Nail polish removers and other personal care products are sending a shocking number of young kids in the U.S. to the emergency room, according to a new study out Monday. Nearly 65,000 children under the age of five have been treated for “cosmetic-related injuries” in ERs in the 15 years leading up to 2016, the study…

Harvard and Japanese scientists say they’ve made a “landmark” discovery in cancer drug development. In a new study published Monday, they say they have finally found a way to synthesize in bulk a complex class of promising cancer-fighting molecules derived from sea sponges. Their new strategy has already helped speed…

Here’s a little morsel of horror to carry you through the weekend. Scientists at North Carolina State University say they’ve discovered disease-causing Salmonella bacteria in the U.S. that can resist one of the few remaining antibiotics available for certain infections. What’s worse, the mutation responsible for this…

An aesthetically unpleasant but genuinely promising medical treatment—a fecal transplant—may come with more serious risks than previously thought. This week, the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning about the treatment, after receiving reports of two people coming down with serious drug-resistant infections…

The past five years have seen a surge in documented cases of the deadly and gruesome viral disease Ebola, thanks to widespread (and ongoing) outbreaks that have ripped through Africa and even made it to other areas of the world. But a new study out Thursday suggests the waves of misery and death we record whenever…

If you’re the type to get squeamish about the things you accidentally eat, you’re not going to like the new report released by the WWF (formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund) this Tuesday. According to the report, we might be eating a credit card’s worth of microplastic every week, thanks to widespread…

Humans have been smoking, eating, and wearing cannabis for millennia, and a new study out Wednesday presents some pretty strong evidence of people using it explicitly to get high back during the first century BCE in Central Asia. The paper suggests that the plant could have been cultivated to be more mind-altering and…

A new study seems to deal a serious blow to one of the pro-cannabis movement’s talking points: the idea that the more medical cannabis is legalized, the fewer people will die from opioid overdoses. The findings suggest that there’s no real connection between the rate of opioid overdose deaths and a state’s medical…

If you envy people who wake up with the Sun, but you can’t seem to get to bed until well after midnight, some new research might help change your habits. An intriguing (but small) study suggests that it’s possible to retrain yourself to go to sleep earlier in just three weeks, without any drugs or other drastic…

You wouldn’t expect that finding a tapeworm egg in your brain would be seen as good news, but such was the case for New York resident Rachel Palma this past fall. That’s because the larva found inside was the true cause of Palma’s worsening symptoms of insomnia and hallucinations, rather than a brain tumor that her…

Scientists have gained some insight into one of the first known calamities to visit mankind: a two century-long pandemic caused by the bacterial disease plague. Studying the remains of plague victims, the researchers say they were able to sequence the genomes of plague strains that devastated the Roman Empire starting…

Scientists have shined a light on one of the creepier denizens of the deep sea, a pitch-black creature that can turn itself into a living lamp called the dragonfish. New research helps explain one of the dragonfish’s more disturbing qualities: its relatively gigantic and translucent teeth.

Switching from red meat to chicken to keep your cholesterol down may not be a great strategy, according to a new study this Tuesday. It found that people’s blood cholesterol levels rose similarly when they ate a diet filled with either red or white meat, compared to a diet without meat. This effect on cholesterol,…

A coffee or smoking habit can cause a person some serious trouble if they end up in the hospital, preliminary research suggests. Patients in the intensive care unit often suffer withdrawal symptoms from caffeine and nicotine, it found. Worse still, doctors might mistake the cause of those symptoms for something else,…

An Australian patient’s life-saving surgical procedure went up in flames, and unfortunately we don’t mean that figuratively. Doctors say their attempts to perform emergency heart surgery on the man went slightly awry at one point, when a flash fire sparked in the man’s cracked-open chest cavity. Amazingly, the doctors…

Gender discrimination in science doesn’t just affect women scientists. It also skews the results of animal research, as a new paper out this week describes. Animals used in experiments are still overwhelmingly male, thanks to outdated stereotypes that hormones like estrogen can distort an experiment’s findings.

One man’s hot tea habit turned out to be much less relaxing than he hoped, according to his doctors. An 84-year-old Canadian ended up in the emergency department with a serious case of high blood pressure, headache, and chest pain, with the only likely cause of his symptoms being his two weeks straight of drinking…