13 premium articles in this collection
“Who here believes involuntary death is a good thing?” Nathan Cheng has been delivering similar versions of this speech over the last couple of years, so I knew what was coming. He was about to ...
The new year has barely begun, but the first days of 2026 have brought big news for health. On Monday, the US’s federal health agency upended its recommendations for routine childhood vaccinations—a m...
At first glance, it looks like the start of a human pregnancy: A ball-shaped embryo presses gently into the receptive lining of the uterus and then grips tight, burrowing in as the first tendrils of a...
One day this fall, I watched an electronic sign outside the Broadway-Lafayette subway station in Manhattan switch seamlessly between an ad for makeup and one promoting the website Pickyourbaby.com, wh...
As anyone who has googled their symptoms and convinced themselves that they’ve got a brain tumor will attest, the internet makes it very easy to self-(mis)diagnose your health problems. And although s...
Shantana Hazel often thought her insides might fall out during menstruation. It took 14 years of stabbing pain before she ultimately received a diagnosis of endometriosis, an inflammatory disease wher...
Science Corporation—a competitor to Neuralink founded by the former president of Elon Musk’s brain-interface venture—has leapfrogged its rival after acquiring, at a fire-sale price, a vision implant t...
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. T...
It’s the 25th of June and I’m shivering in my lab-issued underwear in Fort Worth, Texas. Libby Cowgill, an anthropologist in a furry parka, has wheeled me and my cot into a metal-walled room set to 40...
Be honest: Have you ever looked up someone from your childhood on social media with the sole intention of seeing how they’ve aged? One of my colleagues, who shall remain nameless, certainly has....
Sneha Goenka is one of MIT Technology Review’s 2025 Innovators Under 35. Meet the rest of this year’s honorees. Up to a quarter of children entering intensive care have undiagnosed genetic ...
This week I’m writing from Manchester, where I’ve been attending a conference on aging. Wednesday was full of talks and presentations by scientists who are trying to understand the nitty-gritty o...
