Category: 4. Health

Americans are increasingly waiting weeks or even months to get an appointment to see a health care specialist.

This delay comes at a time when the population of aging adults is rising dramatically. By 2050, the number of adults over 85 is expected to triple, which will intensify the strain on an already stretched health care system. We wrote about this worsening challenge and its implications for the health care workforce in a January 2025 report in the New England Journal of…

On March 27, 2025, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced plans to dramatically transform the department. HHS is the umbrella agency responsible for pandemic preparedness, biomedical research, food safety and many other health-related activities.

In a video posted that afternoon, Kennedy said the cuts and reorganization to HHS aim to “streamline our agency” and “radically improve our quality of service” by eliminating rampant waste…

The measles outbreak that began in west Texas in late January 2025 continues to grow, with 400 confirmed cases in Texas and more than 50 in New Mexico and Oklahoma as of March 28.

Public health experts believe the numbers are much higher, however, and some worry about a bigger resurgence of the disease in the U.S. In the past two weeks, health officials have identified potential measles exposures in association with planes, trains and automobiles, including at Washington Dulles…

Disease forecasts are like weather forecasts: We cannot predict the finer details of a particular outbreak or a particular storm, but we can often identify when these threats are emerging and prepare accordingly.

The viruses that cause avian influenza are potential threats to global health. Recent animal outbreaks from a subtype called H5N1 have been especially troubling to scientists. Although human infections from H5N1 have been relatively rare, there have been a little more than 900…

Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has made AI his foremost priority in addition to pushing the possibilities of social connection with various disruptive product suites such Orion, which aim to weave AI and augmented reality effortlessly into user’s lives.

For AI specifically, it was reported last month that Meta is quietly working on a standalone application to compete with other formidable players in the…

A 2025 report on Inside Higher Ed described the incoming class of 2029 as being highly diverse and including many students with significant mental health concerns. As indicated in a 2023 study in the journal of Educational Psychology & Counseling, national increases of mental health concerns have resulted in many colleges and universities emphasizing the importance of student well-being. However, as the study indicates, there’s little…

Of all the cuts the Trump Administration has made, its attacks on medical research are some of the most baffling, threatening the ability for American scientists to keep developing new medicines to treat everything from cancer to Parkinson’s.

For billionaire Sean Parker, who told Forbes he’s been heavily involved in lobbying to boost federal spending on medical research, that means philanthropies and the private sector will have to step in…

Generative artificial intelligence has entered a new frontier of fundamental biology: helping scientists to better understand proteins, the workhorses of living cells.

Scientists have developed two new AI tools to decipher proteins often missed by existing detection methods, researchers report March 31 in Nature Machine Intelligence. Uncovering these unknown proteins in all types of biological samples could be key to creating better cancer treatments, improving doctors’…

The new findings, published in JAMA, indicate that while the rate of…

“A Healing Tide” was the name of The War and Treaty’s 2018 debut album. But…