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Lisk Feng What Mormon Family Trees Tell Us About Cancer
By searching the church's famed family trees, scientists have tracked down a cancer-causing mutation that came west with a pioneer couple—just in time to save the lives of their great-great-great-great grandchildren.
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Grigorita Ko / Shutterstock How Cats Used Humans to Conquer the World
Ancient DNA from 209 cats over 9,000 years tell the story of their dispersal.
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Christopher Furlong / Getty The Disputed Death of an 8-Year-Old Whose Organs Were Donated
The hospital used a once-controversial but increasingly common donation procedure.
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Justin Pierce / Creative Commons The Aftermath of a Deadly Mushroom Bloom in California
A surge of death-cap poisonings might provide the data to save future victims.
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University of Mississippi Medical Center The Plan for 7,000 Bodies Discovered Under a Mississippi Campus
The unmarked graves belong to patients who died in a state asylum.
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AP / Andrew Harnik The FDA Just Asked to Pull an Opioid Painkiller Off the Market
It’s the first time the agency has asked to remove an opioid over public health fears.
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Donald McFarlane The Tough Little Drone Ship That Explores Acid Lakes
I think I can, I think I can.
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NEJM / Katie Martin / The Atlantic The One-Paragraph Letter From 1980 That Fueled the Opioid Crisis
Because it was published in the most prestigious U.S. medical journal, its influence snowballed in a dangerous way.
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K. Andreassen / CAGE Hundreds of Huge Craters Discovered in the Arctic Ocean
The potentially ominous depressions in the sea floor formed after ice sheets melted, letting trapped methane blow out.
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China Stringer Network / Reuters Rice Was First Grown At Least 9,400 Years Ago
Archaeologists have unearthed bits of rice from when it was first domesticated in China.
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CDC Special Bacteriology Reference Lab How a Usually Harmless Bacteria Ended Up Killing 18 People in Wisconsin
An outbreak shows the slippery slope between benign and deadly.
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VCG Wilson/Corbis A Grand New Theory of Life's Evolution on Earth
A series of energy revolutions—some natural, some technological—built upon one another to give us our rich, diverse biosphere.
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Mario Anzuoni / Reuters A Creationist Sues the Grand Canyon for Religious Discrimination
The national park wouldn’t let him collect rocks for research.
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Drew Angerer / Getty Fentanyl Is So Deadly That It's Changing How First Responders Do Their Jobs
The dangerous opioid is forcing police and forensic-lab workers to invent new ways to protect themselves.
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Phil Noble / Reuters A Decade Later, a Patient Finds Out Her Genetic Test Was Wrong
Should scientists give results to participants in research studies if they haven’t been validated in a clinical lab?
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Ted S. Warren / AP What to Make of the Tunnel Collapse at a Nuclear Cleanup Site
The incident is only part of the slow-motion deterioration of one of the country's most contaminated places.
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Wits University / John Hawks A New Addition to the Human Family Tree Is Surprisingly Young
Homo naledi was alive between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago, which complicates the story of human evolution.
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Carsten Koall / Getty The Awful Pinkness of Period Apps
The first-ever research into period-tracking apps suggests women want less gendered options.
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Miromatrix Medical 'Big Pork' Wants to Get In on Organ Transplants
The pork industry has always been creative about finding uses for pig byproducts.
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John Locher / AP Nevada Fights the Latest Attempt to Give It the Nation’s Nuclear Waste
A Congressional hearing on a bill to revive the Yucca Mountain facility pits Nevadans against everyone else.
