According to new research from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, night shifts may hinder the body’s ability to repair DNA damage caused by normal cellular processes.

The nation has largely won the war on smoking, unless you’re uneducated or live in a rural area.

Falls kill over 420,000 people every year. So why don't we know more about how to fall better? Neil Steinberg investigates.

A couple of months ago, I wrote this blog post about the fear (mostly felt by philosophers) that philosophy was disappearing from public debate. I posted it on Reddit – an online space for public debate – and it got the strongest response out of anything I’ve ever written.

What use is there today for one of the oldest virtues? By Joe Pinsker.

Beautiful macro photos of insects by Milan-based photographer, illustrator and designer Francesco Bagnato.

Although sedation and analgesia for patients undergoing colonoscopy is the standard practice in Western countries, unsedated colonoscopy is still routinely provided in Europe and the Far East.

Horseshoe Crab blood is an irreplaceable medical marvel, and biomedical companies are bleeding thousands of crabs and throwing them back in the ocean. Can this creature that's been around since the dinosaurs be saved?

These 17 mosques represent some of the most beautiful in the world, and whether modern or sporting traditional minarets, they represent an integral space in the lives of 1.6 billion people.

People mislead themselves all day long. We tell ourselves we’re smarter and better looking than our friends, that our political party can do no wrong, that we’re too busy to help a colleague. In 1976, in the foreword to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the biologist Robert Trivers floated a novel explanation for such self-serving biases: We dupe ourselves in order to deceive others, creating social advantage. Now after four decades Trivers and his colleagues have published the first research supporting his idea.

Have you ever stood in a high place and felt the urge to jump?

The Tsimane living in the Amazon have the lowest reported levels of age-related hardening of the arteries in the world, say researchers who encourage Westerners to learn from these Bolivian rainforest inhabitants. Atherosclerosis was thought to be a natural part of aging. Even Egyptian mummies have shown signs of plaque buildup in the arteries. For the study in Friday's medical journal The Lancet, cardiologists focused their low-radiation CT scanners on the Tsimane, a forager-horticulturalist population that eats mainly wild, lean game, plantain, rice and maize, and fruits and nuts.

Lab-grown meat could be on your plate within the next five years. For the past few years, the barrier to getting test-tube meat into the hands of consumers has been the cost of production. In 2013, it was around $325,000 to make this stuff in a lab, but the process has been refined, and the cost now is just $11.36.

Don't drink skim milk thinking it is less fattening. Actually, quite the opposite is true!

One night while watching TV, Chris Kunkel decided to kill himself. “Out of nowhere, it just came over me,” Kunkel told me over the phone. He found a bottle of Tylenol PM in the medicine cabinet, swallowed the contents, and put himself to bed. Kunkel was home alone; his wife and two kids were out of town visiting family, but he was on call for work as an army IT specialist and had to stay behind.

The sheer number of people we now encounter in the digital space on a daily basis is, to me, overwhelming. As someone whose friends and family are spread around the globe, I am grateful for the possibilities that social media affords — I FaceTime my mom everyday and participate in an ongoing multi-platform discussion on the (many) merits of falafels with my college roommate who now lives 3,500 miles away.

Movies? Finished. Novels? Dead. The web? A black hole of insanity. Welcome to the world of a literary maverick who’s brutally honest about the digital age.

The gap between the "haves" and "have nots" is widening, according to the latest data out this week. The rich are money-making machines. Today, the top mega wealthy -- the top 1% -- earn an average of $1.3 million a year. It's more than three times as much as the 1980s, when the rich "only" made $428,000, on average, according to economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.

Let’s mark the end of 2016 by resetting.

Creating an effective treatment for schizophrenia requires a better understanding of its biology, of the genes that cause it. Using technology to illuminate chromosomes, scientists confirmed the underlying genetics of this mental disorder. The identified genetic disruptions occur at a crucial time in brain development. The science team hopes its research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, leads to new medications to treat the disorder.

A new study shows that a relatively high intake of dietary cholesterol, or eating one egg every day, are not associated with an elevated risk of incident coronary heart disease. Furthermore, no association was found among those with the APOE4 phenotype, which affects cholesterol metabolism and is common among the Finnish population. In the majority of population, dietary cholesterol affects serum cholesterol levels only a little, and few studies have linked the intake of dietary cholesterol to...

Stress — on the job and off — has been called a health epidemic by the World Health Organization. It makes us more prone to a host of maladies, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, and cancer. And it's estimated to kill more than 120,000 American workers each year. It's not just work, of course. It's how we work. Our smartphones tether us to our 9-to-5 jobs 24/7. We're online, all the time. Day and night. Weekday and weekend. Technology, supposed to make our lives easier, has made it a lot more complicated.

Egyptian member of parliament Elhamy Agina continued his recent string of controversial statements, this time calling for all women to undergo mandatory ‘virginity tests’ to ensure their virginity prior to being admitted to universities in Egypt. In statements to Youm7, Agina, who was previously disciplined for stating women must undergo female genital mutilation, called on the Minister of Higher Education to issue a mandate that would require him or his officials to review all virginity tests prior to providing female students with university cards.

These 8 countries that produce the most acid rain in the world should really think about the environment they will leave for the generations to come. Acid rains are very dangerous and they have long-term consequences on humans and wildlife. It is thought that the acid rain dates back to the end of 19th century. Although it is commonly known as “acid rain”, this title refers to fog, snow, sleet and rain that contain acid in higher amounts than normal.

Dark and shrunken microglia cells identified in the brains of people and mice seem to smother brain connections and are associated with age and disease

The daily work of a hospice nurse, who treats the physical, psychological, and spiritual needs of people at the most vulnerable point of their lives. By Larissa MacFarquhar.

American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth.

She's 21, has thyroid cancer, and wants people in her prefecture in northeastern Japan to get screened for it. That statement might not seem provocative, but her prefecture is Fukushima, and of the 173 young people with confirmed or suspected cases since the 2011 nuclear meltdowns there, she is the first to speak out.

Facebook wants to hear what you have to say. Literally. Professor Kelli Burns claims to have tested a hunch that the social media giant's mobile application is listening to everything you say and providing ads based on that content, and discovered it was true. The mass communication prof at the University of South Florida, with the help of telly journalists, has verified the fact that Facebook's mobile app grants itself access to your microphone by talking about a holiday she wanted to take.