A bit of good news on the COVID-19 front this week: New research reveals a drug that might actually help save severely ill patients, and data suggests that distancing policies may have saved millions of lives over the last few months.

In this ode to design renegades, Alice Rawsthorn highlights the work of unlikely heroes, from Blackbeard to Florence Nightingale. Drawing a line from these bold thinkers to some early modern visionaries like Buckminster Fuller, Rawsthorn...

Even though we are still in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists are trying to figure out the ways in which this disease may stick with people in the long term - from lasting lung damage to potentially triggering...

Ninety-nine percent of cancer drugs never make it to tumors, getting washed out of the body before they have time to do their job. How can we better deliver life-saving drugs? Cancer researcher Joy Wolfram shares cutting-edge medical...

For millions of people with Parkinson’s disease, movement becomes much harder. But researchers have found that dance therapy may help them both physically and mentally.

Jimmy Lin is developing technologies to catch cancer months to years before current methods. He shares a breakthrough technique that looks for small signals of cancer's presence via a simple blood test, detecting the recurrence of some...

As many as 50 million people worldwide may live with Alzheimer's and similar forms of dementia, and while we still don't understand a lot about it, scientists may be one step closer to an effective treatment.

What drove David Sengeh to create a more comfortable prosthetic limb? He grew up in Sierra Leone, and too many of the people he loves are missing limbs after the brutal civil war there. When he noticed that people who had prosthetics...

The secret behind medicine that uses messenger RNA (or mRNA) is that it "teaches" our bodies how to fight diseases on our own, leading to groundbreaking treatments for COVID-19 and, potentially one day, cancer, the flu and other ailments...

Viruses have a bad reputation -- but some of them could one day save your life, says biotech entrepreneur Alexander Belcredi. In this fascinating talk, he introduces us to phages, naturally-occurring viruses that hunt and kill harmful...

How does cancer know it's cancer? At Jay Bradner's lab, they found a molecule that might hold the answer, JQ1. But instead of patenting it and reaping the profits (as many other labs have done) -- they published their findings and mailed...

If patients seem to be unaware of their obvious conditions and symptoms, it might not be that they're in denial, but their brain might actually prevent them from realizing their disabilities.

For most people, insomnia won't kill you. But in one very rare, very specific case, not only is it deadly, it's lurking in your genes.

Around 1917, an unknown illness dubbed "sleeping sickness" caused people to suffer severe sleepiness and delirium. Some even became paralyzed for decades until a temporary cure was discovered in the 1960s. The story of this illness is...

While antibiotics have saved millions of lives, misusing them can speed up how fast bacteria evolve to resist them. And it turns out that one of the biggest hotspots for these antibiotic-resistant bacteria…is hospitals.

As COVID-19 spread, BioNTech cofounders Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci had one goal: to make a safe, effective vaccine faster than ever before. In this illuminating conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, the immunologists (and...

Pioneering surgeon Susan Lim performed the first liver transplant in Asia. But a moral concern with transplants (where do donor livers come from ...) led her to look further, and to ask: Could we be transplanting cells, not whole organs?...

Near the end of 2020, we got some puzzling but good news: COVID-19 fatality rates have been dropping. Here are a few factors that might help explain why we’re seeing this trend.

SciShow News explains how evolution and antibiotics have teamed up to produce an ordinary germ that can now, sometimes, kill people. Also, our favorite piece of science equipment -- the Large Hadron Collider -- has big plans for this...

Today, the organ transplantation is one of the well-known medical treatment, but the road to the first successful organ transplant was full of challenges, discoveries, and a whole lot of work.

In August 2015, Jimmy Carter announced that he had a form of cancer that spread to his liver and brain. A few months later he reported the cancer was gone. How?

Professionally diagnosing narcissistic personality disorder is difficult for psychologists, partially because anyone who might have it just thinks they’re great!

Has a doctor ever told you that you just have too much blood? Probably not, but there are a handful of conditions where being a little low might be good for you.

Some potentially good news on the COVID-19 treatment front: Thanks to a technique that’s more than a century old, recovered COVID-19 patients may be in a position to help the rest of us -- with their blood plasma.