Tag Archives: health

Unruly Gut Fungi Can Make Your Covid Worse

Fungi are an indispensable part of your microbiome, keeping the body’s host of microorganisms healthy as part of a system of checks and balances. But when you’re hit by an infection, fungi can be thrown out of equilibrium with other organisms inside you, leading to a more severe infection and …

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Bird Flu Is Spreading in Alarming New Ways

Last Friday, a health alert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pinged its way across the inboxes of clinicians and state health departments all over the US. The message described how a dairy farm worker in Texas had contracted H5N1, the highly infectious strain of avian influenza, or …

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This Woman Will Decide Which Babies Are Born

God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have a regular baby or have an Orchid baby. A regular baby might grow up and get cancer. Or be born with a severe intellectual disability. Or go blind. Or become …

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Screen Time for Kids Is Fine! Unless It's Not

The anti-smartphone movement is having a moment. On March 25, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill banning children under 14 from social media platforms. In February, the UK government backed tighter guidance to keep children from using their smartphones at school. In the past year, grassroots organizations like Smartphone …

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The Next Generation of Cancer Drugs Will Be Made in Space

Immunotherapy is one of the most promising new ways to fight cancer, but it takes forever. It works by mimicking or invoking the body’s own immune defenses to weed out and attack cancer cells. But the drugs that do this are typically administered intravenously—fed into the blood using needles, in …

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The Real Reason Some Abortion Pill Patients Go to the ER

Today the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments in a consequential case that threatens to curb access to medication abortion across the country. A central issue in the case is the safety of the drug mifepristone, the first in a two-pill regimen used to induce an abortion. …

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