Katherine Ellen Foley

The same biological compounds that spiders use to paralyze their prey may help save human lives one day.

Psychedelic drugs seem to mellow people out in a way that could prevent future crimes.

On Wednesday, Oct. 18, the US Food and Drug Administration approved a treatment for certain types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma that uses patient’s own genetically modified immune cells to attack cancer.

Some of NASA’s most influential women have finally been immortalized in an iconic toy set.

Last Friday, Oct. 13, governor Jerry Brown of California declared a state of emergency after hepatitis A cases in San Diego, Santa Cruz, and Los Angeles counties hit record highs.

The most common sexually transmitted infection is becoming even more widespread in part thanks to the rise in popularity of oral sex.

There’s a good chance that when you woke up this morning, your first thought was to go back to bed. But it’s also likely that you had so many obligations pulling you out from under the covers—work to do, food to cook, friends to see—that you started your day, even if you didn’t get your seven to eight hours of recommended shuteye.

By the end of the 2017 fiscal year in September, the US Food and Drug Administration had approved 763 new generic versions of drugs—112 more than it had in 2016, almost twice as many as in 2014.

The world may be getting richer, but the nutrition of children is getting worse. According to an analysis of over 2,400 research papers, the number of people aged 5-19 considered obese—with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more—increased from 11 million in 1975 to 124 million in 2016. The number of underweight children, with a BMI of less than 18.5, has also increased, from 167 million in 1975 to 192 million in 2016, although it’s fallen from a high point of 200 million in 2000.

Whales are notoriously hard to study. Scientists can sometimes observe the animals from boats or scuba dives, but whales tend to be suspicious of foreign ocean visitors and swim away if they feel threatened.

Before Scott Pruitt was sworn in as the chief of the US Environmental Protection Agency under president Donald Trump, he was at odds with the organization. He vowed to dismantle several of the EPA’s current regulations limiting pollution, even going so far as suing the federal agency multiple times as Oklahoma’s attorney general.

People living with diabetes have to prick their fingers to check their blood sugar levels anywhere from one to seven times a day.

The latest approach to making new drugs is genetically modifying members of our own microbial ecosystems.

Bed bugs are incredible world travelers.

The trouble with diagnosing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition that shows up in the overwhelming majority of American football players and other athletes who frequently take blows to the head, is that it can only be diagnosed through an autopsy. And at that point, there’s nothing medicine can do to help the victim.

The 35-year-old car crash survivor was still alive 15 years later—but completely paralyzed and unresponsive. He was in what scientists refer to as a ‘persistent vegetative state.’ After 12 months, most medical professionals consider this type of brain damage irreversible.

The roughly 6 million wild boar in the southern US have been considered pests for years. Since European explorers and settlers in the 1500s brought the swine over as a food source, they’ve become a nuisance. They eat just about everything, have no natural predators, and degrade the environment to make it uninhabitable for native animals.

You’ve probably never heard of Percy Spencer, but you’ve certainly used one of his most famous inventions—probably to make popcorn.

Even some vegetarian dinosaurs—who never even knew the joys of ribeye steak—didn’t stick to their green diets.

If you’re looking for a sperm donation in Canada, there’s a good chance you’ll wind up with American semen.

There are metropolises of microorganisms in every nook and cranny of your body, and scientists just conducted the largest study on them yet.

Sophia Spencer has done more at the age of eight than most of us will do in a lifetime.

Doctors are starting to use genetic testing for preventive care, but they’re still nowhere near perfect and they’re not particularly well monitored.

The Cassini spacecraft is poised to commit suicide at NASA’s command.