Can an electrical signal applied to the ear reduce, on a global basis, the greatest cause of maternal death?
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If your unborn child takes up anywhere between 6 and 8 pounds (sometimes even 9 and 10!), why the heck are we gaining 20 to 35 pounds in nine months? Here's how the weight gets distributed on your body.
Vitamin-A deficiency around the world leads to between 250,000 and 500,000 children going blind – every single year. Half of them die within a year of losing their sight. Meanwhile, Golden Rice – a genetically-modified seed than can deliver this essential vitamin – is still not being used in impoverished nations. Here's a look at this pressing issue.
Can someone please explain the logic here? Does this make any sense at all?
With Memorial Day weekend and the subsequent peak "drowning season" upon us, there's no better time to review the precautions that should be taken when any body of water is in close proximity.
Several years ago, a survey of professional toxicologists revealed that 79% of them believed that the Environmental Working Group and two other organizations overstate the health risks of chemicals. That's why EWG is beloved by activists but detested by scientists.
The latest advance in cancer treatment is the FDA's approval of Keytruda, a drug that targets cancer cells in a novel way. This marks a shift in how cancer is approached, while it turns the mere promise of new treatments into reality. This new genetic-based approach brings the future of personalized medicine into the present.
“When patients enter a hospital," the author of a recent article writes, "they arrive with complex and dynamic microbial assemblages that will be shaped by the treatment they receive and by the interactions they have with staff and with the building itself." Just a few reasons why hospital-acquired infections are frequent and costly.
Dr. Lance O'Sullivan decided to take action when the anti-vaccine movie "VAXXED" was shown in his community. By protesting the misinformed movement while spreading the truth about the benefits of vaccines, the staunch vaccine supporter is our new hero. If only he wore a cape.
Glyphosate is perpetually in the news. However, last month was especially busy because various agencies concluded that it either did – or did not – cause cancer or kill butterflies. The herbicide has even been implicated as a cause of autism, but the science is terrible. Perhaps the worst science came out of MIT in 2014 — confusing correlation with causation. A big no-no.
A recent study suggests that having four or five beers can be as effective as taking over-the-counter painkillers for pain relief. This may be so, but there's a catch — one that's not worth the risk.
Every day that a new antibiotic development is delayed will mean more people will die from antibiotic-resistant infections. But a fair plan to provide incentives for companies to continue, or re-enter, antibiotic research is being held up in the U.S. House. Democrats get the blame here.
A large outbreak in Washington State of hundreds of cases of mumps – a disease projected to be eliminated from the United States by 2010 – is raising new questions, two in particular. Why is it back? And can we ever rid the nation of it for good?
According to a recent study, those who had the opportunity to receive "individual wellness coaching by telephone for weight management lost an average of 10 pounds each and changed their weight trajectories from upward to downward."
Don't have the money for an elite wellness getaway? Here are some low-budget alternatives.
The Brookings Institute recently released a study on what it terms the "Privacy Paradox," in that officials believe that our concerns about privacy are not monolithic, but contextual. Privacy involves withholding information from others to protect a social image, either for a person or the community he/she inhabits.
British scientists came up with a plan to decrease the incidence of the dangerous drug resistant Clostridium difficile: Limit the use of fluoroquinolone antibiotics, such as Cipro, in hospitals.
Self-righteousness, gratitude, sympathy, sincerity, and guilt – what if these social behaviours are biologically influenced, encoded within our genes and shaped by the forces of evolution to promote the survival of the human species? Does free will truly exist if our genes are inherited and our environment is a series of events set in motion before we are born?
Should researchers even participate in a study, if the potential exists that the results they collect can benefit the company or industry that employs them? This thought comes to mind after reading the conclusion of a newly-released examination comparing the protective benefits of sunscreen and umbrella shade.
McKesson Corp. has been repeatedly fined for failing to report suspicious opioid orders, which is required by the Drug Enforcement Agency for all parties in the opioid supply chain. This is not the corporate citizenship and good stewardship its officials claim – and there is little we can do about it.
The first member of the cephalosporin class of antibiotics was discovered in the 1940s, in a sewage pipe in Sardinia. Now a group has isolated some novel compounds from lichens gathered in northern Quebec. Three of these have modest antibacterial activity. Can chemists make them more potent?
In 1976, Barry Kidston, a chemistry grad student, would find out the hard way that you had better be careful with your reaction conditions when making psychoactive drugs. He got a little sloppy, and instead of making a pure derivative of Demerol, got an impurity in the batch, which gave him Parkinson's with one injection. Six years later, a group of six "frozen addicts" suffered the same fate. Crazy brain chemistry.
The Cleveland Clinic remains mortified that one of their physicians, Dr. Daniel Neides, wrote blog post full of anti-science quackery. It has issued as strong of a rebuke as possible without firing him on the spot. Here's the full whiplashing by the Cleveland Clinic.
Things aren’t always what they seem – especially in the medical realm. That's precisely what surgeons in Japan discovered when performing an emergency appendectomy. Brain tissue ... in ovaries?!
The Food and Drug Administration has just cracked the whip on the use of antibiotics in animal feed — something that should have been done long ago. However, many of the antibiotics used for this purpose are not used in humans. Does this matter? You may be surprised.
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