Ars Technica
Vaccine mandate war: Is it unethical for health workers to forgo COVID shots?
On [July 13], seven health organizations—including the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, the Association for Professionals in Epidemiology and ...
Why are humans one of the few species in which fathers play an ongoing role in child-rearing?
Male mountain gorillas don’t seem to know or care which young are theirs. But nearly all males tolerate the company ...
Recreational fear: Why some of us like scary movies and haunted houses
[We] tend to seek out scary movies, horror novels, or haunted houses—and not just during the Halloween season. This tendency ...
Who let the dogs out: When and how were dogs first domesticated?
We still don’t know exactly when or where dog domestication first happened; it already had a pretty complex history by ...
Anti-vax conspiracy promoter Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. sues Facebook claiming fact-checking is censorship
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed suit [August 18] in federal court in California alleging that Facebook's fact-checking program for false ...
Stem cell tourism: Shady treatments are being offered–even in the United States
[W]e're just starting clinical trials to determine if we can use [stem] cells effectively. But that hasn't stopped people from ...
How the Hobbit films illustrate the way human brains evolved
For Northwestern University neuroscientist and engineer Malcolm MacIver, [a scene from the Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey where Gandalf and Bilbo ...
FDA shuts down sales of homeopathic shots containing toxic lead, mercury, strychnine
[The FDA cracked down] on four homeopathic companies selling injectable products said to contain highly toxic substances, including lead, mercury, ...
Why space travel demands a well-stocked cosmic pharmacy
In space, no one can hear you sneeze. But if an astronaut does catch the flu, it can be a ...
An essential but ‘disturbing’ question: What if coronavirus is here for good?
Most of the optimistic ideas about what to do about SARS-CoV-2 involve engineering the virus's extinction. We could ramp up ...
‘Sloppy’ CDC lab practices blamed for tainted coronavirus tests in early stages of pandemic
As the new coronavirus took root across America, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent states tainted test ...
Turning thoughts to text with brain implants and artificial intelligence
For people with limited use of their limbs, speech recognition can be critical for their ability to operate a computer ...
Worst-case scenario for coronavirus deaths ‘imperfect and has to rely on a number of assumptions’
On Monday [March 16], the COVID-19 Response Team at Imperial College London released a report that describes its efforts to ...
Even small villages were ravaged by Black Death, mass grave in the UK shows
Archaeologists recently excavated a mass burial of at least 48 men, women, and children on the grounds of a medieval ...
This is your brain on horror movies
When we watch horror movies, our brains are hard at work, with lots of interconnected cross-talk between different regions to ...
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop under fire again for ‘exploiting health issues in order to make money’
Gwyneth Paltrow’s contextual commerce company Goop is still making more than a dozen false and misleading health claims about the ...
Re-engineering yeast to create biofuel appears possible, ‘but the effort involved is intimidating’
A little while ago, we covered the idea of using photovoltaic materials to drive enzymatic reactions in order to produce specific chemicals ...
Stepping in Goop: Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix series promotes ‘junk science, gibberish and unproven health claims’, says microbiologist
In the third episode of Goop's Netflix series, a female guest remarks that we women are seen as "very dangerous ...
‘Connecticut vampire’s’ identity revealed through genetic analysis of remains
Back in 1990, children playing near a gravel pit in Griswold, Connecticut, stumbled across a pair of skulls that had broken ...
‘Grandmother hypothesis’ may explain why killer whales and humans evolved menopause
There's a rare human trait that doesn't often make it into debates about what makes our species unique: menopause. Humans ...
‘Eye of Sauron’: Man’s strange eyes linked to rare genetic condition
Doctors in Texas came face to face with a dark, spine-tingling eye that looked rimmed by flames—or, as they calmly ...
Chinese scientists may have figured out how to attack the protein created by Huntington’s damaged gene
Huntington's disease is caused by a dominant mutation, meaning that anyone who inherits it will develop the disease. ... Despite ...
Extra copies of Denisovan, Neanderthal DNA helped humans adapt to ancient environments
University of Washington geneticist PingHsun Hsieh and his colleagues found Neanderthal and Denisovan versions of some genes in the genomes ...
The man who was always drunk, but never drank alcohol: Scientists unwrap the mystery of ‘auto-brewery syndrome’
After years of inexplicably getting drunk without drinking alcohol, having mood swings and bouts of aggression, landing a DWI charge ...
Reversal of fortune for ‘failed’ Alzheimer’s drug? Biogen now seeking FDA approval, based on new test data
An experimental treatment for Alzheimer's disease is headed to the Food and Drug Administration for approval—despite the fact that it ...
Medieval Europe’s devastating Black Death was caused by just two strains of the disease
The Black Death ravaged medieval Western Europe, wiping out roughly one-third of the population. Now researchers have traced the genetic ...
Man with at least 17 children sues fertility clinic for being ‘incredibly irresponsible’ with his sperm
An Oregon doctor filed a $5.25 million lawsuit [October 2] against a fertility clinic at the Oregon Health & Science ...