We think of pain as a symptom, but there are cases where the nervous system develops feedback loops and pain becomes a terrifying disease in itself. Starting with the story of a girl whose sprained wrist turned into a nightmare, Elliot...

Over our lifetimes, our bodies undergo a series of extraordinary metamorphoses: we grow, experience puberty, and many of us reproduce. Behind the scenes, the endocrine system works constantly to orchestrate these changes. Emma Bryce...

A shooting star crashes onto Earth and a hideous blob emerges. It creeps and leaps, it glides and slides. It's also unstoppable: no matter what you throw at it, it just re-grows and continues its rampage. The only way to save the planet...

Sleep is your life-support system and Mother Nature's best effort yet at immortality, says sleep scientist Matt Walker. In this deep dive into the science of slumber, Walker shares the wonderfully good things that happen when you get...

Being a teenager is hard. Especially when hormones play their part in wreaking havoc on the teenage body and brain. In this episode, Hank explains what is happening to the during the angsty-time. ----------

The sounds we hear every day really do have effects on our health. Not just our ears, but our hearts and even our brains.

Jessi stayed up too late, so she's feeling really tired. Luckily, she isn't too tired to tell you all about what happens when we sleep and why we feel so terrible when we don't get enough sleep!

Ethanol: this molecule, made of little more than a few carbon atoms, is responsible for drunkenness. Often simply referred to as alcohol, ethanol is the active ingredient in alcoholic beverages. So how exactly does it cause drunkenness,...

There's a lot about sleep that we don't understand, like why we even sleep in the first place, for example. Here are some amazing discoveries biologists have made while trying to solve the mystery of sleep.

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to get distracted while studying - even when you know you really don't have time for Facebook, Snapchat, Cookie Clicker, or whatever else is calling you? This week we're going to help you get a better...

At MIT, Dina Katabi and her team are working on a bold new way to monitor patients' vital signs in a hospital (or even at home), without wearables or bulky, beeping devices. Bonus: it can see through walls. In a mind-blowing talk and...

Why do we sleep? Well... that's a tricky question. More easily answered is the question,"How do we sleep?" In this episode of Crash Course Psychology, Hank discusses some of the ways our brain functions when sleeping and how it...

The Hindu Kush Himalaya region is the world's third-largest repository of ice, after the North and South Poles -- and if current melting rates continue, two-thirds of its glaciers could be gone by the end of this century. What will...

Scientists know that anesthesia drugs are really good at knocking you out. What they don't know is how.

What keeps you up at night? Pondering deep questions? Excitement about a big trip? Stress about unfinished work? What if the very thing keeping you awake was stress about losing sleep? This seemingly unsolvable loop is at the heart of...

February 2nd is Groundhog Day in the United States, and Jessi and Squeaks are celebrating by sharing all kinds of amazing groundhog facts with us! Learn what groundhogs eat, where they live, and how they make it through tough winters!

There's a chill in the air where Jessi and Squeaks live, and that means it's time for some animals to start the long, yearly nap called hibernation! Learn why animals hibernate and how they get ready to sleep for months at a time!

It's our final episode of Soft Skills where Evelyn talks about how to take care of yourself. If you don't take care of yourself, no one else will. So take all of these soft skills we've talked about and add this last little bit to make...

New ReviewLast year, Claire Caine Miller and I teamed up to write about the then-new AAP guidelines on infant sleep. Those guidelines recommended that infants sleep in the same room as their parents until they were one year of age. We took issue...

This video is answering the question of can we still hear in our sleep.

While Thanksgiving is a time focused mainly on family, friends, and giving thanks, it's also the cause of a pervasive medical myth: that turkey makes you sleepy. Don't start with us about the tryptophan. Gah! We know about the...

My physician-gaming-group-friends are being swamped by concerned parents because of a new study in Pediatrics that has led to many news articles declaring that swaddling - wrapping an infant tightly in a cloth or blanket - may increase...

Last week we talked about sleep. We talked about how much the average person needs, and how much they get. We also talked about how you can't just rely on "averages" to determine how much you need. Sleep in a personal thing, and we all...

Last week we covered CBD and mental health, finding that data to backup health claims are scarce and consumer CBD products are often sketchy. In this week’s episode on CBD and other health ailments, we find that many of the same caveats...