1,700 years ago, Chinese alchemist Ge Hong was renowned for his soup that could cure diarrhea-stricken patients. It had a surprising secret ingredient: feces. While it might seem unwise to consume feces, exciting new research suggests...

Since the 1970s, researchers have engineered superbugs. While this research could help us prepare for future outbreaks, the stakes of this work are extremely high: if even one dangerous virus escaped a lab, it could cause a global...

Mosquitoes are responsible for more human deaths every year than any other animal, but very few of the 3,500 mosquito species actually transmit deadly diseases to humans. Scientists have been conducting experiments using engineered...

Schizophrenia was first identified more than a century ago, but we still don’t know its exact causes. It remains one of the most misunderstood and stigmatized illnesses today. So what do we actually know about its symptoms, causes, and...

Current treatments for depression and PTSD only suppress symptoms, if they work at all. What if we could prevent these diseases from developing altogether? Neuroscientist and TED Fellow Rebecca Brachman shares the story of her team's...

When we think of how we respond to outbreaks, we often think of physical things like vaccines or medicines, but there is another factor that is just as critical to understand: culture! Culture determines how we collaborate and use the...

Our understanding of both clogged arteries and the building blocks of DNA are thanks to the groundbreaking work of Dr. Marie M. Daly, the first Black woman in the U.S. to receive a Ph. D. in chemistry.

The pandemic forced the world to work together like never before and, with unprecedented speed, bore a new age of health and medical innovation. Physician-scientist Daniel Kraft explains how breakthroughs and advancements like...

What did the recent study using the CRISPR gene editing technique actually entail, and what did we learn from it?

Your DNA is a part of you, but it might not share your sense of who's numero uno.

Does bee venom therapy work? Stings cause pain, itching, or even death in some people, so how might potential benefits outweigh the risks?

In which John Green teaches you about the war that was supposed to end all wars. Instead, it solved nothing and set the stage for the world to be back at war just a couple of decades later. As an added bonus, World War I changed the way...

Daniel Kraft offers a fast-paced look at the next few years of innovations in medicine, powered by new tools, tests and apps that bring diagnostic information right to the patient's bedside.

From outbreaks of measles in the United States and cholera in Haiti to patterns of lead poisoning near gold mines in Nigeria, medical geographers play an important role in tracking disease in the landscape. Today, we're going to look at...

Raindrops and snowflakes generally start to form around something else in the air, like a speck of dust, but sometimes that something else is bacteria.

Biologist Dan Gibson edits and programs DNA, just like coders program a computer. But his "code" creates life, giving scientists the power to convert digital information into biological material like proteins and vaccines. Now he's on to...

If you've ever wondered why you crave certain foods or what your appendix actually does, there's something in this collection for you!

This week on SciShow News, we explore how our genes change with the seasons! Plus, it turns out that even flies get scared sometimes.

Mosquitoes transmit a number of terrible diseases like malaria, West Nile virus, and the Zika virus, but why not the flu?

Usually when we think about animals and disease, we think about illnesses that they transmit to us - like swine flu or Lyme disease. But illness is often a two-way street, and while animals can pass pathogens to us, we can also pass our...

Seasonal illnesses from infectious diseases aren’t a new concept, but a few decades ago public health experts began to notice the same behavior in some non-infectious diseases like breast cancer. These patterns have helped us learn a lot...

Hank clarifies the misconceptions about Chagus disease, discusses a couple of interesting celestial events - one that happened in the past and one that will happen in the distant future, and sheds more light on the benefits of sexual...

Today we know pathogens -- viruses, bacteria, and certain other microbes -- are responsible for many diseases. But linking specific diseases to the microbes that cause them has been surprisingly tricky, and some research practices lead...

Paul Andersen explains how variation is created within a cell. He starts by showing how molecular variation can increase fitness at the local level. He explains how an additional chlorophyll molecule allows plants to absorb more light...