Category: 4. Health

The Haenyeo women who dive deep into the East China Sea to harvest sea urchins and shellfish spend the most time underwater of any humans ever studied — one to five hours a day, researchers report August 18 in Current Biology.

“It’s as close as you get to studying a mermaid,” says Chris McKnight, a marine mammal biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

McKnight and colleagues worked with seven Haenyeo divers who live on Jeju Island in South Korea. Over…

The conversation around drugs has long been framed by cost. Policymakers calculate the billions lost every year to productivity gaps, hospitalizations, law enforcement and incarceration. The U.S. alone spends an estimated $193 billion annually dealing with the fallout of illicit drug use, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Yet there is a blind spot. People do not only use drugs…

It’s been a big year for revivals. There’s a new Jurassic Park movie, a reunion tour featuring 1990s rock band Oasis, and a Harry Potter television series in the works.

President Trump is also looking to revive some of the policies he tried to enact during his first term. He recently issued an executive order aimed at…

Columbia immunologist Dusan Bogunovic discovered the individuals’ antiviral powers about 15 years ago, soon after he identified the genetic mutation that causes the condition.

At first, the condition only seemed to increase vulnerability to some bacterial infections. But as more patients were identified, its unexpected antiviral…

A fundamental discovery is overturning decades of molecular biology. Thousands of previously “invisible” microproteins—tiny chains of fewer than 100 amino acids—can profoundly change human biology when mutated. These small proteins, once dismissed as genetic noise, are now recognized as determinants of phenotype. They…

This month alone, two large innovation giants have launched massive new initiatives in the pregnancy and fertility spaces, respectively.

The first announcement was by smart-ring maker Oura, which announced that the newest generation of its hardware will now be able to support the company’s newly designed “pregnancy insights experience,” enabling users to engage with a personalized pregnancy tracking tool. The ring will…

Neurosurgeons perform intricate surgeries on the brain, spine, and the different peripheral nerves as they course throughout the body. They meticulously open a patient’s skull to stop bleeding vessels, remove tumors with precision measured in…

When Dr. Elina Berglund Scherwitzl helped discover the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012—a breakthrough that later won the Nobel Prize in Physics—she thought she’d reached the…

Doctors can only practice medicine in states where they’re licensed. Then each insurer they work with needs to verify their credentials. It’s a messy and time-consuming process that costs more than $1 billion each year. Miss a deadline? Forget working with that insurer in that state till you’ve fixed the error. Misplaced a form required for the signoff process? Ditto.

Medallion’s Derek Lo figures that his software can cut through the…