How do we categorize drugs? How do we name them? This is quite a bit trickier than one might think, because there are different ways we might want to categorize them, each of which has its own application. Any drug also has multiple...

Delve into the fascinating world of boron - a chemical element with unique properties and a rich history. We explore its various medical uses, including its role as an antiseptic for cuts and burns, an eye wash, and a treatment for...

What are drugs? What do they do? How do they do what they do? These questions are part of the field of pharmacology, and over this series we will learn all about a wide variety of different drugs that have clinical use. This will require...

It's time to learn about microorganisms! These are all the tiny little critters in the water, and the air, and in the ground, and inside you. We didn't even know they were there until a few hundred years ago, but once we started to learn...

Now that we know how drugs move through the body to reach their target, what happens once they get there? By what mechanisms can drugs interact with target proteins to elicit a particular cellular response, and by extension a...

Now we know a bit more about how viruses interact with cells, whether those are bacterial cells, or animal cells, such as ours. But how do they gain access to our cells in the first place? How do viruses get inside the human body? Let's...

People are living longer and they desire to live as independently as possible in their senior years. But, independent lifestyles come with risks, such as debilitating falls and deteriorating health resulting from inadequate care. To...

Researcher Andrew Storfer discusses his research on Tasmanian devils, their infectious cancer, and how this research has wide reaching impacts.

One day in 1976, there was a terrible outbreak of an unknown disease at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia. What was the pathogen responsible for this so-called Legionnaires' disease? Let's find out!

Typhoid fever can be a very serious illness, and we may have already heard of it because of Typhoid Mary, a famous carrier in the beginning of the 20th century. Let's go in for a closer look!

In 1896, a mysterious disease spread through the Snake River Valley of Idaho. Some people called it a spotted fever, and hundreds got sick. As it turns out, this was all the doing of some bacteria, Rickettsia ricketssii. Let's get a...

Lots of kids get the chickenpox. I know I did! I was about four years old. It was awful. But now we can learn all kinds of things about the virus called Varicella-Zoster virus, which causes chickenpox and shingles. What is its structure...

The world is at the verge of a crisis, where the antibiotics we used to treat infections for decades are becoming useless. It takes a historian and a microbiologist to possibly save the day.

Staphylococcus aureus is the bacteria responsible for what we commonly refer to as a staph infection. They are extremely common, but they are also developing antibiotic resistance at an alarming rate. Let's take a look at these now.

Syphilis is another infection that is typically caused by sexual contact, thanks to the pathogen Treponema pallidum. What does this bacterium do? How is the infection treated? Let's take a closer look now.

Lyme disease. It's that one you get from ticks! So what kind of ticks, and where are they? How does that work exactly, and what are the bacteria that are being transferred when they bite? The bacteria are called Borellia burgdorferi,...

We've all gotten food poisoning before, and it's terrible. So what causes it? Just a little bit of bacteria called E. coli, that's all. Let's check them out!

As disease-causing bacteria becomes increasingly resistant to antibiotics, scientists like Erin Carlson from Indiana University are turning to natural sources to find new medicines. "Science Behind the News" is produced in partnership...

In this week’s episode we discover a new species of titanosaurian dinosaur and how airline boarding procedures might be making you sick; we explore a compact mass spectrometer for use in the field; and finally, we learn how vertebrate...

Last year, Taiwan went more than 250 days without reporting any locally transmitted cases of COVID-19, according to CNN. However, after an outbreak last week, as of Wednesday morning, May 19, it had 1,119 active cases.