A Poop Transplant Gave Old Mice Their Young Brains Back
Lazy eye treatment only works on brains still able to rewire themselves. So how did a gut microbiome switch that ability back on in animals long past it?
Medicine & Health
A $20 Fish Tank Helped Grow the First Human Lung Outside a Body
A donor organ, washed of all its cells, reduced to a ghostly scaffold. Then rebuilt from scratch using the patient's own biology.
Your Skin Cells Fire Electrical Spikes When You're Injured. They Work Nothing Like a Nerve.
A wound sets off a wave of activity that races across nearby tissue for over an hour, using signaling biology assumed reserved for neurons. What it's actually communicating is still unclear.
A Bat Sat on a Sleeping Boy's Face. He Had No Bite Marks. He Died of Rabies.
A bat lands on a sleeping kid's face. No bite. No scratch. No reason to worry. The family was wrong, and the reason why is something most people still don't know.
The Twelfth Key to Our Last-Resort Antibiotic Turned Up in Freshwater Mud
A resistance gene capable of defeating one of medicine's final options just surfaced in ordinary river-bottom muck, not a hospital, not a farm. What kept it there might be the more unsettling part.
Older Adults Took a Placebo Knowing It Was Fake. Their Memory Improved Anyway.
A study gave people pills they knew were fake. Memory improved. Stress dropped. Physical performance went up.
Scientists Turned a Parasitic Worm Into a Living Drug Factory
Scientists engineered a hookworm to manufacture and deliver medicine inside a living host. What the parasite spent millions of years perfecting, researchers just learned to program.
No One Born Blind Has Ever Been Diagnosed With Schizophrenia
75 years of searching psychiatric wards worldwide, and researchers still can't find a single blind person with schizophrenia. What does a zero tell us about how the mind constructs reality?
The Sleeping Pandemic That Shadowed the Spanish Flu
A second pandemic shadowed the Spanish Flu, stranger, quieter, and just as deadly. A century of science still can't explain what it was or whether it could come back.
Humans Have a Third Set of Teeth. A New Drug Could Make Them Grow.
Your mouth has been keeping a secret: dormant tooth buds, a latent third set, held in reserve. A Japanese drug trial is asking whether they can finally be switched on.
The Baby Incubator Spent Decades as a Carnival Act Before Hospitals Would Touch It
The NICU as we know it didn't start in a hospital. It started on a Coney Island boardwalk, next to the roller coasters, funded by 25-cent tickets.
Bacteria Have a Union Now
Bacteria under antibiotic attack split into donors and recipients, passing survival proteins between cells. The mutual aid network medicine didn't know it was up against.
Your Brain Is 99.5% Brain. The Rest Is Plastic.
A new study found microplastics in human brain tissue at concentrations 7 to 30 times higher than in other organs, and the levels are still rising.
The Ovary Clocked Out. Then It Picked Up a Second Shift.
The ovary stops making eggs and medicine calls it done. New research suggests it just switched departments. What is it actually doing?
A Routine Dissection Found Two Extra Penises
A routine cadaver dissection at the University of Birmingham turned up something no one expected: three penises instead of one.
Your Body Has a Clock that Says Burn More Calories in the Morning
Your internal clock controls when you burn calories most efficiently. It doesn't care what time you scheduled dinner.
A Low Hum Has Haunted People for 50 Years
Scientists studied 28 people who hear a mysterious low-frequency sound. The most likely source is inside the listener's own ear.
Building a Brain Requires DNA Shredding
Newborn neurons break both strands of their own DNA just to reach their destination. The brain typically repairs it, but what if it can't?