Search results

The idea that some people with mental illness lack insight into their condition isn't new. And the condition, which health officials continue to grapple with, can also cause great stress for the loved ones of those afflicted by it.

The explosion of Mount Tambura, killed 100,000 people and changed the climate for several years. It was responsible for the "year without a summer," Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, and perhaps the military failing of Napoleon Bonaparte. 

It turns out that tiny phytoplankton, which can cause massive "blooms," may actually affect our weather. As we will see, there's more to climate than just warming.

Some people have unfounded fears of food preservatives. After all, they do have chemical names that sound scary. Who would want sodium benzoate, when they could have flavonoids do the same job? Even the name itself is relaxing.

Aging at home rather than in a nursing home can be more satisfying for individuals and their family and may reduce the cost of care. But what to do when Mom and Dad are not at the top of their game? Passive monitoring will play an increasingly larger role. 

According to PETA, veggie burgers cause cancer because of their iron content. Using their logic, so does soy and spinach.

You've probably never even heard of osmium (no relation to Donny Osmond). That may be because 1) You are not a dork, and 2) It is the rarest metal in the world. It also has some interesting properties. It is an unreactive, very hard metal, which is used in fountain pens but add four oxygens and it becomes a different beast - one that can blind you.

With the release of the CDC's 2018 breastfeeding scorecard, it is time to add common sense into these failed policies that actually supports women and families.

How is science used in environmental litigation, and by whom? A new study finds patterns in the litigants and their strategies. 

GM crop adoption has been facilitated in developing countries through the development of biosafety frameworks, allowing for thorough risk assessments to be completed. Significant benefits from these crops have come in the domain of socio-economics.

Probability and odds play a large role in explaining the results of medical studies. Yet, they are not the same, and knowing how to understand odds will make it easier to separate the signal from the noise.

There are signs that the devastating opioid crisis we're experiencing here is spreading to other nations – including the United Kingdom. Germany had the closest rates to those in the U.S., while in the U.K. doses per million people, per day, more than tripled.

Mosquitos are a global carrier of diseases. Genetically-modified mosquitos can alter their ability to transmit disease or suppress their population. Isn't it time to use this tool in our continued fight against this lethal carrier?

Should machines be allowed to make our moral judgments? They are often smarter and less emotional. But when we make a moral choice, is that what we're really looking for?

The Krebs cycle explains how the body's biochemistry produces energy. It is an intellectual rite of passage that many feel we can eliminate from physician's education. Perhaps so, but in our haste to "eliminate wasteful knowledge and compress time to "create more doctors," what kind of doctors do we create? 

U.S. public health agencies struggle to endorse an obvious solution to a true public health menace. Hopefully, the UK Parliament will provide a much-needed boost to the forces of common sense.

Armadillo reproduction can teach us a rather wise guiding principle.

With drastic shifts taking place in the medical profession, those weighing whether to enter it have had to grapple with two major issues: immense student debt and choice of career specialty. While NYU hopes that waiving tuition for its medical students will encourage them to join the thinning ranks of family-focused medicine, our veteran medical expert is skeptical.

Many public and private locations have begun carrying injectable epinephrine. But with no generic form of the easiest kind of device, there have been complaints of price gouging. No more. The FDA has approved the first generic version of epinephrine auto-injector for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions.

1. If you don't have HBO, and if you have HBO but you don't watch John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight", and if you do ordinarily watch but missed the August 13th episode...well, you didn't miss much.

Jurors in California awarded $289 million to a man who claimed that his cancer was due to Monsanto’s herbicide glyphosate – even though that's biologically impossible. Even the judge acknowledged that there was no evidence of harm. Yet trial lawyers manipulated a jury’s emotions and the public’s misunderstanding of science to score another jackpot verdict.

Poorer people often live in areas with more pollution and crime, that is no surprise, but pollution is relative in 2018. American air is incredibly clean, (1) so clean epidemiologists and activists have tried to define harmful smog all the way down to 2.5 μm (microns) in diameter in hopes of showing air quality is still a worry. And they have begun to consider noise the same as smog for harm, along with lots of other things.

Quickly following on the heels of news that salt should be used in moderation, it turns out that the same is true for our latest dietary villain: carbohydrates. It also turns out that too few can be just as bad as too many.

One study tells us we can predict a three-fold risk of cancer at birth. Yet, another states that we frighten patients when the term "cancer" is used for low-risk situations. Discussing uncertainty can be a risky business. 

Oregon, the progressive state, is about to take a giant regressive step into our shameful past. Their plan to stop all opioids for chronic pain patients on Medicaid is reminiscent of the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male."