Over coffee at a Starbucks just outside Austin, Texas, Del Bigtree told me he wants his teenage son to catch polio. Measles, too. He’s considered driving his unvaccinated family to…

Of every 1,000 people the measles virus infects, it may kill as few as one to three. In a way, this can seem merciful. But the mathematics of measles is…

A year after the Trump administration began the dismantlement of USAID, it is initiating a new round of significant cuts to foreign assistance. This time, programs that survived the initial…

Eating candy for breakfast is not a good decision. But most mornings, I start my day with something that looks and tastes a lot like just that. The Built Puff…

A post on X claimed to be a simple message from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Stay active; eat well. But the 90-second video it shared, called…

The quest to live forever has fascinated humans for millennia. The Epic of Gilgamesh, composed about 4,000 years ago, follows a king who searches the world for a plant that…

Olympic skimo is a spectacle. Appearing at the Games for the first time, skimo, short for ski mountaineering, grew from a long tradition of scaling mountains on skis—sometimes for hours…

Back when he was 17 and in high school, Eric Sid fainted. In the emergency room, he was diagnosed with anemia, which can cause fainting spells, and for years he…

In 2021, just months after the first COVID vaccines debuted, concern was growing about an exceedingly rare but sometimes deadly outcome of certain shots. Two related vaccines—one from AstraZeneca and…

In the winter of 168 C.E., the famed Greek physician Galen arrived in Aquileia, an Italian city on the northern edge of the Adriatic. The city had grown large since…