A smart toilet

Smart Toilets: The Jetpack of the Bathroom

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are envisioning a toilet that can analyze urine for indicators of disease.
White matter fibres

Can Zapping Your Brain Really Make You Smarter?

Early scientific results on transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) show promise, but are they enough to support a multi-billion-dollar industry?
Two illustrations of the heart

Who Really Discovered How the Heart Works?

For centuries, the voice of the Greek doctor Galen, who held that blood is produced in the liver and filtered through tiny pores in the heart, went unchallenged.
William G. Kaelin Jr, Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza

What Did the Winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine Discover?

The 2019 Nobel Prize for Medicine honors a discovery that may make it possible to prevent or even reverse the damage from cardiovascular disease.
Drain pipes flowing into a bay

Antibiotics Are Getting into Everything

How does a wild dolphin end up resistant to antibiotics?
A pink breast cancer awareness ribbon

Branding the Breast Cancer Narrative

Do those ubiquitous pink ribbons stand for women’s health concerns... or for normative concepts of beauty?
A fetus inside of an artistic depiction of an artificial womb

On the History of the Artificial Womb

Will outside-the-womb gestation, increasingly viable for animal embryos, lead to a feminist utopia? Or to something like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?
A woman sitting alone on a bed

A Brief History of Masturbation

In the U.S. and Europe, there's still discomfort around the topic of masturbation. But we’ve come a long way from tying it to mortal sin and insanity.
Mouse embryo

Get Ready For Human-Animal Hybrids

New progress in stem-cell research raises some thorny ethical questions.