I am partial to the odd tipple and, as a resident of the licentious, enabling city that is New Orleans, I'm fortunate to be adequately supported in my booze-seeking ways by the high number of bars and restaurants within stumbling distance of my front...

By Carrie Arnold Whooping cough is staging a comeback. According to the CDC, 2012 saw nearly 42,000 pertussis cases—the most since 1955. Many public health officials initially believed the epidemic was due to falling vaccination rates. But a new stu...

Mitochondria are the cell's workhorse, transforming the calories we eat into useable energy. They have also been the subject of lots of scrutiny over longevity, since lifespan is intimately tied up with metabolism. Now a new study reports that mitoc...

It’s rare for a decision involving a genetic predisposition to seem so clearcut -- an 87 percent chance of getting breast cancer before you die. Those were the odds Angelina Jolie was given after she was found to have inherited a defective gene cal...

A paper published this week in Science reviews what we know about the water quality impacts of shale gas development and hydraulic fracturing. And the conclusion is… still not that much. This despite the fact that “fracking,” as it is commonly calle...

This week, I was honored with a Best Life-In-Science Award from ScienceSeeker for my article on the earliest known cases of HIV/AIDS, "The Sea Has Neither Sense Nor Pity: the Earliest Known Cases of AIDS in the Pre-AIDS Era." There were some serious ...

By the time you realize what has happened, it's too late. An Anopheles gambiae mosquito can land on your skin completely unnoticed. While you continue unaware, she stealthily walks over your exposed flesh, searching, probing the surface of your ski...

People who write about water like to say that the liquid in our drinking glasses and toilet bowls has been with us since the age of dinosaurs, continually recycled through plants, animals (including us) and the atmosphere. But really, some of the w...

A recently published paper in Scientific Reports has found that climate variability in the form of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) has had a significant impact on the occurrence of disease outbreaks in Europe over the past fifty years. Researche...

When, in a moment of weakness, you reach for that chocolate donut or bag of jelly beans, to all appearances your tastebuds are running the show. You imagine the snack's sweet taste; you might even salivate a little. If, on the other hand, these foods...

Everyone has their own collecting quirk. I myself collect animal skulls, inconveniently large earrings and unusual stories of infectious disease cases and outbreaks. To each their own, yes? I've decided that, instead of stockpiling these stories away...

Relapse can be a particularly sinister aspect of drug addiction. Now scientists are getting closer to a vaccine that can bind heroin in the bloodstream and therefore prevent it from acting on the brain. A heroin vaccine has been sought after for som...