Health & Medicine

  1. Health & Medicine

    Getting to the bottom of diabetes and kidney disease

    Renal cells called podocytes may need insulin to maintain tissues’ blood-filtration role, a study in mice finds.

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  2. Earth

    Air pollution appears to foster diabetes

    Epidemiological studies confirm previously published animal data.

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  3. Health & Medicine

    Medical Nobel goes to developer of IVF

    Robert Edwards receives prize for work that led to 4 million births.

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  4. Life

    To researchers’ surprise, one Pseudomonas infection is much like the next

    Consistent genetic changes in the lung bacteria that commonly plague cystic fibrosis patients are a welcome discovery because they may point to new treatment strategies.

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  5. Health & Medicine

    Pernicious influences on dietary choices

    Because humanity developed during eons of cyclical feasts and famines, we survived by chowing down on energy-dense foods whenever they became available. Today that's all the time. But a number of recent studies point to additional, less obvious influences on what and how much we choose to eat.

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  6. Health & Medicine

    Few Americans eat right

    The Institute of Medicine periodically issues recommendations on what people should eat to be healthy and maintain a reasonable weight. Americans have largely ignored this well-intentioned advice, a new study shows. It reports that “nearly the entire U.S. population consumes a diet that is not on par with recommendations.”

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  7. Life

    A thousand points of height

    A study finds heaps of genetic variants that influence a person’s stature, but even added together they don’t stack up to much.

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  8. Life

    A salty tail

    Just adding sodium can stimulate limb regrowth in tadpoles, a study finds, raising the possibility that human tissue might respond to relatively simple treatment.

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  9. Health & Medicine

    How the brain chooses sides

    A new study reveals where and how people decide which hand to use for a simple task.

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  10. Health & Medicine

    Disease donations

    Sometimes organ donors share more than a functioning body part. They can unwittingly bestow quickly lethal infections. That’s what happened, beginning last November, according to a new case report.

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  11. Health & Medicine

    Main malaria parasite came to humans from gorillas, not chimps

    Using DNA from fecal samples, researchers show that the infection was not passed to Homo sapiens by its closest primate relative.

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  12. Health & Medicine

    Vital flaw

    Liver cells that inherit the wrong number of chromosomes often do just fine, and may even have some advantages.

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