NPR
The brain science behind thirst
It feels so simple. When we're thirsty, we drink. But the brain science behind that decision is pretty complicated, a ...
Video: How Israeli scientists trained a goldfish to ‘drive’
Picture this: A goldfish swimming in a square tank on wheels as it rolls deliberately from one side of a ...
Podcast: Here’s the case for optimism even as COVID infection rates soar
On average, the U.S. is tallying nearly 500,000 new COVID cases a day. [January 3], the U.S. hit yet another ...
Sí or Oui? Brain imagery shows dogs can differentiate among languages
[Brain researcher Laura Cuaya] and her colleagues designed an experiment with 18 volunteer dogs — including her two border collies ...
CORBEVAX: Could this vaccine corral COVID in the developing world?
A vaccine authorized in December for use in India may help solve one of the most vexing problems in global ...
‘Bleeding, blood clots, inflammation, oxygen deprivation and disruption of the protective blood-brain barrier’: For a sizable percentage of hospitalized COVID patients, the coronavirus targets the brain
The current catalog of COVID-related threats to the brain includes bleeding, blood clots, inflammation, oxygen deprivation and disruption of the ...
Why is Omicron such a ‘super-spreading variant’?
In a household, the risk of spreading the omicron variant to another member is three times higher than it is ...
Xenobots: Are organic robots programmed to find cancer cells the future of regenerative medicine?
Scientists say they've witnessed a never-before-seen type of replication in organic robots created in the lab using frog cells. Among ...
Vaccine mandate opponents find a home in the Republican party
"The truth is, I'm still a registered Democrat," says Del Bigtree, a well-known anti-vaccine activist. Even before COVID-19, he wrote ...
Omicron genetic surprise: Its family tree traces back more than a year
Just as people who want to find out their ancestry — were their forebears Nordic? Mongol? — can find traces ...
‘If you’re not going to take a stand now, then when?’: Physicians defer booster shots in protest of global vaccine inequity
They wore white coats and gave a press conference, standing next to a 12-foot-tall pile of fake bones. The 15 ...
Mixing and matching COVID vaccine boosters: Here’s a guide
Is it a good idea to go for a vaccine that's different from the one I got the first time ...
A tiny percentage of employees are bucking vaccine mandates — but this amounts to tens of thousands of people across the US
Across the country, employers are firing workers for refusing to comply with vaccine mandates. Some people are opting to quit ...
80 million workers face COVID vaccine mandates — and that’s a major challenge for OSHA
In early September, just before President Biden ordered 80 million workers to get vaccinated or undergo regular testing, a question ...
How can we encourage people to wear masks?
Researchers from Stanford, Yale, the Bangladeshi nonprofit GreenVoice and the research group Innovations for Poverty Action, among others, are conducting ...
Alzheimer’s is almost impossible to treat. Now there are treatments drawing on brain waves and protein tangles in the pipeline beyond the focus on sticky amyloid plaques
Immune cells, toxic protein tangles and brain waves are among the targets of future Alzheimer's treatments, scientists say. These approaches ...
Science is revolutionizing how elite female athletes train. What we’ve learned could benefit all women
When Dr. Kate Ackerman was in medical school 20 years ago, she'd heard of the term "female athlete triad." Coined ...
Federal court rules Indiana University allowed to impose mandatory vaccination requirement, for now
Indiana University is one of hundreds of colleges mandating COVID-19 vaccinations this year. According to university policy, students and staff ...
$1500 a month? Breakthrough obesity injection Wegovy (semaglutide) approved by the FDA — but high costs and limited insurance coverage likely to limit adoption
When a promising new drug to treat obesity was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for sale in the ...
In rare cases, teens are developing post-vaccine myocarditis. How big a concern is this?
According to the CDC, after a meeting of expert advisors discussed the data [June 23], more than 300 cases of ...
CRISPR milestone: Crippling transthyretin amyloidosis disease now treatable through gene editing, paving way for addressing other genetic diseases
[65-year-old Patrick] Doherty found out he had a rare, but devastating inherited disease — known as transthyretin amyloidosis — that ...
‘The New Apartheid’? Conspiracist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s latest anti-vaccine film spins real history of medical racism to scare Black Americans into rejecting COVID shots
[The film “Medical Racism: The New Apartheid”] is the latest effort by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the founder of Children's ...
Podcast: Is laughter unique to humans? No, other animals evolved the same play behavior. Here are some examples
[HOST MICHAEL MARTIN:] It's true, we all laugh. But is laughter, uniquely human? It turns out, not really. Plenty of ...
‘It would be huge to see my granddaughter’: In an attempt to cure blindness, scientists use CRISPR to edit DNA inside patients’ bodies
Carlene Knight would love to do things that most people take for granted, such as read books, drive a car, ...
What might happen if viruses jump from pet dogs to humans? That worrisome future is already here
[S]cientists are reporting that they have discovered what may be the latest coronavirus to jump from animals into people. And ...
Does more and easier to administer: What will the next generation of COVID vaccines look like?
[R]esearchers are racing to develop the next generation of COVID-19 vaccines, utilizing a variety of innovative technologies to produce more ...
Podcast — ‘We’re growing food now in a way that doesn’t leave room for other biodiversity’: How GMO crops are affecting the monarch butterfly and what can be done about it
Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from an interview with University of Georgia ecologist Sonia Altizer and NPR host ...
COVID and the Amish: Ohio congregants face soaring infectections and vaccination rate is only 1%. Here’s why
Holmes County, where half of the population is Amish, has the lowest vaccination rate in Ohio, with just 10% of ...