Humans

  1. Health & Medicine

    Early mRNA research that led to COVID-19 vaccines wins 2023 medicine Nobel Prize

    Biochemists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman devised mRNA modifications to make vaccines that trigger good immune responses instead of harmful ones.

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  2. Health & Medicine

    How a deadly fungus is so good at sticking to skin and other surfaces

    One of Candida auris’ scary superpowers is its stick-to-itiveness. Unlike other fungi, the pathogen uses electrical charges to glom onto things.

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  3. Health & Medicine

    Here’s how much coronavirus people infected with COVID-19 may exhale

    Just breathing naturally can lead people with COVID-19 to emit dozens of copies of viral RNA a minute and that can persist for eight days, a study finds.

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  4. Health & Medicine

    Mouth taping may be a trending sleep hack, but the science behind it is slim

    Mouth taping is big on social media, but few studies have evaluated it. Some evidence suggests that sealing the lips shut may help people with sleep apnea.

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  5. Health & Medicine

    How brain implants are treating depression

    This six-part series follows people whose lives have been changed by an experimental treatment called deep brain stimulation.

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  6. Neuroscience

    Today’s depression treatments don’t help everyone

    In the second story in the series, deep brain stimulation is a last resort for some people with depression.

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  7. Health & Medicine

    The science behind deep brain stimulation for depression

    The third part of the series explores the promising brain areas to target for deep brain stimulation for depression.

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  8. Neuroscience

    What’s it like to live with deep brain stimulation for depression?

    The fourth article in the series explores the physical and emotional challenges of experimental brain implants for depression.

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  9. Health & Medicine

    There’s a stigma around brain implants and other depression treatments

    The fifth article in the series asks why people are so uncomfortable with changing the brain.

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  10. Neuroscience

    What’s the future of deep brain stimulation for depression?

    The final story of the series describes efforts to simplify and improve brain implants for severe depression.

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  11. Anthropology

    Interlocking logs may be evidence of the oldest known wooden structure

    Roughly 480,000-year-old wooden find from Zambia suggests early hominids were more skilled at structuring their environments than scientists realized.

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  12. Health & Medicine

    Why sewage may hold the key to tracking diseases far beyond COVID-19

    COVID-19, mpox and many other pathogens are detectable in wastewater, but public health officials are still figuring out how best to use those data.

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