight for nighttime driving and a space in the back for a respirator and a small portable ramp.

Ed Roberts’ Wheelchair Records a Story of Obstacles Overcome

The champion of the disability rights movement refused to be hindered and challenged the world to create spaces for independent living

Personal environmental monitors, such as TZOA (shown here), measure air quality and stream that information to users who may otherwise have no idea what they are breathing.

With Wearable Devices That Monitor Air Quality, Scientists Can Crowdsource Pollution Maps

Emerging technology means anyone with a smartphone can become a mobile environmental monitoring station

An ecosystem of bacteria lives in our intestines and produces gases. Detecting these gases in real-time could provide insight into their relationship with different illnesses.

New Research

Fecal Fermentation and Electronic Pills May Help Decipher Gut Gases

Some intestinal gases have been linked with diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome and colon cancer, so tracking them might explain the connection

Bordetella phage BPP-1.

New Drawings Show the Strange Beauty of Phages, the Bacteria Slayers

Phage viruses rearrange genes, prey on bacteria and maintain microbial diversity. Can we harness them to do our bidding?

A reader can point a smartphone at the pages of this children's book to reveal surprising animations.

This Week in Crowdfunding

An Augmented Reality Children’s Book, Bacon Jerky and Other Wild Ideas That Just Got Funded

Never worry about halitosis again with the Breathometer Mint bad breath tracker

A Norwegian Company is Transforming Deserts Into Farmland

Solar power plants in Qatar and Jordan, not far from the sea, are powering desalination systems that irrigate plants in and around greenhouses

The impact of EnChroma sunglasses: the left shows what a wearer with red-green colorblindness would typically see. The right shows what they see while wearing the sunglasses.

A Scientist Accidentally Developed Sunglasses That Could Correct Color Blindness

The California company EnChroma is creating lenses that allow some to see colors for the first time

The Black Death is immortalized by the plague masks of Venice, like this stylized version used in a Carnival costume.

Plague Pandemic May Have Been Driven by Climate, Not Rats

The bacteria responsible for the Black Death were reintroduced to Europe multiple times, possibly due to the changing climate

New York saw 4,500 annual cases by 1907. Mallon was linked to 47, and 3 deaths.

The Frightening Legacy of Typhoid Mary

With concerns about infectious disease in the news, a look back at history’s most famous carrier

The lab-on-a-chip gets the power it needs for testing though the headphone jack on a smartphone, and sends the results through the port to the phone for computation, display and storage.

This $34 Smartphone-Assisted Device Could Revolutionize Disease Testing

A new low-cost device that plugs into a smartphone could cut down on expensive lab tests

Midnight Snacking Is Bad for Your Brain

Experiments in mice show that misaligned eating patterns can mess with the brain’s ability to form memories and learn new tasks

As a kid, you may remember getting your first glimpse of paramecium in pond water or the cell structure of an onion by peering through a microscope.

Ultra-Cheap Microscopes Could Save Millions of Lives

Researchers are designing portable microscopes that cost just a few dollars to make

None

A Man With ALS Says “I Love You” to His Wife for the First Time in 15 Years

A new invention from Not Impossible Labs allows Don Moir to script an audible love letter

Page 32 of 38