On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that companies cannot patent isolated human genes that are naturally occurring.
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A Bionic Breakthrough: A Hand that Lets Amputees ‘Feel’
Scientists have moved closer to enabling amputees with artificial limbs to feel what they are touching. The first bionic hand that will allow the wearer to experience touch again will enter trials later this year, thanks to the …
Quiz: Are You an Introvert or an Extrovert?
Answer yes or no to the following questions, excerpted from the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain, to find out where you fall on the introversion spectrum. Then read the …
Nick Cannon Hospitalized: What Causes Kidney Failure?
Lots of things can cause kidneys to stop functioning, say experts, including trauma, dehydration and some common OTC and prescription medications
CDC Researchers Say No to Eating Raw Cookie Dough
To the dismay of teenage girls everywhere, researchers who investigated a 2009 outbreak of E. coli that sprang from tubes of Nestlé’s Toll House raw cookie dough are advising people to bake their cookies before eating them.
A link between pesticides and attention disorders?
Prenatal exposure to pesticides may be delaying kids’ nervous-system development, leading to attention problems later in life, a new study finds.
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley followed more than 300 California children and their mothers over several years. When the women were pregnant, the researchers took …
Millions of eggs recalled in salmonella outbreak
An egg producer in Iowa is recalling 228 million eggs, as the federal government reports a multi-state outbreak of salmonella.
Infection with the bacterium salmonella enteritidis can cause fever, abdominal cramps and diarrhea. Sickness usually only lasts a few days, with no long-term consequences. But the infection can be fatal if the …
Understanding the mind of a cocaine addict
A protein known for its role in Rett syndrome — a rare genetic brain disorder — also works to regulate cocaine addiction, new research shows.
In a study published today in Nature Neuroscience, Florida researchers were able to mimic in rats a human’s transition to cocaine addiction: the transition, that is, from controlled intake …
The end of antibiotics?
There’s been a big hubbub this past week about antibiotics. After Lancet Infectious Diseases reported the spread of a new drug-resistant superbug spreading from south Asia, news agencies around the world reported “panic” and “fear and loathing” over the germs’ possible consequences. Some experts claimed the news was overblown –that the …
Top 5 health stories of the weekend
It’s summer, so with luck you didn’t spend all weekend indoors glued to the screen. In case you missed these headlines when they broke, here are the biggest health stories of the past two days:
- Plan C. The FDA approved a new emergency-contraception pill on Friday. Unlike the existing Plan B, this latest drug — already sold in Europe
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Cheap drugs are just as effective at preventing heart disease, long-term study shows
Pricey drugs to reduce blood pressure appear no better at preventing heart disease than cheap, generic diuretics, which have been around for decades.
This is the result of a 13-year study of roughly 33,000 Americans who use anti-hypertensive drugs. The hypertension patients were randomly assigned in the 1990s to receive either a …
Was the JetBlue slide incident caused by head injury?
Many explanations have been offered for JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater’s meltdown and dramatic emergency slide exit on Monday—from “air rage” to suggestions of a relapse into alcoholism. But none of the media coverage has noted what could be the most obvious and chilling reason for his bizarre behavior: at the beginning of …
How can a pea plant grow in the lungs?
The Internet’s a-buzz with news of Ron Sveden, the 75-year-old Cape Cod man who discovered that a growth in his lung was not, as feared, a tumor — but rather a pea plant. A seed had somehow lodged itself in his lung, presumably after some food found its way down the wrong tube, and the seed then sprouted.
But how is this …
