January 17, 2020
For Michelle Fleisher, the confusion started in sixth or seventh grade.
“I wasn’t really sure what I was,” Fleisher says. “I knew I wasn’t a boy ... I felt really off-put by my own being. I knew trans people existed, but I knew almost nothing about them. I felt more lik...
January 11, 2020
Not to be a downer at the start of the new year, but might it be that all the headlines, news reports, and tweets this week about a decline in cancer death rates in 2017 were just a little too exuberant?
“U.S. Cancer Death Rate Lowest In Recorded History! A lot of good...
January 10, 2020
One day in 2009, Frank Rheindt was wandering up a forested mountainside on an Indonesian island when the skies opened up. He had spent months planning this trip, days finding a charter boat that would carry him to this remote place, and hours plodding uphill, but the l...
January 3, 2020
Jan. 2, 2020 -- Matthew Might’s son Bertrand was born with a devastating, ultra-rare genetic disorder.
Now 12, Bertrand has vibrant eyes, a quick smile, and a love of dolphins. But he nearly died last spring from a runaway infection. He can’t sit up on his own anymore,...
November 22, 2019
As a child, the pain crises of his sickle cell disease often landed Stephine McCants in the hospital for weeks at a time.
“I didn’t know how to deal with it,” he says. “I used to blame God. I used to blame everything -- because the pain would be that bad.”
Now McCants, 2...
November 2, 2019
The facility lies midway between Munich’s city center and its international airport, roughly 23 miles to the north. From the outside, it still looks like the state-run farm it once was, but peer through the windows of the old farmhouse and you’ll see rooms stuffed with...
November 1, 2019
Getting sick with measles does not just result in a dangerous infection that causes itchy blisters. It can leave the immune system vulnerable to other infections for some time to come, a new study has found.
Although there had been earlier hints of such "immune amnesia,...
July 9, 2019
Watching Snowball the cockatoo dance to Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” has long been one of the joys of the internet.
The four-minute video has been viewed more than seven million times, and it’s probably generated at least that many grins. But when a small group...
April 25, 2019
The Antarctic’s second-largest colony of emperor penguins collapsed in 2016, with more than 10,000 chicks lost, and the population has not recovered, according to a new study.Many of the adults relocated nearby, satellite imagery shows, but the fact that emperor pengui...
February 26, 2019
All serious butterfly collectors remember their first gynandromorph: a butterfly with a color and pattern that are distinctly male on one wing and female on the other.
Seeing one sparks wonder and curiosity. For the biologist Nipam H. Patel, the sighting offered a possi...
About me
Independent
Health/Science
journalist covering
the biological
sciences.
Regular contributor to The
New York Times, The Washington Post,
Scientific American.com, WBUR radio and others.
Journalism educator and book
author.
Contact:
January 17, 2020
January 10, 2020
January 3, 2020
November 22, 2019