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If Americans traded stocks using the kind of nonpublic information available to Congress, they’d face investigations, fines, and prison time. Yet lawmakers—especially those who rise into leadership—can legally buy and sell shares while shaping the very rules and contracts that move markets. Too often, the vote that’s “best for the American people” competes with what’s best for a member’s portfolio—a tension that recent economic research now helps quantify.

In a strange turn of events, The Lancet—one of the world's oldest medical journals—has taken a line you might expect to hear from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., declaring "ultra-processed" food a driver of chronic disease. Is there any evidence behind this association, or are we just dealing with academic snobs who can't appreciate the benefits of convenient, abundant food?

With highly potent and (sometimes) legal marijuana widely available across the US, emergency rooms are reporting an increase in Cannabis hyperemesis syndrome (CHS), an unpleasant condition characterized by screaming and vomiting—"scromiting" in the vernacular. The condition is yet more evidence that marijuana’s reputation as a low-risk drug is undeserved.

Fireplaces are cozy until it’s time to shovel out the ashes. Nuclear power has the same problem: abundant, reliable energy paired with a growing pile of difficult-to-discard spent fuel. But a new reactor design aims to “burn” part of that nuclear ash by turning certain spent fuel back into usable energy.

The immune system’s first encounter with a virus or vaccine establishes a “starting template” that shapes its response to new variants, a phenomenon often called immune imprinting. A new study shows that protection isn’t about being vaccinated or infected—it’s about the sequence of those exposures, and how repeated boosters or infections can reshape the response over time.

Much has been written advising laypeople to navigate conflicting medical opinions and identify the golden truth amid the pervasive muck and mire. These questions also vex judges when evidence is presented in litigation seeking damages from allegedly related injuries. Although judges do not decide which of the competing positions is correct, they are, as the evidentiary “gatekeeper,” responsible for determining the soundness of the science presented and barring junk science from the courtroom. Once assessed, all sound evidence from both sides is presented to the jury for deliberation, essentially based on which witness they found most credible. Whether the decision is made by a judge or a jury, specific, albeit different, strategies are used to make these assessments.

Artificial sweeteners have long been cast as either miracle weight-loss allies or metabolic saboteurs — but the science is far less dramatic and far more nuanced. Non-sugar sweeteners have shaped diets worldwide, even as public confidence has begun to wobble. New data suggests they’re largely safe and may modestly support weight loss when paired with an overall healthier diet, but they’re no magic fix, just tools whose benefits depend entirely on how, and why, we use them.

Does motion sickness turn you into a green, spewing mess? For plenty of people, the answer is yes. Current remedies may or may not help. But after 40 years, the first new motion-sickness drug has been approved. Ready to cross the Pacific in a laundry basket? Not so fast.

I have tea coming out of my ears. Not literally of course. But the ears were the target.

Across four very different stories—Revolutionary-era smallpox, the still-mysterious ignition of the Black Death, a modern measles outbreak shaped by community identity and distrust, and the promise of genetics to build safer drugs—a single theme emerges: disease is never just biology. It is also environment, social structure, politics, and perception.

Josh Axe is expanding his wellness empire, this time to include wellness training. The Health Institute is another money-making ploy pushing vibes, anecdotes, and Axe’s personal beliefs. The Health Institute sells confidence to those looking for a way to break into the wellness world, but as with most things in the Wellness World, The Health Institute" trades in the feeling of authority rather than the substance of it. 

New York’s Medical Aid in Dying is often framed as compassion guided by medical expertise. But is the legislation prescribing a moral choice behind the mask of scientific certainty?

You may have enjoyed a glass of the bubbly on New Year's Eve, but did you drink it from the right kind of glass?

Flu season is hitting hard right now, thanks to this new variant called Subclade K—yeah, the one they're dubbing the "Super bug." It's basically taken over as the main strain in the US, spreading super fast with some sneaky mutations that dodge a bit of our usual immunity. It's legit, and this year's flu vaccine isn't providing the best protection against it.

A quiet policy proposal to shift America’s childhood vaccination schedule toward Denmark’s leaner schedule is on pause. Denmark’s “fewer jabs” is a context-driven strategy shaped by the Danes’ universal healthcare, different disease risks, and explicit trade-offs about severity, cost, and public acceptance. The real lesson for the US isn’t which shots to copy, but how to build a transparent process that earns trust by making those trade-offs visible.

As vaccine exemptions spread and courts are weaponized in the name of “medical freedom,” preventable childhood diseases are roaring back—with consequences states may even more loathe to implement than the “dreaded” jab.

You wake up on New Year’s Day, and all kinds of horrid things have been flying out of your mouth. Your head feels like it’s been in a stampede. What do you do? Tylenol? Maybe not.

Every January, the resurgence of diet and detox trends makes it difficult to distinguish reputable health advice from the opportunistic claims of "Wellness Warriors". The current obsession with anti-inflammatory diets serves as a perfect case study. As the internet becomes saturated with information, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate evidence-based guidance from marketing.

Lonvi Biosciences says the answer is yes: citing a Nature Metabolism paper, its CTO claims “living 150 years is entirely practical” with a monthly three-day dose of PCC1, a grape-seed–derived “senolytic” meant to wipe out inflammation-spewing senescent “zombie cells.” The catch is that the longevity boost so far is in mice—not humans—so selling PCC1 as a life-extension breakthrough is a classic leap from intriguing lab biology to premature, hype-heavy promises.

Everyday life is full of small behaviors we treat as moral choices, scientific truths, or acts of civic virtue—often without much reflection. From abandoned shopping carts to climate guilt over pet ownership, from misplaced faith in statistical “significance” to misunderstandings of animal behavior, these examples reveal how intuition, habit, and oversimplified science shape what we believe.

What does science tell us about gluten sensitivity? Depending on whom you ask, it's either a heal scare advanced by social media grifters or a legitimate medical condition that afflicts many people. Let's take a closer look to separate fact from myth.

Recently at a White House event where President Trump signed an executive order instructing the DEA to reclassify marijuana as a Schedule III drug, CMS Director Mehmet Oz announced plans to have Medicare pay for specific formulations of CBD. He may be motivated by good intentions, but the plan is at odds with Congress, which recently effectively banned CBD. It might also harm the millions of non-seniors who benefit from CBD by making it less affordable and harder to obtain.

The story everyone knows about the opioid epidemic goes like this: Big, bad Purdue Pharma aggressively marketed its potent painkiller OxyContin, hooking legions of unsuspecting Americans on the pharmaceutical equivalent of heroin. It's a compelling tale—and it's wrong in almost of its particulars. Let's take a closer look.

A rare moment of bipartisan progress has emerged with the Senate’s unanimous passage of the FDA Modernization Act 3.0, pushing the FDA to finally align its regulations with modern science and end animal testing. Supported by an unusual coalition of industry, patient advocates, scientists, and animal welfare groups, the Act represents both a scientific upgrade and a long-overdue ethical shift in drug development.

President Trump issued an executive order calling on the DEA to reclassify cannabis as a Schedule III controlled substance. It has been heretofore classified as Schedule I, meaning it has ‘no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.’ Many proponents fear that classifying cannabis with drugs like codeine and ketamine will cause an epidemic of reefer madness. But the prohibitionists can relax. Rescheduling is not legalization—it’s prohibition with new paperwork